Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All
About this audiobook
Blow is the unlikely story of George Jung’s roller-coaster ride from middle-class high school football hero to the heart of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín 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 supercharged 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.
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About the author
Bruce Porter is a former writer for Newsweek and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. He has written for the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, Playboy, and Rolling Stone, as well as dozens of other magazines and newspapers. Porter’s first book, Blow, was a bestselling New York Times Notable Book and was made into a major motion picture. He lives in New York City.
Stephen Bowlby, a lifelong performer and filmmaker, loves bringing ideas to life in ways that entertain, inviting both action and reflection. With a career in writing, directing, and film editing, he infuses his narration with a strong sense of story.
