George Jung, the cocaine smuggler whose exploits served as the inspiration for the movie Blow, has reportedly died. He was 78.
The news was first reported Wednesday by TMZ, which cited sources close to the situation in saying that Jung passed Wednesday morning at his home in the Boston area, adding that the “cause of death is currently not known, though he had recently been experiencing liver and kidney failure.”
TMZ reported that Jung had been in “home hospice care since this past weekend and died with his girlfriend, Ronda, and friend, Roger, by his side.”
A post on Jung’s Instagram account provided further confirmation, saying that he died Wednesday morning at his home in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
George Jung: A Wild Life
One of the best known drug smugglers, George Jung was born on August 6, 1942 in the Boston area. His stomping ground would ultimately form the basis for his famed moniker: “Boston George.”
His entry into the drug trade began in the 1960s, when Jung started transporting marijuana across the Mexico border into the United States.
In a 2007 interview with PBS’s “Frontline,” Jung recalled his origins as a smuggler:
“Well, smoking marijuana—or most everybody who smokes marijuana deals it in small amounts to their friends, innocently enough. I think it’s innocently enough,” Jung said in the interview.
“Then I begin to see the money aspect of it. That was the driving force. I suddenly began to realize that to become an entrepreneur in the marijuana business would make me fairly well off. And I also liked the lifestyle, my own working hours. Basically, the whole conception of this came about when a friend of mine came out to Manhattan Beach for the summer in California. He was attending U-Mass at Amherst and I had a large punch bowl of pot sitting on the table, for anybody to use at their leisure.”
“He asked me how much it was worth and I told him something like $60.00 per kilo. He told me that it sold for $300.00 back East in Amherst. The wheels began to turn and the next thing I knew we were purchasing the $60.00 kilos and transporting pot back to Amherst making a profit of approximately $200.00 on each one less the airline fare, what have you. At that time that was a lot of money.”
George Jung was busted in 1974 and was sentenced to four years in the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut, where he met a cartel associate from Medellin named Carlos Lehder. Jung and Lehder “conspired to rain a white-powder blizzard down upon America that would inhibit the serotonin reuptake of millions of party people at the end of the ’70s, making them both incredibly rich men,” as High Times put it in 2015.
It was Lehder who would eventually introduce Jung to Pablo Escobar, the notorious Colombian drug kingpin.
Jung ultimately found out that Lehder was selling out the cartel, prompting Jung to testify against Lehder.
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