[11][12] Originally from Armenia, Colombia, Lehder eventually ran a cocaine transport empire on Norman's Cay island, 210 miles (340 km) off the Florida coast in the central Bahamas.

[14][15][16][17] His motivation to join the MAS was to retaliate against the M-19 guerrilla movement, which, in November 1981, attempted to kidnap him for a ransom; Lehder managed to escape from the kidnappers, though he was shot in the leg.

Additionally, Lehder "founded a neo-Nazi political party, the National Latin Movement, whose main function, police said, appeared to be to force Colombia to abrogate its extradition treaty with the United States.

His father, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder, was an engineer who emigrated from Germany to Armenia, Colombia in 1928, where he participated in the construction of several buildings which had elevators, a rather modern and unusual characteristic at that place and time.

[20] Lehder dropped out of school to devote himself to reading books by authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Hermann Hesse, while maintaining admiration for Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

At the age of 24, Lehder took aviation classes, becoming an expert pilot who would know several air routes, which served as the basis for his growing criminal career, which began with small-quantity marijuana trafficking between the United States and Canada.

[24] While serving a sentence for car theft in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut,[25] Lehder decided that, upon his release, he would take advantage of the burgeoning market for cocaine in the United States.

[26] Jung had experience flying marijuana to the U.S. from Mexico in small aircraft, staying below radar level, and landing on dry lake beds.

[28] Roman Varone and Jung had already experimented with bringing marijuana into the United States from Mexico in small aircraft below radar range and landing in dry riverbeds.

[29][30] Using a small stolen plane and a professional pilot, the pair began to fly cocaine into the United States via the Bahamas, in the process increasing their financial resources and building connections and trust with Colombian suppliers, while spreading money around among Bahamian government officials for political and judicial protection.

[33] In the late 1970s, the Lehder-Jung partnership began to diverge, due to some combination of Lehder's megalomania and his secret scheming to secure a personal Bahamian island as an all-purpose headquarters for his operations.

[34][13] In 1978, Lehder began buying up property and harassing and threatening the island's residents; at one point, a yacht was found drifting off the coast with the corpse of one of its owners aboard.

[35] As Lehder paid or forced the local population to leave, and began to assume total control of the island, Norman's Cay became his lawless private fiefdom, after allegedly bribing the Prime Minister of the Bahamas Lynden Pindling.

[44][45][46] Lehder returned to Colombia where, in addition to resuming his business, he was recognized for giving the government of Quindío a modern plane Piper PA-31 Navajo for the time.

Such a gift caught the attention of the authorities and the public because despite being used on several occasions, its high cost overruns forced its sale a year after it was legalized.

In addition, Lehder follows Escobar's example by dabbling in politics by founding the Movimiento Cívico Latino Nacional (National Latin Civic Movement), a political movement based on the principles of anti-communism, neo-Nazism, Anti-colonialist, Non-Aligned, Anti-fascism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Marxist-Leninist, as well as declaring itself Latin American, Nationalist, Regionalist, Moralist, Ecologist, Bolivarian, Republican, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman and supporter of legalization in favor of a Pan-American union similar to NATO with its own army and with which it mainly gave speeches against the extradition of Colombians and Latin Americans to American prisons.

[67][68][69][70] The newly created National Latin Movement (founded in the Posada Alemana) obtains the support of Luis Fernando Mejía, a renowned Pereiran poet and political mentor.

The movement obtains more than 10,000 followers in the department of Quindío and with broad support in small towns and with a significant impact in large cities of the country, although becoming a serious adversary for the departmental political class, however, the origin of its Fortune would draw the attention of the Colombian authorities who would know of his old businesses in Norman's Cay as well as several incidents in Miami due to wars between gangs associated with cocaine trafficking.

The April 30, 1984 assassination of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the Colombian Minister of Justice, initiated the beginning of the end for Lehder and the Medellín Cartel.

[citation needed] Lehder's downfall was assisted by his blatant bribing of Bahamian officials, and the attention the activities on Norman's Cay were attracting.

After Brian Ross's September 5, 1983 report, on the U.S. television network NBC, made public the corruption of Bahamian government leaders,[75] Lehder could not return to Norman's Cay.

Escobar's faction, initially both the most powerful and violent, rapidly disintegrated in the face of attacks by the rival Cali Cartel, Colombian police/army, organs of the U.S. government, and vigilante paramilitaries.

Three years after that, Lehder wrote a letter to a federal district judge, complaining that the government had reneged on a deal to transfer him to a German prison.

Lehder argued that, having already served 20 years in prison, which corresponded to two-thirds of the 30-year maximum time stated in the treaty, he had completed his legal sentence and should therefore be released.

[80] Lehder was released from prison on June 15, 2020, and escorted to Germany by two US officials on a regular passenger flight from New York to Frankfurt and handed over to German authorities.