May 6, 2021 – Master narcotics trafficker and drug smuggler George (Boston George) Jung, the man practically personally responsible for flooding the United States with cocaine in the late 1970s and first half of the 1980s on behalf of Narcos baron Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel, died of organ failure today at the age of 78. Jung’s rise and fall in the drug game was depicted in the 2001 hit film Blow starring Johnny Depp as Jung and Cliff Curtis as Escobar.
Born and raised in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Boston George began his career as a kingpin shipping bales of marijuana from California to New England for distribution at colleges and universities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island and Maine. Jung was busted in Chicago in 1974 and sent to federal prison. His networking behind bars launched him into the stratosphere.
While he was locked up, Jung was cellmates with the half-Colombian, high-German Carlos Lehder, one of Pablo Escobar’s most trusted lieutenants. Lehder schooled Boston George on the world of powder and when they were both released, Lehder and Jung flew to Colombia together for Lehder to introduce Boston George to Escobar and cement a relationship between the three men. Lehder’s character in the movie Blow was renamed Diego Delgado and played by Spanish actor Jordi Molla (Bad Boys II, Riddick).
Jung and Lehder headed the Medellin Cartel’s transportation unit, using an island Lehder purchased in the Bahamas (Norman’s Kay) as a jumping off point to fly planes filled to the brim with cocaine (usually 300 kilos or so) into the U.S. and distribute it from a base of Los Angeles beauty salons. Authorities estimated that more than 80 percent of the North American cocaine market was being serviced by the union between the hippy-chic Boston George and the powerful, ultra-violent Medellin Cartel. Escobar grew to be the biggest drug kingpin on the planet.
By the beginning of the 1980s though, the maniacal, increasingly unhinged Lehder and Jung had fallen out and Jung left the cartel to go off on his own in the coke business. Jung was indicted for cocaine trafficking in 1985, but worked his way out of his sentence by agreeing to testify against Lehder.
Jung was nailed in a coke case out of Kansas in 1994 and did two decades in prison. He was released in 2014 and returned for a brief stay in 2016 for a parole violation related to an autograph signing he attended without his parole officer’s permission.
Lehder cut a deal for himself following his conviction and helped the U.S Government topple Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who he did business and banking with. The Bureau Of Prisons finally released the 71-year old and self-declared Neo-Nazi Lehder last year and he was immediately deported to Germany. Escobar died in 1993 in a hail of bullets as a result of a shootout with Colombian and American military on a Medellin rooftop.
Check out THE OG PODCAST interview with Boston George from 2020 here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/boston-george-jung-inspiration-for-the-movie-blow/id1467014230?i=1000451958675
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