One of Colombia’s legendary drug lords and a Key operator of the Medellín cartel expelled to this South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.
Soon after, Fabio Ochoa was a free man again.
Ochoa arrived at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport on a deportation flight Monday, wearing a gray sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After getting off the plane, the former cartel leader was greeted by immigration officers dressed in bulletproof vests. No police were present on the spot to arrest him.
Fernando Vergara / AP
Colombia’s national immigration agency quickly released a brief statement on social media platform his fingerprints and confirmed via a database that he was not wanted by Colombian authorities.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began flooding the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to American authorities, to the point that in 1987 they was included in Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires.
Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel formerly run by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellín in 1993.
Colombian immigration via AP
Ochoa was first indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the 1986 murder of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin Cartel but who 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 in which they avoided extradition to the United States.
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was arrested again three years later on drug charges and was extradited to the United States in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami naming him as than more than 40 people in a drug trafficking conspiracy. .
He was the only suspect from this group who chose to stand trial, which resulted in his conviction and a 30-year sentence. The other defendants received much lighter prison sentences because most of them had cooperated with the government.
Ochoa’s name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade.
Fernando Vergara / AP
But the former member of the Medellin Cartel was recently depicted in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first battles courageous businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of the Miami cocaine market, then enters into an alliance with the drug trafficker, played by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa is also represented in the Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite Medellin family engaged in breeding and breeding horses and in stark contrast to Escobar, who came from humbler roots.
Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant district attorney who was part of the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities were never able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illegal drug proceeds and that he hopes the former mafia boss will have a welcome return home.
“He’s not going to retire as a poor man, that’s for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.