Crazy Charlie

Now a summer 2023 ViX Original series based on this book by Ron Chepesiuk. Carlos Lehder is one of the most important and fascinating individuals in the history of drug trafficking and the U.S. War on Drugs. Lehder was the drug kingpin who developed the transportation system that helped flood the flood the U.S. with drugs from Latin America. This is the first biography of Lehder.

Born in 1949, Carlo Lehder rose from a struggling, small time pot dealer to become a major godfather in the Medellin cartel, the crime syndicate largely responsible for initiating the cocaine epidemic plaguing American society since the late 1970s. Federal U.S. prosecutor Robert Merkle, who successfully prosecuted Lehder in 1988, said that the drug lord "was to cocaine transportation what Henry Ford was to automobiles" because he was the mastermind behind the transportation network that revolutionized the international drug trade. Lehder's genius was to devise a sophisticated transportation system that allowed the Medellin cartel to transport huge quantities of cocaine from Colombia, the source country, to the U.S., the world's major illegal drug market.

By 1987, the DEA and the Colombian government had put Lehder's net wealth at more than $3 billion. A great admirer of both Nazi icon Adolph Hitler and Marxist Che Guevara, Lehder hated the U.S. and viewed cocaine as a kind of atomic bomb that could destroy Uncle Sam from within. Lehder got the nickname, "Crazy Charlie," because of his bizarre and often unpredictable behavior.