Born in 1949, Carlo Lehder rose from a struggling, small time pot dealer to become a major godfather in the Medellin cartel, the crime syndicate largely responsible for initiating the cocaine epidemic plaguing American society since the late 1970''s. Federal U.S. prosecutor Robert Merkle, who successfully prosecuted Lehder in 1988, said that the drug lord "was to cocaine transportation what Henry Ford was to automobiles" because he was the mastermind behind the transportation network that revolutionized the international drug trade. Lehder''s genius was to devise a sophisticated transportation system that allowed the Medellin cartel to transport huge quantities of cocaine from Columbia, the sour country, to the U.S., the world''s major illegal drug market.