George Jung transported tons of cocaine from Colombia to the United States for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. His story was featured and dramatized in the movie Blow that starred Johnny Depp and the investigative book Kings of Cocaine. He has also been profiled in various magazines and was interviewed for a F.E.D.S. magazine cover story. With all the hype and fanfare he has been celebrated as an outlaw celebrity and Hollywood has romanticized and glorified his story giving him icon status. But the truth is much deeper. The man they call Boston George, George Jung, federal prison number 19225-004 is currently in the Bureau of Prisons at FCI La Tuna in Texas. The big screen told his story, he has told his story and other writers have told his story, now Gorilla Convict will tell his story, no punches pulled, raw and uncensored.
Boston George was the product of an upper-middle-class family in Weymouth, Massachusetts, who attended the University of Tennessee on a football scholarship. He became a hippie in the 1960s counterculture and marched for peace in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. He was a child of the Woodstock nation who in 1967 devised a plan to buy the best weed in California and take it back east to sell in the Boston College area. “I became the Pot Man,” George said. He started making 200 grand a year flying pot back east using the contacts he cultivated in the counterculture movements in Los Angeles and San Francisco to score the kind bud. Through those people he also met a bunch of entertainment type, Hollywood people and became a distributor and retailer of high grade marijuana. His clientele included celebrities, outlaws and rock stars. “Even the stars knew me as Pot Man,” George said.
Eventually George started flying to Mexico to buy weed in larger and cheaper quantities. He was doing 600 to 900 pound loads and making 50 to 100 grand a month. “The first flight, me and another gentleman did it ourselves, it was long and scary. Because of my lack of experience I hired another pilot after that,” George said. Three years later he got busted. His mother found out what he was dong and turned him in. He was arrested and sentenced to serve time in federal prison and sent to FCI Danbury, a federal prison in Massachusetts. “Danbury was a prison that you could learn from other inmates,” George said. And he put his criminal environment to good use.
George met Carlos Lehder, a Colombian with ties to Pablo Escobar. “Carlos was a guy who loved Adolph Hitler and John Lennon,” George said. George and Lehder hit it off. Carlos spoke perfect English. George, who was seven years older, shared with Carlos how he had moved tons of pot and found out that Carlos struggled to unload a few hundred. But Carlos had dreams of smuggling cocaine. He was hooked up with Griselda Blanco, the Godmother of cocaine, who was running and trying to establish the trade in New York for the Medellin Cartel. They traded notes and Lehder was impressed with Jung’s transport methods. “Until I met Carlos, Colombians never knew how to transport cocaine into the Untied States in large quantities. Only small suitcases carried by women,” George said. “Carlos was my bunkmate in the Federal penitentiary in Danbury. He was Colombian. He taught me everything I needed to know about cocaine and I taught him everything about smuggling drugs into America.”
Lehder wanted to set up a transportation ring and with Jung’s insights and experience in the smuggling game he was able to do this. George showed the Colombian how to transport tons of cocaine by plane. “A kilo was between 1 and 2 grand American in Colombia and it sold for about 60 grand here in the U.S.” George said. Jung knew he could market the cocaine through his entertainment and counterculture contacts in L.A. and in San Francisco through the people he knew in the Haight-Ashbury section. “I figured that if the record industry and movie industry were interested, they could promote the product through the greatest advertising medium there was.” George said meaning film and the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Among the music, movie and film, Hollywood-type people George knew, the high grade Colombian cocaine would be an instant hit and jumpstart the cocaine powder market in the United States.
Lehder served as the cultural bridge between the Colombian cocaine producers and the pilots and distributors in the U.S. but it was George Jung who made it all happen with his contacts on the sales tip, at least according to him. “Carlos knew Pablo Escobar. Our first trips were done with two females carrying suitcases, two a piece on the airplane. The suitcases were lined with fiberglass cells and basically undetectable. Once we made enough money, we sent a plane down to load up with cocaine,” George said. George and Carlos’s cocaine dreams from Danbury would become reality. But Pablo and the other Colombians didn’t like Carlos Lehder. He pitched his idea to them, outlining George’s tactics but they still wanted to do a run using their tried and tested methods. They started with 15 kilos, then smuggled 50 in the suitcases, giving them the capital to set up with the airplane. Jung got the 50 kilos sold in Hollywood for 2.2 million in two weeks, this made Carlos an important person in the eyes of Pablo Escobar and showed him that he needed Carlos.
“That was the start or beginning of the Medellin Cartel. We showed the Colombians that you could ship large quantities of coke to the U.S. via airplane and that there was a demand for the drug in America. Millions of dollars were generated in days.” George said. “The Colombians loved me. What Carlos, the Colombian powder and myself formed was the beginning of the Medellin Cartel. There was Carlos, Pablo Escobar, the Ochoas and myself. Carlos and I were responsible for transporting and distributing, the Ochoas handled the political and the police side and Pablo supplied all the drugs. Pablo was a visionary. He had a code of honor and those who violated it were terminated. Carlos and I made over 100 million. I had so much money I would buy houses just to store it. I had to smuggle my money back out of the U.S. to Colombia and Panama. I had so much money it began to mean nothing to me. We started the influx of cocaine to the U.S.”
By 1977 George Jung was burning out. He was spending 15 hours a week in the air smuggling money. To Lehder he became untrustworthy. Jung started using too much coke and the hippie and Hitler advocate grew apart. Jung was carrying $1 million a trip, but it was all sent back to Medellin. George kept $100 grand a trip, he basically became a mule. Lehder had convinced the Colombians that Jung was too burnt out to do anything else. But George has a different opinion. “Carlos got greedy and wanted it all for himslef,” George said. By 1977 Lehder had set up the Bahamas pipeline. He bought a Piper Navajo for 125k cash and an island called Norman’s Cay. Lehder was sending 250 kilos at a time on a plane out of Nassau to the U.S. and it was all Pablo’s coke. He made Jung obsolete.
“Pablo and I had a good relationship. He continued to be my connection. I don’t think he really cared for Carlos but Carlos was bringing in too much money for him,” George said. By 1980, at the age of 25, Carlos had completely discarded George Jung. He didn’t need him. He was running the whole transportation ring himself. “Carlos Lehder and Henry Ford had a 1ot in common. Henry Ford perfected the mass transportation of automobiles for the American consumer and Carlos Lehder perfected the mass transportation of cocaine for the American consumer.” A law enforcement official said. His transportation ring, which George Jung showed him how to set up and operate, turned Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel into world powers and Colombia into a narco state. The rest is history. But back to George Jung.
When the U.S. government turned all their might and resources against the Medellin Cartel it was lights out for them. The Colombian government turned Carlos Lehder over to the DEA and extradited him to the U.S. in 1987. He was convicted and sentenced to 135 years in federal prison. He cooperated with the U.S government investigation of Panama dictator Manuel Noriega and received a reduced sentence in return for his testimony. The Adolph Hitler loving drug lord is now in the Bureau of Prisons federal Witsec program. It is said that he is an open homosexual in prison and has been involved in numerous knock down fights with his lovers. But the federal government covers it all up since at one time he was their prize snitch. George Jung snitched also, he testified against Carlos Lehder. “While considering your options, remember this and remember it well, choice with out consequence is no choice at all,” George said.
George Jung was in prison when Ted Demme, the director came calling. “I was destined to meet George Jung. I was destined to direct Blow,” Ted Demme said. He hooked up with George when he was at FCI Otisville in New York and they got the script and movie together, which starred Johnny Depp as a young George Jung. “To me he is not a number, he’s not a convict, and he’s not a criminal,” Depp said. “He’s a great man whose wisdom and knowledge unfortunately was greatly overshadowed by the choices and mistakes he made all those years ago when he hadn’t even had time to brush himself off from the conditioning wrought upon him by his parents.”
The movie was a big success and made Boston George a celebrity in prison and out, a man who Hollywood stars wanted to fraternize with and who magazines wanted to interview and profile. “I lived the life of the biggest rock stars or film stars. There was nothing I couldn’t do. But I didn’t have many friends,” George said. “Life was my gamble, luck was my art form. I’ve lived ten lives in one and now I’m the rend where illusion meets reality. All that I know finally comes to meaning, all the deserted lands, sandy beaches I ever walked in ribbons of desperado moonlight, all the secret cargos carried on pirate winds, all the curtained faces that watched me pass through like a great hunter who now sees a light of his campfire realizing at long last after having come so far exactly why I’m here on this planet at this time. May the wind always be at your back and the sun on your face and the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.”
George, George, George! Please enough with the hippish colloquy, we can’t take any more. He must have done a lot of acid or he is just burnt out from all that coke for real. A hippie-gangster or should we say snitch, because here at Gorilla Convict we must keep it real. Boston George was at FCI Fort Dix for a minute. They say he was dirty and didn’t wash much. His homeboys from Boston wouldn’t fuck with him because he was no good. That is how Boston dudes get down. One convict called Stevie-0 arrived at the Dix and George just happened to be in his unit, so he met the dude.
Stevie-O explains, “I hit the compound at Dix and went looking for my homeboys. Some Spanish dudes directed me to Boston George. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. I was glad to meet someone from the town. I ran into some other homies later that evening and told them I met Boston George and they told me that motherfucker was hot and who he was, about the movie and all that shit. I was mad as shit. I hate rat motherfuckers and this piece of shit had me hanging around him all day in the unit. I went back to that motherfucker and told him, ‘Don’t ever claim Boston if you’re hot, you snitch.’”
Eventually Boston George was transferred to FCI La Tuna in Texas, it’s said he charges dudes two books of stamps to take a photo with him. It seems all that money he had, that he couldn’t fit in his house, is long gone. Just another tale of infamy from out of the Bureau of Prisons.