In February 1977, Jung received fifty kilos in Miami, which he transported to Boston to meet Lehder, who was a no-show. Unbeknown to Jung, Lehder had run into difficulty crossing the Canadian border and was on the run. Jung gave the cocaine to his former weed dealer, the Hollywood hairdresser. Two weeks later, it had been sold for over $2 million.
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Lehder showed up at Jung's parents, concerned about the fate of the cocaine and that Jung may have ripped him off. Many Colombians had lost cocaine by trusting Americans. When he saw his share of the cash - $1.8 million - Lehder was so delighted that he bought a new BMW. Soon, Jung was making $500,000 a week. Hidden in cars, millions were smug gled back to Medellín by Lehder.
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By 1977, a plane was needed to move the cocaine, so Jung hired a Learjet. But constantly smuggling and using cocaine was wearing Jung out.
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Lehder was such a strict disciplinarian that he put everybody he knew to work. An exhausted Jung asked Lehder to find someone to bring cocaine to California.
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"I'll call you as soon as I have that person in transit," Lehder said. The next day he called Jung.
"I have someone. They're on the plane now."
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"Who is it?"
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"It'll be a surprise."
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The next day, Jung heard knocking on the door of his Holiday Inn room. Opening it revealed a little grey-haired lady: Lehder's mother. When Jung objected, Lehder said that everybody had to work, and she had wanted a free trip to Disneyland.
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As the business grew, the former cellmates fell out. Lehder viewed Jung's cocaine habit as detrimental to work performance. Jung was snorting a gram at a time, earning him the nickname I-95 because his long lines of white powder reminded the Colombians of that Interstate Highway. Attempting to squeeze Jung out of the picture, Lehder demanded to know the name of the Hollywood hairdresser.
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In August 1977, a pilot tested the Bahamas route - the plan hatched in prison - with 250 kilos picked up from one of Pablo's farms outside Medellín. The plane refuelled in Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas, on its eleventh largest island. It landed in the Carolinas, and the cocaine was transported to Florida. The cocaine sold within days. The profit was $1 million, which Jung and Lehder split. Lehder wanted to move the base of their operations to the Bahamas, but Jung argued against it.
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"Look, Carlos, the only way to do this business is to hit-and-run. Keep changing our smuggling routes. Never stay in one place.
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Then we don't have to be under anybody's thumbs. We make ourselves a hundred million apiece, or whatever. You go your way. I go mine."
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Lehder wanted rapid expansion to help him
achieve his revolutionary goals, whereas Jung favoured slow and steady progress. For cocaine supply, Jung had stepped on Lehder's toes by marrying a Colombian whose brother was a supplier. Lehder obtained the contact details for the Hollywood hairdresser, so he didn't need Jung as an intermediary anymore.
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Jung accused Lehder of going behind his back.
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Lehder obtained a boat, and searched for an island in the Bahamas. He settled on Norman's Cay, a fishhook-shaped landmass surrounded by some of the clearest blue water on earth, teeming with marine life. The central curvature harboured yachts. At the top of the island, a dozen beach cottages sat on a rocky coast. At the tip of the fishhook was a 3,000-foot airstrip adjacent to four miles of sparkling white sand, forming a beach that curved around water known as Smugglers Cove. On a hill by the airstrip was a yacht club with a four-stool bar, a restaurant and the only telephone on Norman's Cay. Amid hundreds of islands, it was paradise.
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Lehder paid $190,000 cash for Beckwith House on the northeastern bend. He deposited millions in a trust company, which he used to buy up property on the island.
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With Jung out of the way - or so Lehder thought - Lehder got down to the business of running all of the wealthy inhabitants off the island, so that he could turn it into a smuggling hub. He started out politely. He showed up at cottages with a suitcase full of cash and told the owners to name their price. Flashing large sums of money, and introducing himself as Joe Lehder, he came off as polite and intriguing.
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"Joe, how much money are you worth?" a neighbour asked on Lehder's thirtieth birthday.
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"Oh, about $25 million."
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He bought the rights to the guesthouse, the bar and the airstrip. He closed the airstrip down for general use by painting a giant yellow X on it, which prevented other residents from flying in and out. He closed the yacht club, the diving school and stopped the hotel from taking reservations.
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The remaining residents were starting to wonder what was going on, but Lehder was only just getting started. He decided that the homeowners who'd refused his cash had to go. To pressure them into moving, he filled the island with intimidating characters, including bodyguards and traffickers.
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"In case I didn't make myself clear," Lehder told one resident, "if you're not off this island today, your wife and children will die."
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A college professor who ran a diving business was told that diving must stop. When he returned for his gear, his plane was surrounded, and he was prevented from leaving. After shooting the plane's radio, Lehder's body-guards instructed him to fly away and never return. In the air, he noticed that the plane lacked fuel. It had been siphoned. The plane had to emergency-land on a nearby island's beach.
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The police did nothing about the complaints from the residents. Lehder had paid everybody off. A Bahamian immigration officer initiated deportation proceedings against a remaining resident.
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Emulating his hero, Adolf Hitler, in a way that would have made his father proud, Lehder hired forty German bodyguards, who arrived in the Aryan tradition with Doberman pinchers, automatic weapons and blonde hair. Toting black satchels, they patrolled in Toyota jeeps and Volkswagen vans. Any yachts that approached with tourists, sightseers Or remaining residents were shadowed along the perimeter of the island by vehicles full of armed neo-Nazis and dogs capable of tearing limbs off. If they got too close to the shore, a helicopter would hover over them.
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The famous TV anchor-man for CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, travelled by yacht to Norman's Cay on a Christmas vacation. Finding the harbour empty, he dropped his anchor.
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"You can't dock here and you can't anchor out there!" yelled a man on the pier.
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Cronkite continued to the next island, where he was told that it was common knowledge that the people who'd taken over Norman's Cay didn't want any visitors.
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The last resident to leave was Floyd, a handyman who'd built his own house on the island. Lehder had hired him to assemble a couple of prefabricated hangars to store planes and cocaine. While working on a hangar, Floyd watched a plane land, men with rifles jump out, and a truck arrive, from which suitcases were loaded onto the plane. When his work was done, Floyd was ordered to leave the island, but he refused. He told the superintendent that he wasn't interested in selling the house he'd built.
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"He [Lehder] doesn't have to buy it. He's just going to take it."
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A foreman warned Floyd, "Look, he's [Lehder's] coming by and he has some pretty rough men there, and they probably won't kill you, but they could certainly knife you up pretty bad." After that, Floyd fled.
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Planes landed every day. Lehder's associates lived in several of the houses. Out of his twenty-two cars, Lehder preferred driving a 1932 Ford Replica, a classic car with a rectangular elongated body with two round lights at the front.
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Even though he'd warned Jung about the detrimental effects of cocaine on business judgement, Lehder started to use cocaine heavily. His associates joined in, and they all became paranoid. To calm them down, planes full of women were flown in. Wild parties ensued with Beatles and Rolling Stones' music. Cocaine-crazed neo-Nazis hauled a houseboat to the top of the island's only hill, and left it there to be used as a lookout. Luxury properties were destroyed and vandalised. Laden with cocaine, a DC-3 crashed in the lagoon and was left to rot. Like his other hero, Che Guevara, Lehder started dressing in army fatigues and waving guns around. His alter ego continued to assert itself.
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Meanwhile, Jung had been reduced to the man who had launched Lehder. In a confrontational mood, he flew to Norman's Cay. Making only $500,000 a year, he coveted Lehder's tens of millions.
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