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Drug lord George Jacob Jung dies at 78: popularly known as Boston George and El Americano~details below

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George Jocob 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.

According to report his death was confirmed on social media by people close to him, including a post shared on his Instagram page. 

No cause was given, but the celebrity news site TMZ reported that he had recently been experiencing liver and kidney failure.

Mr. Jung made his fortune as part of the Medellín cartel. He joined the cartel’s mastermind, Pablo Escobar, one of the world’s most murderous and successful cocaine traffickers, in smuggling planeloads of the drug into the United States.

At its peak in the mid-1980s, the cartel was the largest drug-smuggling ring in the Western Hemisphere, vacuuming up an estimated $420 million a week, or $22 billion a year.

Mr. Jung, who is also known by his nicknames “Boston George” and “El Americano” he gained some notoriety after Hollywood produced a version of his life story in the 2001 movie “Blow,” in which he was portrayed by Johnny Depp. 

The movie, directed by Ted Demme, was adapted from Bruce Porter’s 1993 book, “Blow: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million With the Medellín Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All.”

The movie was a disappointment at the box office and received so-so reviews. Writing in The Observer, the critic Andrew Sarris said there was no “arc” to Mr. Jung’s criminal destiny and that “he just steadily fades into middle-aged prison pallor.”

Mr. Jung had a more glorified view of himself. “I don’t call myself a gangster,” he told The Boston Globe in 1993. “I’m an outlaw. Bob Dylan said when you live outside the law, you must be honest. A gangster is a person who steals and cheats and takes. I never took. I just gave.”


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