Carlos Lehder Wants to Go Home

By Jeralyn, Section Crime in the News
Posted on Mon Aug 10, 2015 at 10:17:56 PM EST
Tags: Carlos Lehder, Medellin Cartel (all tags)

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Carlos Lehder has written a letter to Colombia President Juan Manuel Santos, asking him to intervene with U.S. authorities so he go come home to Colombia to die. (Apparently he is not ill, he is just thinking of death since he is "close to 70." He's about to turn 66.) He ends his letter with (via google translate):

"With humility and the hope of the paisa arriero, expelled from Colombia, I have remained and survived 28 years in captivity... I am getting close to 70 years of age and deserve to die in Colombia."

Lehder was the first of the Medellin cartel leaders to be extradited to the U.S. In 1987, he was arrested, whisked onto a plane and brought to the U.S. At that time his net worth was estimated to be $2.5 billion. His trial lasted 7 months, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole plus 135 years. (Here is the court opinion affirming his conviction and sentence. [More...]

In 1991, he entered a cooperation agreement with the U.S. to testify against Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama. He was promised his sentence would be reduced to 30 years, and he would in no event serve more time than Noriega. He testified, and then went into the witness protection program (as an incarcerated witness.) His sentence was only reduced to 55 years. He fully exhausted his available legal remedies, see here and here.

The U.S. attorney in Tampa, where Noriega was prosecuted, was interviewed in a 1996 article as saying he was opposed to the deal and later said Washington forced it on him. He didn't think Lehder deserves any more of a break.

Merkle, U.S. attorney in Tampa at the time, is appalled by the Lehder case. "I never contemplated any kind of deal with Carlos Lehder," he said. "It never entered my head to even think about it." But Merkle was overruled by his Justice