(George Jung, left, in prison in 2010.Nish242/Wikimedia Commons)
George Jung is one of America's most well-known drug dealers, having been immortalized in the Johnny Depp film "Blow."
But in 1974, he was a relatively low-level drug smuggler; one who had just been sentenced to four years at the Federal Correctional Institute at Danbury, Connecticut, after being picked up with a car trunk full of marijuana in Chicago.
Danbury, in Jung's words, was a "very mellow, laid-back place." But it was also a place where, "You could more or less learn anything you wanted to learn in there in reference to illicit activities," Jung told PBS Frontline. "It was basically a school."
At the time, Jung's offense was relatively light and his term relatively short. But, in a decision that would alter the American drug landscape forever, prison authorities put Jung in a cell with Carlos Lehder, a young Colombian-American who had been picked up for stealing cars.
"He was looking for a way to transport cocaine out of Colombia and people to sell it in the United States and there I was," Jung told PBS. "It was like a marriage made in heaven, or hell in the end."
"Jung knew how to import drugs by plane; Lehder had contacts in Colombia," Tom Wainwright, the former Mexico City bureau chief for The Economist, wrote in his book, "Narconomics." Cocaine was a relatively little-used drug in the US at that point, Wainwright writes, but "When Lehder and Jung were released from prison in 1976, they set about changing that forever."
(Carlos Lehder Rivas, 37, considered by officials to be one of the most important world leaders of drug trafficking, is shown in an undated photo.AP Photo)
Once they were both released, Lehder sent a telegram to Jung at his parents' house in Massachusetts, telling him to find two women and send them to Antigua with Samsonite suitcases.
"They were more or less naive to what was going on and I told them that they'd be transferring cocaine, and really at that time, not very many people in Massachusetts knew what the hell cocaine was," Jung recounted to PBS.
The women returned to Boston with their drugs undetected, telling Jung they enjoyed themselves so much that they were going back the next day.
"So they went and they were successful both times," Jung said. "That was the beginning of the cocaine business for Carlos and myself."
At the next stage, Jung met Lehder in Canada, and the two of them tracked down a pilot with connections in the Bahamas.
"This was the first time that we showed the Colombians that you could take huge amounts of cocaine and drop it into the United States via air and also there was a huge market there for it," Jung told PBS, saying they generated millions of dollars in a matter of days.