A legendary Colombian drug lord has been released from jail in the US and he is expected to be deported home.
Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, a key operator of the Medellin cocaine cartel, was released on Tuesday after completing 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers were responsible for flooding the US with cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to authorities. The trio amassed a fortune so large that in 1987 they were included in Forbes Magazine’s billionaires list .
Ochoa’s job was to run a distribution centre while living in Miami for the Medellin cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar.
While his notoriety as an underworld figure has faded since his heyday in the 80s, Ochoa came back to public attention recently due to his depiction in the hit Netflix series “Narcos” which charts the rise and fall of the Colombian cartel.
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AFP via Getty Images)
Ochoa was first indicted in the US. for his alleged role in the killing of Drug Enforcement Administration informant Barry Seal in 1986 — whose life was popularized in the 2017 film “American Made” starring Tom Cruise.
He was on the US list of the “Dozen Most Wanted” Colombian drug lords when he was arrested in the South American country under a government program promising drug kingpins would not be extradited to the US.
He was arrested again and extradited to the states in 2021 on an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 others as part of a drug smuggling ring. Out of all his co-accused Ochoa was the only one who chose to go to trial rather than cooperate with the US government, resulting in a much longer prison term than the rest.
Although he has served 25 years in jail, authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illicit drug money, so he should have a nice little nest egg waiting for him when he returns home.
“He won’t be retiring a poor man, that’s for sure,” Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, told the Associated Press.
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