One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a The main player in the Medellín cartel was pushed back to the South American country after serving 25 years of a 30-year sentence in the United States.
A short time later, Fabio Ochoa was a free man again.
Ochoa arrived at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and was carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After exiting the plane, the former cartel boss was greeted by immigration officials wearing bulletproof vests. There were no police on site to arrest him.
Fernando Vergara / AP
Colombia’s national immigration agency immediately released a short statement on the social media platform
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune as cocaine flooded the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, so much so that they were named to Forbes Magazine’s billionaires list in 1987 .
Ochoa lived in Miami and ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel he once led Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellín in 1993.
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Ochoa was first charged in the United States for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel but became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s as part of a deal that prevented extradition to the United States
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but three years later Ochoa was arrested again on drug trafficking charges and extradited to the United States in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 people as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy became .
He was the only suspect in this group who chose to go to trial, which resulted in his conviction and a 30-year prison sentence. The other defendants received significantly less prison sentences because most of them cooperated with the government.
Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers are at the center of the global drug trade.
Fernando Vergara / AP
But the former Medellin Cartel member was recently portrayed in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first fights against courageous businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of Miami’s cocaine market and then forms an alliance with the drug trafficker played by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa is also pictured in the Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite Medellín family interested in livestock and horse breeding, providing a sharp contrast to Escobar, who came from a more humble background.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was part of the law enforcement team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never successful in seizing all of the Ochoa family’s illegal drug proceeds and he expects the former Mafia boss to make a welcome return will experience at home.
“He certainly won’t retire a poor man,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.
