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Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellain Cartel, an Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and International Corruption Hardcover – December 1, 1989

by Guy Gugliotta (Author), Jeff Leen (Contributor)

4.3 499 ratings

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Here is the most complete and revealing account ever of the Medellin Cartel, the powerful Colombian narcotics organization that controls as much as 80 percent of the world cocaine market, written by the Miami Herald reporters whose prizewinning series of articles broke the story. Photos.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a riveting narrative based on their prize-winning series in the Miami Herald , Gugliotta and Leen expose in alarming, well-documented and vivid detail the estimated $8 billion-a-year Colombian cartel that controls 80% of the world's cocaine market. In their account, the complex hierarchy of the cartel directs an international operation that resembles and surpasses many multinational corporations in efficiency and sophisticated marketing techniques. Run by a small group of murderous young overlords, the organization has thousands of employees--from peasants and pilots to lawyers and hit-men. Initially, corrupt bank and government officials in Colombia favored the cartel's growth. However, this changed after the cartel's successful opposition to an extradition treaty between Colombia and the U.S., which involved a reign of terror against Colombian institutions. The extended activities of the cocaine barons in Central America have compromised U.S. national interests, the authors maintain, especially in the case of reported contra- cartel links and alleged drug trafficking by Panama's Noriega. Despite concerted law enforcement efforts, the cartel still thrives. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In what is the most gripping, complete account yet of this powerful cocaine cartel, the authors, Miami Herald reporters, have painted an incisive and shocking picture of the men and money involved. The lives and characters of the drug lords are thoroughly explored, including the trial of Carlos Lehder, who recently became the first Cartel leader to be sentenced to prison in the United States. Even those libraries with Paul Eddy's The Cocaine Wars: Murder, Money, Corruption, and the World's Most Valuable Commodity ( LJ 7/88) and Elaine Shannon's Desperadoes: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win ( LJ 11/15/88) should purchase this. Highly recommended.
- Sally G. Waters, Stetson Law Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (December 1, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 391 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0671649574
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0671649579
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #1,434,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,884 in Criminology (Books)
- #51,820 in Politics & Government (Books)

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4.3 499 ratings

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Jeff Leen
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Jeff Leen is the author of two books, The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds and the Making of an American Legend (Atlantic Monthly Press, August 2009) and, with Guy Gugliotta, Kings of Cocaine: A True Story of Murder, Money and International Corruption (Simon & Schuster, 1989).
He received his A.B. in English Literature and Drama in 1979 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked as a senior editor on the school magazine, Subject to Change.
In 1982, he received his M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia. After graduation, he joined the Miami Herald as a reporter in the Gulf Coast Bureau. In 1985, he began covering the cocaine trade in Miami.
Beginning in 1987, he worked on the paper's investigative team in Miami. That year, he co-authored a 10-part series on the Medellin Cartel that became Kings of Cocaine. The series resulted in the seizure of Pablo Escobar's vacation home on Miami Beach and the druglord's $10 million apartment building in Broward County.
At the Herald, Leen also contributed to the coverage of Hurricane Andrew that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 1993.
Since 1997, he has been a reporter and an editor in the Washington Post's investigative unit, where he was part of a four-reporter team whose investigation of D.C. police shootings won the 1999 Pulitzer Gold Medal, the paper's first since Watergate. As the Post's investigations editor and later assistant managing editor in charge of investigations, he has directed reporters investigating deaths among the mentally retarded and at-risk children, plutonium poisoning in Kentucky, overseas drug testing, the 9/11 terror attacks, the business activities of the Nature Conservancy, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, federal farm subsidy abuse, the Dick Cheney vice presidency and the Chandra Levy homicide case. The work has been honored with five Pulitzer Prizes, including another Gold Medal and two for investigative reporting.
He is married to Lynn Medford, senior Style Editor at The Washington Post.
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Guy Gugliotta
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Chris Hopkins

One of the best books I have ever read.

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2015

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I will probably put together a more comprehensive review as I am writing this from my kindle but as for now I will say that this book truly shed light on the heart of evil. Escobar murdered over 7000 people, 9/10 of the supreme court justices from 1978 to 1988, and had a knack for murdering the entire family of anyone that "crossed" him or perturbed him in any way. Columbia in the 80s truly was the devils playground. If a drug Lord didn't get his way he would simply send an armed crew into a courthouse and machine gun every single person there. The Columbia cartels in the 80s had resources that rivaled and often succeeded that of the government's and militaries. It is truly pathetic that the Columbia government let its people down and allowed them to suffer so greatly as they deliberated over technicalities while the drug lords freely murdered thousands of people in public office and the press even rewarding 5000 dollars to anyone that simply killed a police officer and brought in his badge. There is nothing more disgusting and sinister than esocbar, Ochoa and Lehrer and the fact that they were able to prevail so greatly in their hedious endeavors demonstrates one of the greatest political failings of mankind next to Hitler's rise to power and use of germanys resources as a mass murder weapon

3 people found this helpful

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Thad Brown

Excellent book, though the story is a little dated.

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2013

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This is an excellent book about what I would call ‘phase 1’ of the history of Colombian cocaine trafficking. Or maybe it would be better called ‘The Cessna Era’ since it was really in this time that cocaine was moved mostly in small planes, through Central America and the Caribbean, and then eventually through South Florida and on to parts various in the US. When the narrative in this book ends, in 1988, Pablo Escobar still had five years to live, the worst of the inter-cartel wars were still to come (which I suspect would have shocked the authors and readers when this book was released), and the Zetas and Sinoloa Cartel were but figments in the imaginations of young Mexican men.

Both the strength and the weakness of this book lie in the fact that it is comparatively dated at this point. The title gets it very right; this was the Wild West, cowboys and Indians, lawmen and outlaws time for cocaine trafficking. Much of the interest in the book is reading about how long it took the DEA to understand just how vast and profitable the cocaine trade had become, pretty much without them even noticing. In one excellent, long section of the book, the Colombian national police and DEA agents make a bust almost by accident of a huge jungle production lab for turning paste coca into powder cocaine for transport. The cops had assumed the cartels were aggregating output from dozens or hundreds of mom-and-pop labs and shipping that to the US. What they found was a huge complex with tons, not kilos of cocaine, generators, barracks, an industrial kitchen, a sewing shop for uniforms, and earth moving gear to maintain the professional looking airstrip. Then the followed paths through the jungle and found four or five more just like it, proving cocaine had become an industrial, vertical monopoly for the cartels.

Keeping with the ‘cowboy’ theme, the book concentrates heavily on two guys barely remembered today, but two true pioneers of the cocaines business. Both were pilots. Barry Seal was a thrill-seeker American stick jockey with a reputation as a uncommonly talented pilot. Carlos Lehder was a Colombian pilot who essentially bought an island in the Bahamas and turned it into his own, private complex for airlifting cocaine to Florida. Both do things, like purchase surplus cargo planes with cash, that would have Homeland Security on your doorstep within a day or two if you tried it today. And both of them, no matter what you think of what they did for a living, have a certain outlaw charm to them. Lehder managed to stay on the lam for years in Colombia, sometimes hiding behind Colombian law, sometime hiding from it. Seal was murdered while checking into the halfway house where he had been assigned to stay nights, showing that even in 1988 many judges still had no idea how far the Colombian cartels could reach.

The book also touches on some of the darker, murkier aspects of the cocaine business in the 1970s and 1980s. The authors do not shout from the mountain, ‘The CIA sold crack in Los Angeles,’ but they do cover the complex geopolitical relationships created by a mutli-billion dollar black market business that was taken far less seriously than it is today. The cartels certainly flew drugs through Nicaragua, while Panamanian banks laundered money and Manuel Noriega managed to play everyone from the DEA to Escobar to Fidel Castro. There is even a small reference to good ol’ Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair, while Barry Seal hints (convincingly) that various intelligence types might have known a great deal more about his business than they wanted to let on.

However, if you want to learn more about Colombia and its successes and failures dealing with cocaine, I’d suggest two other books. First I would suggest Robin Kirk’s More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia. In many ways it picks up roughly where this book ends and covers all of ‘phase 2’ of the Colombian drug wars. That would be the post-cowboy era, more about blackberries and money laundering than flying into Florida with your lights off. This includes the worst of the cartel wars, the newer paramilitary forces that first collaborated with the cartels and then fought them, and then the consolidation of the cocaine business after the cartels were largely broken. That would take the reader up until 2002, when Alvaro Uribe was elected and made violence from both the cartels and the FARC an even bigger national priority. The ‘phase 3,’ lasting until today, would include the ‘demobilization’ and truth commission from the Uribe administration, the impressive decrease in violence in urban Colombia, the continued violence in the countryside, and eventually the ‘professionalizing’ of the paramilitaries AND FARC into some of the most powerful narcos in the country. And, of course, the rise of Mexico as the main transit point for smuggling drugs into the US, as the DEA shut down much of the business in Florida. The ‘phase 3’ book, as far as I can tell, has not yet been written.

If after reading this you’ll allow me a personal note, I lived in Medellin for six months during 2012, and these problems are still being dealt. Medellin remains a city of stunning beauty and effortlessly charming residents, but American still like blow and it’s still mostly grown in Bolivian and Peru, so somebody has to ship it. Griselda Blanco, one of the very first Colombians to smuggle cocaine in the US, was gunned down gangland style this fall, after serving a nearly 15 year sentence in the US and retuning to Medellin. It was a thoroughly professional hit that someone had waited 20 years to carry out. Kirk’s book is especially enlightening when she talks about the brutal, thankless options available to the citizens and (especially) judiciary where the paras, narcos, and guerrillas continue to fight. Still, if you want to know the history of the narco-traffickers, Cocaine Cowboys is certainly the place to start. Just be sure to continue reading, as much has changed since 1988.

44 people found this helpful

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Daniel Lawlis

Exciting

Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2014

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This book reads like an action novel. I found it very fast-paced. It goes into a lot of detail concerning Barry Seal (former cocaine distributor turned DEA informant) and the involvement of Nicaragua in 1980s cocaine smuggling. The stories the book tells lend validity to the expression that "truth is stranger than fiction." Decide for yourself, after reading about Barry Seal's antics, whether I'm exaggerating. For those who enjoyed the movie Blow, the minutia about Carlos Lehder (portrayed as Diego in Blow) and George Jung (Johnny Depp's character in Blow) will be particularly interesting. In my opinion, Blow omitted some of the most exciting aspects of George and Carlos's early dealings (e.g., Carlos sneaking across the Canadian border into the U.S. through the woods).

This book entertains and informs at the same time.

3 people found this helpful

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Hannah

Received a dirty old book

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2024

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I bought this for a class and I thought I selected purchase new and not used. The pages are dirty, the cover is mangled and it has a funky smell to it, it came with all of its pages, but clearly used.

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2023

Great buy !

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2016

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The book is good and detailed although it ends before the fall of the cartels. Considering the year it's written, this is nothing but natural. There is a considerable number of characters to the story, so it does become a bit overwhelming at some point. This led me to the feeling of some chapters being fillers, however it doesn't sabotage the main story too much, although some important figures sometimes seem to dodge the scope and then reappear out of nowhere. But all in all, the book is a good read, highly captivating.

3 people found this helpful

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Richard Holiman

Good reference on the origins of the cocaine trade.

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2020

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When I was assigned to a federal drug task force in 1988, all of the DEA agents told me that the best way to get up to speed on the big picture, was to buy and read this book. I did, and they were right. Somewhere over the years, I lost my copy and I recently bought another and read it again. It’s still as interesting as it was to me back then.

One person found this helpful

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T. Johnson

Very informative

Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2018

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(If not for the typos, I'd have given this book five stars.)

This is basically an encyclopedia about the reign of terror (and downfall) of the Medellin cartel. Told in great detail, it's a real page turner which I couldn't put down. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of international drug trafficking.

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Shannon Belval

Great book and service

Reviewed in Canada on September 28, 2020

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Enjoying reading this book. Delivery was as expected. The seller kept in constant contact while waiting for the book. Impressed!

Marlos Mendes

Para entender os cartéis e o tráfico na América Latina

Reviewed in Brazil on February 4, 2016

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Ótimo relato sobre o boom do tráfico de drogas nos anos 80 e a criação dos cartéis do tráfico, passando de mero contrabando a mega empreendimento, e da ascensão dos 'patrones' do tráfico, principalmente Pablo Escobar. Recomendo.

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Christian T.

interessantes buch über die "Narcos"

Reviewed in Germany on August 21, 2016

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gut recherchiertes buch über die blütezeit der kokain schmuggler über die bahamas route. empfehle auch noch das buch "Killing Pablo"

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Unknown

the book is a great read even now

Reviewed in India on August 16, 2016

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Kings of Cocaine is a book written about events in the 1980s. The book is well researched and brings out some of the key events. Even thought the events are dated, the book is a great read even now. It is difficult to believe that an incident like 'palace of justice' sieze.

Besides, spinning a story, there is a great amount of wisdom in the book. Some of the things that stood out in the book:
1. The mix of intimidation, best legal defence and influencing public opinion through well researched and planted stories
2. Members of law enforcement agencies were left with a choice between taking money and falling in line or be subject to violence and risks
3. Even with so much violence around them, there were Columbians to fought - driven by ideology or ambitious and seeking promotion
4. Stifling demand vs supply
5. Challenges for witnesses -- Case of Barry Seal and role played by "Stanford Bardwell".
6. Impact of high profile asasinations
7. Attacking the press is one of the poorest strategies

As an Indian, very interesting take is on the efficiency of a criminal justice system -- need good police officers, good systems, judges and a fast delivery of justice. Any part of the chain that does not performing well makes the system come apart and destroys the confidence of others. Lots of people within our system responsible for delivering justice have no accountability and their performance has no impact on their career prospects. Some of the appointments are through an opaque process............

All in a all a great read and I recommend the book

One person found this helpful

Mr B.

Just mind Boggling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2014

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No it isn't new, but it is complete, forget "Killing Pablo" etc ... this goes very deep and is fully comprehensive, an absolute page turner and if you have no idea of the story then you will be utterly stupefied. You just could not make this up!

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Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellain Cartel, an Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and International Corruption Hardcover – December 1, 1989

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