SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

Machine Gun Carlos

Back in south Florida, Seal pleaded guilty to the second Quaalude smuggling indictment and was sentenced on the first, for which a jury had already found him guilty. U.S. District Judge Norman C. Roettger, no friend of drug dealers, sentenced Barry to 10 years in prison and said he would have given him 25 years if he could have. The judge, who didn't know Seal was working for the DEA, ordered the government's star smuggler to prison immediately.

Seal's DEA handlers interceded. Two days later Barry was out of jail. Three days after that he flew back to Colombia. When he landed outside Medellin, Seal met up with Carlos Lehder. While the Ochoas were courtly and temperate, Lehder was wild and unpredictable.

The son of a German father and a Colombian mother, Lehder was a Nazi admirer and a serious cocaine user who would sometimes stay wired for days. When Seal touched down at a cartel airstrip carved out of the jungle, Lehder was there, sitting astride a white horse and waving a machine gun. The proposed shipment was now down to 1,500 pounds. As Lehder supervised the loading of the cocaine, Seal protested that the shipment was too heavy. The airstrip was muddy and he didn't think the plane could take off.

But Carlos's machine gun trumped Barry's technical protests.

Once the dope was loaded, Seal pushed the throttles to their stops and sloshed and splashed through the mud. Barry was right. The dope was too heavy. The overloaded plane crashed at the end of the runway and caught fire. Lehder, Seal, and the loaders managed to save the dope, though.

A few days later, the Ochoas sent Seal another airplane, a more powerful Titan twin engine. With the dope transferred to the new plane, Seal took off and headed for Nicaragua.