Carlos Lehder_ The Nazi Sympathiser Who Flooded America With Cocaine _ Our History

A plane from Columbia's Tampa Airlines touches down at Miami International Airport. According to the cargo manifest, it's carrying boxes of jeans. But DEA agents in Columbia have been tipped off that hidden in the clothing is a huge shipment of cocaine. That informant was telling us that it would be at least 500 kilograms of cocaine. Up to this point in time, we had never seen that amount of cocaine. There had been no seizures in either Miami or New York anywhere near that. When customs agents search the boxes, they are stunned. Not only did they find 500 kilograms, they found 1,700 kilograms of cocaine. The nearly two tons of cocaine is valued at an incredible $175 million. At the time, it's the biggest seizure made worldwide. For the first time, I think that was an eye-opener for us. We in the DEA and other government officials understood what we were dealing with. Drugs are menacing our society. They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. And we... The huge Tampa haul sends shockwaves through U.S. law enforcement. President Reagan sets up a Southern Florida drug task force. And from all over the USA, hundreds more federal agents are drafted in. For Florida DEA agents on the front line of the drug war, like Mike McManus, it's not a moment too soon. Three years earlier, he had been an undercover Fort Lauderdale cop. Then one night, a drug sting went badly wrong. I had two bad guys pull guns on me, and I was able to disarm them. My partner was pistol whipped and ultimately went to the hospital. The shootout changes the course of McManus' life. But I told my wife, I now know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I'm going to go with the DEA. This is going to turn out to be my life's passion. Agent McManus knows that the Tampa shipment would have caused all-out street war between the cocaine dealers. And only one man has the know-how to set up a deal this big. Someone who has been a thorn in their sides for the last four years. Carlos Lader, the son of a German father and Colombian mother. He had been brought up in the city of Armenia, 260 kilometers west of the Colombian capital, Bogota. Childhood friend Carlos Toro remembers that even then, Lader was trouble. Every family have black ships, and he was one in his family, I was one in mine. A secret police report in World War II claimed Lader's father was a Nazi sympathizer. But it is Lader himself who will soon reveal a worship of Adolf Hitler. For now, Lader's plan is to get out of Armenia and make it big in America. He moves there when he is just 17. One day, which I remember very vividly, I was walking down the street of Armenia, one early evening, and I saw him coming towards me. And we hugged, and he's very happy, and he says, look what I got, and he pulled his passport. And he said, I went to Cali, and I get an American visa. I'm going to United States. Toro is determined to join his friend, but his own father gives him a warning. And my dad, at the time, he said, if you go, you will go, but not with Carlos. He's trouble. He's that, you know, the best influence. At first, Lader seems happy with the American way of life. Dad had spent a number of years in the US being educated here. In fact, he had a brother that was in the United States Army and fought in Vietnam. Unlike his brother, Carlos Lader has no desire to serve America. His adopted nation is just a place to get rich quick. He was part of an auto theft ring. They were stealing automobiles and shipping them back to Colombia to make money. So this is his first venture into American crime. Then Lader moves from cars to drugs. But in 1974, he is busted in Miami for possession of 200 pounds of marijuana. The 25-year-old Lader is sentenced to four years in Danbury Correctional Institution, Connecticut. At Danbury, he pairs up with an American inmate. It changes the course of his life. He met a fellow prisoner named George Young, who had done some marijuana smuggling. And he and Young talked about smuggling drugs. Aside from their dope smuggling, the power-hungry Lader seems to have little in common with the 28-year-old Young. But George was an old-time hippie. George was very personable. He's the type of guy that you'd want to go out and have a beer with. Young made hundreds of thousands of dollars flying planes loaded with marijuana from Mexico to landing sites in the Californian desert. Lader absorbs every detail of Young's airborne smuggling operation. But marijuana won't satisfy his greed for profit or lust for power. He has another drug in mind, one that is easy to get hold of in his native Colombia. Cocaine. Carlos Lader had the very bright idea. You could say it was a brilliant idea. Rather than smuggle marijuana, why not smuggle cocaine and make a whole lot more money? For years, cocaine production had been centered in Chile, Bolivia and Peru. But by the mid-1970s, Colombian traffickers had taken over. Under their control, cocaine really took off. The Colombians would buy the paste or would buy the cocaine base and ship it. They handled the marketing and the business. Later on, they started to make their own cocaine. To make it big, Colombia's cocaine traffickers need to crack the U.S. market. Ever since the 1960s, drugs have been part of American counterculture. But cocaine still isn't seen as a serious threat. When we first started seeing cocaine come into New York circa 1977-78, the attitude of the DEA was it was kiddie dope compared to heroin. So there was not really a focus on cocaine. Colombia may have the cocaine, but the traffickers can't get it into the U.S. in quantity. Carlos Lader plans to change all that. It's like an hourglass and there's this one point right in the middle where you have to get the cocaine from one place and get it to the other. Figuring out how to do that is what Carlos Lader's claim to fame was. Lader tells Young that he can get hold of a steady supply of cocaine. If they use light aircraft in the same way Young did with marijuana, profits will go through the roof. Lader's good behavior in Danbury gets him paroled in 1976, but he is immediately deported to Colombia. Now 27, he is determined to get some payback for the humiliation of being kicked out of the USA. Lader soon begins to live up to his word. Paroled a year before Lader in 1975, Young is back dealing in marijuana when he gets a telegram. It says, come down, the weather is beautiful. It's the signal Lader is ready to put his plan into action. It all goes down on an island just two hours flight from Colombia. They took a few kilos, put them in suitcases and shipped them off with a friend of his to Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, George Young got his girlfriend and a friend of hers to fly down to Antigua with suitcases, swap the suitcases and bring back the cocaine. It worked. As soon as the cocaine reaches the US, Young carries it on a flight to Los Angeles. The cocaine is handed to his old marijuana dealer in exchange for cash. Just one 50 kilo shipment gets them 2.2 million dollars. They made a really good profit. They knew that they were on their way. The key to their sky-high profits is the quality of the cocaine Lader is getting from Colombia. They gave the distributors like 90-95% pure cocaine. So the distributors wanted as much as they could get. In one stroke, Lader has become the go-to guy for cocaine. His plan to get America hooked on the drug has begun. But his motive isn't just money. Because of his hatred for the United States, he looked at cocaine as the atomic bomb that he was going to drop on the United States. And that's exactly what he had in mind. Lader's first cocaine operations are just raids to test America's defences. Now he plans to launch an all-out assault. You will receive one more set of warning shots. I will then fire into your vessel. Do you understand? With a coastline 8,500 miles long, Florida is wide open to drug shipments arriving by sea from South America. We were up against it, no doubt about it. Florida is a huge state. You had any number of seaports they could use to smuggle cocaine in on commercial ships. With the help of local law enforcement and the US Coast Guard, many of the drug shipments are intercepted. But in 1978, undercover DEA agent Mike McManus starts to see more and more cocaine on the streets. Back then we started buying in grams of cocaine and then all of a sudden we're buying ounces of cocaine and then all of a sudden kilograms are available. And you're seeing this emerging trend, you know, beginning to build in South Florida. Miami is already being rocked by bloody shootouts between rival cocaine gangs competing for supplies of the drug. Cocaine wars hit South Florida, specifically Miami. And now you're hearing about the Colombians are in town and there's turf wars and there's Uzi machine guns that you need to be worried about. Assistant US Attorney Eileen O'Connor is swamped by the increase in drug cases. All hell was breaking loose. We had cocaine cowboys in the streets, shootings, all sorts of things. The shipments coming in by sea don't explain the amount of cocaine pouring into Miami. There must be a loophole in the DEA's defences. There was a DEA agent who was also a pilot and he was of the belief that cocaine was being smuggled into the United States, not just on boats but in airplanes. So he went to his bosses at DEA and got them to agree to set up a sting operation. The DEA pilot poses as a smuggler, willing to fly in anything for a price. And sure enough, he was getting all these transportation people come in that were flying loads of cocaine into the United States. But the loads of cocaine are not coming from Colombia 1,700 miles away. Instead, the DEA pilot is recruited to pick up a load of cocaine from the Bahamas. Now, the Bahamas at that time, 110 small boat harbours, over 700 islands, 100 airstrips, which is a smuggler's paradise. Following instructions, the DEA pilot lands on a remote four-mile-long island called Norman's Cay, just 200 miles from Florida. Nothing unusual is visible from the air, but on the ground he finds huts full of cocaine-filled duffel bags. Refuelling points and armed guards. And running the whole operation is Carlos Lader. Norman's Cay is his masterstroke. He got the bright idea that if he could trans-ship cocaine from an intermediate place between Colombia and the United States, he could move much, much larger quantities. Using the money from his deals with Young, Lader has transformed the peaceful island. There was a short landing strip that could accommodate small aircraft, but he wanted it to be used to smuggle large loads of cocaine from Colombia, so he expanded it to 1,000 metres, which would accommodate very large aircraft. Cocaine shipments arriving from Colombia are transferred to light aircraft, which take off for the short flight to Florida. Lader makes sure they slip into US airspace unseen. Commercial flights were leaving and they were piggybacking underneath these commercial flights and avoiding radar. He was himself a pilot. He hired the best pilots. Very intelligent in telling anybody how to build a flight plan that can be radar-proof. Very intelligent in scrambling radio frequencies so nobody can listen to our conversation. The drug pilots head for secret landing sites. These planes were landing on clandestine airstrips out in the Everglades. They would throw duffel bags of cocaine out to waiting counterparts, who would then get the cocaine, jump in vehicles and drive off, and then the plane would just take off again. It was amazing how much cocaine was coming in by airplane, small planes. You know, you could fit a couple of hundred kilos on a small plane. A few hours after leaving Lader's Island, the cocaine is speeding to dealers in Miami and all over America. Once Norman's Key gets into business, this is when you see this huge surge in cocaine in the United States. Half of the cocaine arriving in Florida is coming through Norman's Key. The numbers are mind-boggling. I'm talking about thousands of kilograms of cocaine a month. Using Norman's Key as a backdoor air route into Florida from Colombia has another huge advantage for Lader. It puts him outside US jurisdiction. DEA agents operating in a foreign country have no arrest authority. They're there to work with local law enforcement. And they were up against some real obstacles dealing with the corruption factor. The DEA's agents in the Bahamas try to get the government to take action. But Lader has been greasing palms from the bottom right to the very top. While he was there on Norman's Key, he had the protection of the Bahamian government. And he was told, you can stay there, you can use the island, but you're going to have to pay us. There were a lot of people making a lot of money in the Bahamas. All this time, George Young has been the link man between Lader and America's drug dealers. But now Lader calls Young to a meeting. Young became a huge user of cocaine. You use a lot of cocaine and it makes you paranoid. Young began to think that Lader was going behind his back, stealing his distributors in Los Angeles, and generally trying to shove him out of the business. Young is right to be paranoid. Lader really has bypassed him to deal direct with the distributors. Lader tells the older man he is history. He cut George Jung out because he wanted all the money and he wanted the power. With distribution in the US under his control, Lader invites Colombia's top cocaine producers to visit his island. Lader had the idea that it was going to be some sort of a nice, cosy resort where his friends in the cocaine business from Colombia could meet their distributors from the United States and everybody would have a great time and they'd ship, you know, tons of cocaine from Norman's Key to the United States. One cocaine VIP who is crucial to the flow of drugs to the island will soon carve his own bloody path to the top of the DEA's most wanted list. His name is Pablo Escobar. By 1979, Carlos Lader has made it into the big leagues. If the DEA don't stop him, his dream of getting the nation hooked on cocaine will become America's nightmare. Right under the noses of the Florida DEA, Carlos Lader has turned the tiny Bahamas island of Norman's Key into a major cocaine supply base. It has all the luxuries money can buy. He had a three-car garage. He had, you know, beautiful cars there. Corvettes and other exotic cars that he would drive around the island. Fast cars aren't the only thrill on Lader's island. He also transformed it into a Sadavanga mora. Some of his associates would fly in and he would have naked women picking them up at the airstrip. And he took all these beautiful little girls to their young parents and took them to the Bahamas and made them his mistresses. He would have orgies that were fuelled by cocaine and liquor for weeks. Lader's schoolmate, Carlos Toro, is working as a CBS cameraman in New York when Lader invites him to the Key. He sent me a little jet to La Guardia. His pilot picked me up and took me to the Bahamas and he was like, wow, this is beautiful. The plane is slowing down, taxiing to a parking spot and I see a Land Rover with the top down coming towards me and in that vehicle, three gorgeous girls from my hometown that, you know, the girls that you always wanted but you're never going to get and now they were there and they're half naked and they welcomed me with open arms and come home and Carlos was there and we hugged and it's nothing but a fantasy. Private island in the Bahamas, beautiful women, a lot of fun, sun and good food and drink and marijuana and cocaine. Lader isn't just being generous. He needs his old friend to act as a front for his organisation. He insisted, Carlos, you need to come work with me. I'll make you a millionaire overnight. He says, Carlos, let me tell you something. You will not be exposed to the cocaine. You're not going to go into the labs. You're not going to load the airplanes. You're not going to unload the airplanes. You will be in a different category. I said, what is that? He said, you're going to be our public relations director. Lader makes it clear that his cocaine suppliers in Colombia approve of his choice of PR man. They think you're smart, you're intelligent, and maybe you would be able to help us in dealing with heads of government and, you know, to a more diplomatic role. And I like the sound of that. It was like, yeah, that's more like me. I don't want to be a drug dealer. I wanted to be part of it. Toro becomes Lader's front man and paymaster for the drug pilots flying to Norman's Cay, handling more money than he has seen in his life. I took about six, seven million dollars in cash in duffel bags that I would bring to my house, put in my attic, and from there I pay operations. By 1980, Norman's Cay is really paying off. In that year alone, Lader flies 10,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States. They were bringing cocaine, 1,500 kilos every other week. It was a huge operation, and they were making millions of dollars every day. The victim was Felancio Martinez, who was shot to death in a parking garage near the Miami airport. While Lader parties, Miami reels under the onslaught of the cocaine he is shipping in. I mean, it was bad. It was really bad there for a while. Multiple murders in nice neighborhoods and shootouts in broad daylight on highways, in shopping centers, restaurants and airports. It was a tidal wave. It was a tidal wave of cocaine that was coming in. Unable to act directly against Norman's Cay, the DEA tried to target Lader's pilots and the airstrips he is using to get cocaine into Florida. We'd lie in wait, and when the planes come in, we'd respond. Sometimes we got lucky and made the arrests and seizures, but more too often, they got away with it because nobody knew about it. All these aircraft were seized when their pilots were caught smuggling. The DEA get lucky when some arrested pilots give up the details of Lader's operation. Now, they have enough evidence for an indictment. Lader is indicted for smuggling, conspiracy and tax evasion. Now the US government plays hardball with the Bahamas. Lader goes or else. He had been able to dodge a lot of trouble with police and government authorities in the Bahamas by paying bribes and by intimidation. The Bahamian government and the US government finally got together and said, you know, this is it. The big picnic that he'd had there for so many years was over. Frontman Toro gets a call from a Bahamian government contact who lays it on the line. And he says, Carlos has to go. I can no longer continue getting pressure from the United Nations, DEA, US government, Cuba. We can no longer allow these airplanes coming into the island loaded with cocaine anymore. It's a disaster. And on Norman's Cay itself, things are getting out of control. But having hundreds of kilos of cocaine around all the time, people started to sample the wares. And Lader had about 50 employees, 50 guys, mostly bodyguards, thugs with him on Norman's Cay. And as they got further and further strung out on cocaine, they weren't getting any sleep. They were getting paranoid and they were sort of looking over their shoulder. And it was a really nasty scene. Lader's scheme to use the key to flood the US with cocaine seems to be coming apart. It looks like the DEA have a real chance to drag Lader back to face the music in the USA. But Lader is already planning to quit the Bahamas. He is invited to a meeting of Colombia's top drug producers. Carlos Lader was an honored guest there because he had been the one who had pioneered the transportation network to get cocaine from Colombia to the United States. Cocaine production in Colombia is taking place on a massive scale. To reach the very top, Lader needs to go back to his homeland and get in on the action. You need to scale up if you want to become big time. And Lader in particular definitely wanted to be big time. Before leaving Norman's Key, Lader has a last message for the DEA who tried to snare him in the Bahamas. He takes pamphlets that says, DEA, go home. And he has two of his pilots fly over Nassau. You know, they were having an Independence Day festival and they dropped the leaflets with one dollar bills. Thousands of them on top of the people there. Now to achieve his goal of using cocaine as the ultimate weapon against America, Lader plans to copy his idol Adolf Hitler and take over a whole country. He was going to create a new Colombia and he was going to be the ruler of that country. First, the 32-year-old Lader stages a big comeback in his hometown of Armenia. He claims he is a business tycoon who made his fortune in the USA. This is a shitty little place that nobody knew about. But Carlos Lader came into this town with millions of dollars and changed the culture and changed the fabric of our beliefs and our integrity. Norman's Key may have closed down, but Lader sets up new routes to get cocaine to his dealers. He was the one responsible for moving the loads of cocaine out of Colombia into places like Panama, Cuba, places of that nature in the Caribbean. And the money keeps rolling in. He became ultra wealthy. He had apartment complexes. He had beautiful cars. He dominated not only the social scene, but the political scene. He did whatever he wanted. As part of his new image, Lader builds a huge country estate in the hills outside Armenia. At the estate, Lader sets up a Nazi-style party called the National Latin American Movement. His idea was German-style control of running Latin America. He was going to be following the philosophy of Adolf Hitler and build a new Latin American reign. In my opinion, he lost it. He was out of control. But his lavish spending and fancy lifestyle attracts attention from an unexpected quarter. A Colombian anti-government extremist group called the 19th of April Movement, or M19, tries to kidnap Lader for ransom. But Lader gives his kidnappers the slip and escapes. Now, he wants revenge. He calls together Escobar and the other top cocaine traffickers. They knew they had a problem with the terrorists. They wanted to protect themselves. In unity, there is strength. Lader, Escobar and the others form a vigilante group they call Muerte a Sequestradores, or Death to Kidnappers, MAS for short. Once again, Lader airdrops flyers. This time, they are not carrying cash, but a brutal threat. MAS will kill anyone trying to kidnap the cocaine barons. DEA agent Mike Kane is an eyewitness to the MAS terror campaign. I remember driving to work one day with my partner, downtown Medellin, and there was a number of police on the street and the street was cordoned off and it had the crime tape all over the area. And as we drove by, we saw a body hanging in the tree and the sign around it had Death to Kidnappers. M19's leaders are murdered one by one until the terrorists give in. From now on, the drug traffickers are off limits. By setting up MAS, Lader has done more than destroy the kidnap threat. He has created a monster that will plague Colombia for years to come. The light bulb went on and they said to each other, why are we fighting with each other? Why are we competing with each other? Let's ban our talents and our resources and we'll be much stronger and much more capable of shipping cocaine and selling cocaine, distributing cocaine in the United States and perhaps elsewhere, and we'll all make a lot more money doing that. So that is truly how the Medellin cartel was born. Lader is now seen by the other traffickers as one of their own, for his skill in getting cocaine to the US market and for defending them in Colombia. He proved himself to the cartel so well that Pablo Escobar knew that there could be people like him or better, but they couldn't trust him. Carlos had already been trusted and tested and they wouldn't look anywhere else. Lader's name joins Pablo Escobar at the top of the DEA's list of most wanted Colombian cocaine traffickers. He had the address book. He knew where to sell it, he knew how to market it, he knew who to sell it to, he knew who would buy it and he knew how to collect. Lader's network of dealers in the USA gives him final word on drug shipments. His Miami paymaster Toro even hears Escobar get the brush off. Pablo Escobar said, Carlos, you son of a bitch, I got 80,000 kilos cheating here. I've already been paid for them and I have to deliver them all over the world. What are you going to do for me? And Carlos would say, well, you have to be patient. I can only move 2,000 at a time or 5,000 at a time. And there was nothing Pablo could do except wait. Ever since Lader got back to Colombia from the Bahamas, the DEA has been asking for his extradition. Now two federal prosecutors and a Florida DEA team come to Colombia to demand action. Extradition is the one thing Lader and the other cocaine barons fear. You could take their cocaine. They had more cocaine to send. You could take their money. They still had plenty of money coming into their coffers, if you will. But once you're going to take their freedom, they knew the jig was up and they weren't going to stand for that. To the fury of the U.S. team, the Colombian government won't play ball. The Colombian government was dragging their feet and the drug traffickers, led by Escobar and Lader, had actually mounted a campaign to make sure that there was no extradition treaty. Lader says his political party will fight extradition. He delivers an ultimatum to the government. And saying publicly, if you sign an extradition treaty, the war is on, you know, we declare war in Colombia. But first, Lader declares war on the DEA in Colombia. He puts a $350,000 bounty on its agents. And his killers look for a chance to cash in. In terms of the traffickers threatening DEA, absolutely. I had an open contract by Carlos Lader on my head. In some ways, it's a badge of honor. I must be doing something right. I could hear a motorcycle right behind my car. I knew that they were after me and I had a weapon ready. I figured that I would be able to kill both of them if they attempted something. Vigil's pursuers back off when they realize they have been spotted. That was a very close call. Then in April 1984, Lader's fellow cartel member, Pablo Escobar, targets the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, for supporting extradition. Lara Bonilla leaves his office. He's being tracked by a motorcycle. He's in his car. The motorcycle weaves to the right-hand side of the vehicle. They open up with a Ningram and shoot Lara Bonilla several times in the head. The shooter was 16 years old and the driver of that motorcycle was 19 years old. That would be equivalent to very young teenagers assassinating the Attorney General of the United States. The murder of Lara Bonilla shocks Colombia and turns people against the drug lords. But it's a breakthrough for the DEA. The president of Colombia was feeling a lot of pressure and there was a lot of pressure on him. He decided that he was going to extradite traffickers and Carlos Lader was his number one target. The president's extradition warrant shatters Lader's dreams of an empire. He takes refuge in Colombia's forest wilderness. For the DEA, the chase isn't over. It's just begun. He flees into the jungle. The Colombians raid the house and they find about two to three million dollars in cash there. And then pictures of Adolf Hitler splattered across the walls of that residence. It's open season on Lader for the DEA. Working with the Colombian National Police, they target every likely hideout. Leading the task force is Mike Cain. As we were doing this, we were getting closer and we would bring pressure on Lader. Pressure that he didn't like. Pressure that made it much more difficult for him to do his job. Stripped of his power and luxuries, Lader begins to fall apart. The man who set out to destroy the US by getting the nation hooked on cocaine now becomes an addict himself. Carlos Lader was sort of a megalomaniac and the cocaine just jacked him up to the skies. And so he started to pretty much lose control of himself too. In a TV interview at his jungle hideout, he says point blank that he is going to use cocaine to destroy the USA. The massive hunt for Lader starts to bring heat down on the rest of the Medellin cartel. Including Pablo Escobar. We did start to rattle some cages, if you will. And the reaction on the part of Carlos Lader and his colleagues was to strike back and, you know, start threatening us. Escobar puts the word out. It's open season on the DEA. The DEA agents began using bulletproof vehicles. They started issuing us M16 military rifles to protect ourselves. When the DEA keep coming, Escobar threatens to make war on their families. His response was, let's kidnap the children and if these gringos are going to extradite any more of us, we're going to kill their children. Wives and families are sent back to the USA and the hunt for Lader steps up a gear. Three years after Lader went on the run, the Colombian police get a tip-off. He is hiding out in a country house near Medellin. In a dawn raid, the police swoop on the building. But as they move in, they are spotted by Lader's guards. A vicious firefight breaks out. But for all his tough talk, Lader wants no part of it. He started to run out of the house, ran right into a cop, put a pistol right between his eyes and said, get down on the floor. The quick thinking Lader isn't finished yet. He tried to bribe the cop who arrested him, but it didn't work. Lader and his bodyguards are photographed by the police and he tries to treat his arrest as a joke. But the joke is on him. Lader has been sold down the river by the one cartel partner he thought had his back. His old friend Escobar. Pablo Escobar is actually the one that turned him in because he saw him as somebody that could bring down the cartel and he just wanted him out of the area. Lader is taken to Bogota airport where a DEA plane is waiting. In just a few hours, he is in a US prison. Now back from Colombia, veteran agent Mike Vigil. Goes to interrogate the DEA's most important prisoner. Lader tries to buy his freedom and get some payback for Escobar's treachery. He mentioned to me that he was willing to do Pablo Escobar, but I would have to send him back to Colombia so that he could work with the Colombian military. And I said, sure, I'm going to do that. Carlos, I'm going to send you back to Colombia. I said, you're never going to step out of these four walls here. Lader is put on trial in Jacksonville, Florida. Lader was slipped in and out of Jacksonville's federal courthouse amid what some say is the tightest security this city has ever seen. Police and federal agents feared efforts to spring Lader, attempts to kill him or acts of retribution for his arrest. It was a heavily protected site. Sharp shooters on the roof, you name it. One of those due to testify is the former front man for Lader's Norman's Key operation, Carlos Toro. He broke with the cartel three years earlier to become a top undercover informant for the DEA. The cartel hasn't forgotten Toro. The prosecutor is taking no chances and Toro is escorted at all times by US marshals. Two o'clock in the morning, two o'clock in the morning, marshals came into my room. They wake me up. They grab me and they put a blanket on my head and I'm taken into the elevator of the hotel into the trunk of a car. And I'm driven out of Jacksonville, Florida. And they explained, we discovered two Colombians hired by Pablo Escobar. They were paid $250,000 as just a retainer to make sure you die if you take the stand tomorrow. The DEA feel Toro is too valuable to risk. Another star witness takes his place. The man Lader cheated out of millions when he set up his organization years before, George Young. Now he's out for revenge. George did a very good job when he testified. His testimony was corroborated by a lot of the evidence. But it's always great when you have the witness, then you put the icing on the cake or put the bow on the package and explain everything. It's invaluable. Victory for the good guys tonight in what was called the most important drug case in US history. In a trial lasting seven months, Lader is found guilty of smuggling, conspiracy and tax evasion. He is sentenced to life without parole, plus 135 years. What was important was that he got extradited, he was tried, he was convicted, and he was sent to federal prison for the rest of his natural life. This victory is both a real victory and a symbolic victory to the American people and to the people of Colombia who expect that drug traffickers, no matter who they are, how powerful they are, how valiant they are, should be subject to the rule of law and not above the law.