George Jung, Who Made Millions Smuggling Cocaine, Dies at 78
Part of the Medellín drug cartel, he was imprisoned multiple times and was later played by Johnny Depp in the 2001 movie “Blow.”
The cocaine smuggler George Jung at a screening of “Blow,” a movie about his life, in 2018. “I don’t call myself a gangster,” he once said. “I’m an outlaw.” Credit.Greg Doherty/Getty Images
May 9, 2021
George Jung, a cocaine smuggler who, at the height of his criminal career in the 1970s and ’80s, reaped millions of dollars a day from running drugs through the notorious Medellín cartel, died on Wednesday in hospice care in his hometown, Weymouth, Mass. He was 78.