Colombian drug lord released from US prison after 25 years: “He will not retire a poor man”

One of Colombia’s drug lords who runs the Medellin cocaine cartel has been released from a US prison and is expected to be deported back home.

US Bureau of Prisons records show Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was released on Tuesday after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence.

Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune during the cocaine boom in the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to US authorities, so much so that in 1987 they were included on Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires. Living in Miami, Ochoa had a cocaine cartel distribution center that he once led Pablo Escobar.

Although he faded from memory as the drug-trafficking center moved from Colombia to Mexico, he reappeared in the hit Netflix series “Narcos” as the youngest son of an elite Medellin ranching and horse-breeding family that became very divisive. and Escobar, who came from humble roots.

Ochoa — who also goes by the nicknames “Julio” and “Pepe,” according to the US Department of Justice — was first indicted in the US for his role in the 1986 killing of former Drug Enforcement Administration informant Barry Seal — his life was full. popularized in the 2017 movie “American Made” starring Tom Cruise.

He was first arrested in 1990 in Colombia under a government program promising that drugs would not be brought back to the U.S. At the time, he was on the U.S. list of “Dozen Most Wanted” drug users in Colombia.

Ochoa was arrested again and extradited to the US in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 people as part of a drug-trafficking conspiracy. Of those, Ochoa was the only one who chose to go to trial, which resulted in him being sentenced to 30 years.

In the case, the judges were taken back and forth to the court in vans with tinted windows to protect their names, the BBC reported, and their details were kept even from the prosecutors and defense lawyers.

Some defendants received very light sentences because most of them collaborated with the government.

The BBC reported that after Ochoa’s arrest in 1999, he put up billboards in Medellin and Bogota declaring: “Yesterday I made a mistake. Today I am innocent.”

Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were unable to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illegal drug money and he expects Ochoa to return home.

“He’s not going to retire poor, that’s for sure,” Gregory told the Associated Press.

Richard Klugh, Ochoa’s Miami-based attorney, declined to comment.

But in the years of trial, he was unsuccessful and said that his client should have been released early because his sentence was far more than what was appropriate for the amount of cocaine seized by the authorities that could not be attributed to Ochoa.

Colombia remains a major producer and exporter of cocaine, mainly to the United States and Europe. Last year, the South American country set a new record for the production of cocaine and the cultivation of the coca leaf from which it is made.

Last week, the Colombian Navy said authorities from several countries had seized it 225 metric tons of cocaine in a massive six-week operation where they uncovered a new Pacific smuggling route.