BLOW
How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel And Lost It All
By Bruce Porter
(St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, 9780312267124, 320pp.)
Publication Date: March 2001
Categories: Other Miscellaneous Crimes
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BLOW is the unlikely story of George Jung's roller coaster ride from middle-class high school football hero to the heart of Pable Escobar's Medellin cartel-- the largest importer of the United States cocaine supply in the 1980s. Jung's early business of flying marijuana into the United States from the mountains of Mexico took a dramatic turn when he met Carlos Lehder, a young Colombian car thief with connections to the then newly born cocaine operation in his native land. Together they created a new model for selling cocaine, turning a drug used primarily by the entertainment elite into a massive and unimaginably lucrative enterprise-- one whose earnings, if legal, would have ranked the cocaine business as the sixth largest private enterprise in the Fortune 500.
The ride came to a screeching halt when DEA agents and Florida police busted Jung with three hundred kilos of coke, effectively unraveling his fortune. But George wasn't about to go down alone. He planned to bring down with him one of the biggest cartel figures ever caught.
With a riveting insider account of the lurid world of international drug smuggling and a super-charged drama of one man's meteoric rise and desperate fall, Bruce Porter chronicles Jung's life using unprecedented eyewitness sources in this critically acclaimed true crime classic.
Bruce Porter, a former newspaper reporter and editor of Newsweek, teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Connoisseur, among other publications.
"Extraordinarily interesting...Mr. Porter has done an excellent job telling the tale of a very unusual entrepreneur."-- The New York Times Book Review
"The story belongs to anyone who has ever savored a well-told tale of adventure, greed, deceit, and revenge. Best of all, it's true."-- Houston Chronicle
"A sleigh-ride-to-hell story of how '60s hippie innocence turned into '80s megadepravity...finely researched, told with pizzazz."-- Kirkus Reviews
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