One of the legendary Colombian drug lords ia a key operator of the Medellin cartel was deported back to the South American country, after serving 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence in the United States.

Not long after, Fabio Ochoa was a free man again.

Ochoa arrived at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport on a deportation flight on Monday, wearing a gray tracksuit and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After he got off the plane, the former cartel boss was met by immigration officers wearing bulletproof vests. There was no police on the spot to detain him.

Colombia’s national immigration agency immediately released a brief statement on social media platform X, saying Ochoa was “released to join his family” after immigration officials took his fingerprints and confirmed through a database that he was not wanted by Colombian authorities.

Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began to flood the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, to the extent that in 1987 they were included on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires.

Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel he once headed Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993.

Ochoa was first indicted in the US for his alleged role in the 1986 killing of Barry Seal, an American pilot who operated cocaine flights for the Medellin cartel but became a Drug Enforcement Administration informant.

Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s in a deal that avoided extradition to the US.

The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but Ochoa was rearrested three years later on drug-trafficking charges and extradited to the US in 2001 in response to an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 people as part of a drug-trafficking conspiracy.

He was the only suspect in that group who decided to go to trial, resulting in his conviction and 30-year sentence. The other defendants received significantly lighter prison sentences because most of them cooperated with the government.

Ochoa’s name has faded from public memory as Mexican drug traffickers take center stage in the global drug trade.

But the former Medellin cartel member was recently featured in the Netflix series Griselda, where he first battles plucky businesswoman Griselda Blanco for control of Miami’s cocaine market and then forms an alliance with a drug dealer, played by Sofia Vergara.

Ochoa is also featured in the Netflix series Narcosas the youngest son of an elite Medellin family engaged in livestock and horse breeding, he is in sharp contrast to Escobar, who came from humbler roots.

Richard Gregorie, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who was on the prosecution team that convicted Ochoa, said authorities have never been able to seize all of the Ochoa family’s illegal drug profits, and he expects the former mob boss to see a homecoming.

“He’s not going to retire poor, that’s for sure,” Gregorie told The Associated Press earlier this month.