One of the legendary Colombian drug lords and a a key operator of the Medellin Cartel was deported back to the South American country after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.
Soon Fabio Ochoa was a free man again.
Ochoa arrived at Bogota's El Dorado airport on a deportation flight on Monday wearing a gray sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After leaving the plane, the former cartel boss was met by the immigration service in body armor. There was no police on the spot to detain him.
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Colombia's national immigration agency immediately released a brief statement on social media platform X, saying Ochoa had been “released to join his family” after immigration officials took his fingerprints and verified through the base given that the Colombian authorities are not looking for him.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began to flood the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, to the point where they were named Forbes magazine's billionaires in 1987.
While living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel he once led Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.
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Ochoa was first indicted in the United States for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who flew cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel but became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s in a deal that saw them avoid extradition to the United States
The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was rearrested three years later for drug trafficking and extradited to the United States in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 others in a smuggling conspiracy drugs.
He was the only suspect in the group who chose to go to trial, and was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The remaining defendants received much shorter prison terms because most of them cooperated with the authorities.
Ochoa's name has faded from popular memory as Mexican drug traffickers are central to the global drug trade.
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But the former Medellín cartel member was recently featured in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first battles the plucky businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of the cocaine market in Miami and then forms an alliance with a drug trafficker played by Sofia Vergara.
Ochoa is also pictured in the Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite cattle and horse-breeding Medellin family and a stark contrast to Escobar, who came from humbler roots.
Richard Gregory, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was part of the prosecution team that found Ochoa guilty, said authorities have never been able to seize all of Ochoa's family's illegal drug proceeds and he expects the former mob boss to come home soon. .
“He's not going to retire a poor man, that's for sure,” Gregory told The Associated Press earlier this month.