rakontur blog

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Magnolia Pictures
Grade: B+
Directed by: Billy Corben
Written By: Billy Corben
Screened at: Dolby 88, NYC, 10/11/06
Opens: October 27, 2006

With all the mayhem endemic to the city of Miami during the 1970s and 1980s, one wonders whether anyone in political office reconsidered making narcotic drugs legal thereby taking the profits from those who profited by cocaine prohibition. After all, in at least one of the nightclubs during that booming time when Miami turned from a sleepy village to the hub America’s southeast, tables were set up with mirrors to allow patrons to imbibe coke. Men were in the ladies’ room snorting: people listening outside the door could hear the sounds that must have resembled that of a couple of dozen kids with the flu. But coke never did gain a foothold among the many drugs that are permitted to us, yet somehow, by 1990, law enforcement activity appears to have swept the criminals out of that great city where many retreated to the West Coast. What a place, though, during the time that the Medellin cartel used the city as a landing place to deposit literally tons of the valuable white powder, yielding so much money that the Federal Reserve Bank there in one year than the rest of the Fed banks in the U.S. combined.

Most Americans know of the action through Don Johnson’s vehicle on TV, Miami Vice, but lest any of that drama’s devotees think that “Cocaine Cowboys” is (ugh) a documentary, you’re in for a surprise. What lifts this pic above most other nonfiction offerings aside from its subject matter is Billy Corben and David Cypkin’s editing. The action moves more quickly than even Michael Moore could imagine, shifting from fast-talking interview subjects to graphic depictions of the bloodied corpses on the street. At times Corben and Cypkin divide the screen into quadrants, each showing an aspect of criminal activity which involved a plethora of firearms that make one wonder what an urban police force can do, each cop equipped with just a 45 in the holster.

The subjects for the interviews are mostly veterans of the bloodshed, the bad guys who are either in jail or having completed their sentences, boasting about their criminal activities or, in one case, making the case for sensitivity in that he insisted against orders on sparing the life of the children of one of his victims. In that regard, we meet Griselda Blanco, known as the queen of cocaine, who was absolutely merciless in ordering the death of not only competing traffickers who got in her way but of their entire families, little kids included. Ironically, because of a lack of evidence, she was able to plea bargain, serve a few years in jail, and then got deported to Colombia where she is presumably still alive and at large. When this one person moved her operations from Miami to L.A., the homicide rate in Florida plummeted. Here is the true picture of Scarface.

Corben had to whittle down well over a hundred hours of film, both interviews and archival reels, which in part explains how he and David Cypkin could keep the action moving as though the editors themselves were snorting.

Among the lead characters is Jon Roberts, a fellow now going gray, sitting with crossed legs, and discussing his activities as though he were a member of a think tank discussing the Iraq situation. A former cocaine trafficker, he worked with the Medellin cartel, moving $2 billion worth of the powder from Colombia to Florida air strips, unhampered by apparently clueless law enforcement officials. Another criminal agreeing to speak on camera, Mickey Munday, transported ten tons of coke via the same route. Remember that the powder is sold by the gram, so you can imagine how a single trip could earn a trafficker a million bucks, tax free. Both are now free men, which could taken as a sign that crime may pay. Stash the loot somewhere beyond the ken of the cops, serve your time in the pen (where you’re likely to be considered, like the Mafia, at the top of the social class pyramid by your fellow inmates), and you’re living on Easy Street for the rest of your life.

Corben is fortunate not only to have received the open confessions of the traffickers but to have access to the Wolfson Florida Moving Image Archive, which contains tourism films, home movies and videos–which he was able to select to give further life to the doc.

The major irony is that the banks used the loot deposited by the money launderers to fund construction. The skyscrapers of that city owe their very existence to the drug traffickers who, if they failed to exist, might have left Miami the sleep village it was in the fifties. This is a film that moves so fast that if you dare look at your watch (which you won’t), you could miss a confession to two murders.

Rated R. 118 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online