April 25, 2020 — Colombian drug lord Fabio (Fabito) Ochoa Vasquez is trying to get out of a federal prison in the United States five years early because of new sentencing guidelines. The 62-year old in the final stretch of a three-decade term for narcotics-trafficking and is the youngest son of “Don Fabio” Ochoa Restrepo, the fabled horse-breeding cocaine baron who was one of the founding members of the Medellin Cartel. Attorneys for Ochoa Vasquez filed paperwork this week with U.S. District Court Judge K. Michael Moore out of Miami regarding a re-sentencing. Ochoa Vasquez is requesting a reduction from his 30-year term to 24 years, which is the amount of time he’s spent in the American justice system. Moore is expected to rule on the motion later this spring. The mild-mannered , statesman-like Don Fabio Restrepo and the more volatile, internationally infamous Pablo Escobar led the Medellin Cartel to epic heights, controlling 75 percent of the global cocaine economy at the peak of their power in the early 1990s. Escobar was the face of the operation, but insiders claim Don Fabio called shots behind the scenes and was the true brains of the business while laying low on his state-of-the-art Passo Fino horse farm. Fabito Ochoa Vasquez and his two brothers, Jorge and Juan, ran the South Florida wing of the cartel and lived in Miami throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, major players in the city’s so-called Cocaine Cowboy era. Ochoa Vasquez was convicted in a federal drug conspiracy case in 2003. He spent time in prison in Colombia during the 1990s before being extradited to Florida for trial in 2001. Don Fabio died of kidney failure in the months following his son’s extradition. Escobar was killed in 1993 on the run from the DEA, brought down in a hail of bullets in a shootout with U.S. and Colombian military on the rooftop of a Medellin safehouse. The Ochoa Vasquez brothers are considered suspects in the planning of the 1986 murder of cartel pilot turned informant Barry Seal, gunned down in witness protection on a Louisiana military base. Tom Cruise played Barry Seal in the 2017 movie American Made. In the popular Netflix show Narcos (2015-2017), Fabito Ochoa Vasquez was played by Roberto Urbina.
