05/02/2026
George Jung walked off a plane in 1974 with $1.5 million in cash stuffed into duffel bags and a smile that could sell sin.
He was 31, a beach-town hustler from Massachusetts who’d just helped create America’s co***ne economy. Before him, there was w**d and whiskey. After him, there was an empire. “I just wanted to be free,” he said. “Freedom costs money. I found the fastest way to get it.”
It started small. In the late 1960s, Jung was flying kilos of ma*****na from Mexico to New England in small planes packed with surfboards. He wore Hawaiian shirts, charmed customs agents, and handed out w**d at college parties. Then one arrest changed everything. In prison, he met a Colombian inmate named Carlos Lehder. They talked all night about airplanes, logistics, and untapped opportunity. When they got out, they made history. Lehder introduced Jung to the Medellín Cartel. Jung became their American pipeline.
By the early 1980s, 85 percent of the co***ne entering the United States came through his network. He smuggled it in planes, boats, and suitcases, landing shipments on private Bahamian islands and distributing through Miami like a ghost. He partied with rock stars, bought mansions, and stuffed so much cash into his house that rats chewed through stacks of $100 bills. When a banker in Panama told him he could store his money tax-free, Jung simply said, “I’ll need a bigger vault.”
But the high couldn’t last. The same charm that built his empire brought it down. The cartel grew paranoid, the feds got sharper, and his partners turned on him. In 1994, agents surrounded his Massachusetts home. When they cuffed him, Jung just smiled and said, “It’s not a tragedy. It’s just business that went bad.”
He served nearly 20 years in prison. When Blow hit theaters in 2001, starring Johnny Depp as Jung, the world finally saw the man behind America’s addiction. Jung watched the movie in a small prison screening room. “They got it right,” he said quietly. “I flew too close to the sun.”
After his release, he tried to live quietly, selling his story, signing autographs, and warning kids about fast money. But the old temptation never left. “I always thought I was chasing freedom,” he said near the end of his life. “Turns out, I was running from it.”
George Jung died in 2021 at 78, broke, alone, and oddly serene.
He helped build an empire that nearly drowned a nation in powder — and then outlived it.
He proved that the American Dream, when twisted hard enough, can look a lot like the very thing it claims to escape.
