‘The Last Of The Cocaine Cowboys’ Docuseries On Medellín Cartel’s Carlos Lehder In Works From Billy Corben’s Rakontur
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EXCLUSIVE: Rakontur has wrapped production on The Last of the Cocaine Cowboys, a four-part documentary miniseries on Medellín Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder.
Described by the U.S. Department of Justice as “the Henry Ford of the cocaine industry,” Lehder co-founded Colombia’s infamous drug cartel alongside Pablo Escobar, Jorge Ochoa and Jose Rodriguez Gacha in the 1970s. He conspired with heads of state to corrupt entire nations and open cocaine smuggling routes in the Bahamas, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico, also buying his own Bahamian island, Norman’s Cay, and transforming it into an air and sea cocaine shipping hub. Lehder simultaneously rose to political power in Colombia as head of the National Latin Movement and helped elect Pablo Escobar to Parliament, with the cartel at its peak smuggling 300 kilos of cocaine per day, and generating $20 billion a year.
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Lehder in 1987 became the first Medellín Cartel leader to be captured and extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to life in federal prison without the possibility of parole, plus 135 years. He was ultimately released from prison and deported to Germany, after a 33-year stint, in 2020.
The Last of the Cocaine Cowboys will offer exclusive access to Lehder in his first on-camera interviews in 32 years, boasting over 35 hours of conversation with the former cartel leader, as well as footage and photos from his personal archive. For the first time ever, he details his trajectory from private school kid, to car thief, to the top of the cocaine industry, and the harrowing story of his first cocaine run in a truck through the Andes. Lehder also gets into his early smuggling business with “Boston George” Jung, portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 2001 film, Blow; never-before-told tales of his partnership with Escobar, and Escobar’s obsession with gangster Al Capone; personal negotiations for cocaine trade routes with Manuel Noriega (Panama), the Castro Brothers (Cuba) and the Contras (Nicaragua); bribing Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden Pindling with $2 million a year and commanding a private army of enforcers, pilots, and boat captains at his own private island and airport; and the extraordinary circumstances of his release from prison, following his testimony against Noriega at the Panamanian dictator’s unprecedented 1991 drug trial.
Billy Corben is directing the series from his scripts written with David Cypkin, with the pair producing alongside Alfred Spellman for rakontur. While it’s unclear at this point where the show will land, we hear that it’s currently being shopped to several high-profile streamers.
A Miami-based media studio founded in 2000, rakontur launched its Cocaine Cowboys series on the illegal drug trade with a 2006 documentary of the same name, which it followed up with Cocaine Cowboys 2 (2008) and Cocaine Cowboys: Reloaded (2014). The company more recently released the six-part docuseries Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami, chronicling the rise and fall of Miami drug kingpins Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon — aka, Los Muchachos — which debuted on Netflix last year. Rakontur has also previously produced such titles as The U and The U Part 2 for ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 series, and the 2018 documentary Screwball about the MLB doping scandal involving the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez.
Corben and Rakontur are repped by WME.
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