rakontur blog

11/5/2006

Welcome to Miami

The city that coke built

By Matt Haber

You don’t have to be a weatherman to know that cocaine flurries are blowing in the zeitgeist right now. Kate Moss’s career got a bump off some well cut lines, and after a few years in turnaround, Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo, about Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar, is being made into a feature starring Javier Bardem. Then there’s the anecdotal evidence, peaking out from between the lines of gossip columns, joked about on blogs and in urban myths, like the one about New York’s Soho House, where according to legend the bathrooms were designed with as few flat surfaces as possible to discourage nose candy breaks.

Add to this cultural moment Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary directed by Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman, about the rise of coke smuggling in 1970s and ’80s Miami, a city that, according to the filmmakers, was built on laundered (often bloody) drug money. The film focuses on the very high highs and inevitable lows of Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday, two enterprising middlemen for the Medellín cartel, Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, a contract killer for a Colombian gang, and Griselda “La Madrina” Blanco, a ruthless drug queen who ordered dozens of killings, earning her a second nickname, “The Black Widow.”

While the hyper pace of Cocaine Cowboys is obviously meant to emulate the feeling of being on coke, for anyone who’s met Corben and Spellman, one wonders if it’s just a case of method filmmaking. These guys think fast and talk even faster—think Sean Penn in Carlito’s Way. Radar spoke with them as their film opened in New York and Miami … and tried to keep up.

RADAR: Cocaine Cowboys is set in the late ’70s and early ’80s, yet with the popularity of cocaine nowadays, it feels pretty relevant.

ALFRED SPELLMAN: That’s the cycle of drugs. It goes in phases. You had heroin, which was really popular in ’70s New York and created a big problem, and then you saw a resurgence of it in the ’90s. You had cocaine go out of style in the ’90s, replaced by Ecstasy, and then it comes back.

BILLY CORBEN: At one of the Miami Beach after parties we had, one of the guys said, “I am so shocked. Cocaine is more out in the open down here than I’ve seen it since the era of your movie. I walk into places and people are just out doing blow.”

What do you think of that? Because the film starts out like a big party but ends in a veritable bloodbath.

SPELLMAN: I think that everything was fine until the violence started. If you want to attribute that to people using the drug itself, you can—plenty of homicides took place because people were high or fucked up and went out and killed somebody. But it was more about the business and the money it was generating. You have to make a distinction between the retail level—the recreational user, which we deal with a little bit, talking about the clubs, the parties, the restaurants, things like that—and these guys, who were smuggling in tons and tons and tons of cocaine. It’s funny, when we were doing film festivals with Cocaine Cowboys, we were coming up with art and we would farm it out to people, and I always remember, invariably, no matter how many people I sent it out to, I got artwork with a razorblade back. And I’m like, “No. This has nothing to do with anybody using cocaine.”

Explain the difference, because I think when people see a title like Cocaine Cowboys they’re going to think about Scarface and piles of coke.

CORBEN: The difference would be about $2 billion. That’s how much money’s worth of cocaine Jon Roberts helped run wholesale. You have Mickey Munday who brought in over 30 tons. You’re not talking about a baggy full, or a mirror full, or even a table full like Tony Montana.

SPELLMAN: Mickey Munday would smuggle 400 kilos in one plane, close to 1,000 pounds of cocaine. He would get paid $3,000 a kilo as transportation fee. He was FedEx, he was UPS—you know what I mean? That’s $1.2 million a trip. He would do that maybe twice a month: You’re taking $2.4 million a month.

CORBEN: He wasn’t worried about, like, “How am I gonna hustle on the street?” He was worried about, “How can I ship more cocaine? Can I get a bigger plane? Can I lighten the fuel load and still get home safely?”

Mickey seemed to enjoy the inventiveness of the enterprise.

CORBEN: Yep. Like MacGyver. He’s one of these guys who’s just like a genius.

SPELLMAN: The most ingenious thing that Mickey invented, I think, was so simple. His theory was that all the cocaine in the country, 89 percent, was coming through south Florida. How’s it get to the rest of the country? By car at that point. People are driving north, so all [the police] had to do was set up stops along the turnpike going north out of Florida. Mickey says, “We’re gonna bypass that by flying to central Florida, near Lakeland.” He also bought a tow truck company so he could put the drugs in and the tow truck driver wouldn’t know.

CORBEN: Plausible deniability.

SPELLMAN: They had a caravan. What’s not in the film but will be on a DVD is that he had crash cars. One of the drivers had a bottle of Jack Daniels, and if there was any heat or anything like that, the guy in the crash car would drive next to the trooper and then veer off the side of the road and hit a tree and break the bottle. The cop comes over, it reeks of liquor, but the guy’s not gonna get a DUI because the bottle’s top is not broken.

CORBEN: And he’s not drunk. And if this were just a routine traffic stop with the tow truck, the accident would obviously be a distraction.

SPELLMAN: He did the same thing with the boats.

CORBEN: Burn boats.

SPELLMAN: Crash cars and burn boats!

CORBEN: And this is the thing: Mickey’s a design genius, but he’s also a logistical genius. The logistics of the operation were so well thought out and sophisticated. He had not only the knowledge but the money to pull this off.

What part of him made him think it was okay though? Why go criminal?

SPELLMAN: It was easy. There was no enforcement. The cops worried about Nicky Barnes and heroin. They weren’t worried about cocaine. Cocaine was being done by rich people at Studio 54—celebrities and royalty. No one was worried about what cocaine would do to you. Nobody knew the human cost, because doctors and lawyers were doing it. We didn’t have crack yet, so nobody knew the dangers. It was later that people realized that lives were being destroyed.

Is there a risk of glamorizing crime in a film like this?

SPELLMAN: At the time, lots of people believed it was glamorous. And to this day a lot of people still think it’s glamorous.

CORBEN: It starts off that way. We’ve got a three-act structure: The business, which yields the money, which ultimately yields the violence. You see a lot of dead bodies. And not just one bullet-hole to the back of the head kind of thing. You see people who were chopped up.

And then there’s the murder of a child.

CORBEN: This is the thing. So many people, in talking about this, even cops to an extent, thought it was drug dealers killing drug dealers. Almost cleaning up the streets in a way.

Mostly Latin drug dealers killing Latin drug dealers.

CORBEN: Positively, positively. But what you can’t escape is the fact that when you’ve got machine guns in the biggest shopping mall in the city of Miami on a summer afternoon, there’s gonna be collateral damage. These weren’t necessarily just targeted hits or well-executed executions. They were a mess. Rivi [Ayala] talks about being on the back of a motorcycle with a Mac-11 on the highway. You’re gonna hit something other than your target that way.

Let’s talk about Rivi for a second. He was a hitman for a drug cartel and admitted to killing a lot of people. What was it like talking to a killer several times over?

CORBEN: He’s disarming. The first time we went into jail to meet him, here’s this handsome, tanned, very well coifed guy. He had on a brand new pair of tennis shoes, manicured nails. He had some sort of gold medallion on and a digital watch which he periodically looked at while we interviewed him. And I’m thinking, “What, you got some place you gotta go?” And he shakes your hand. He has a very gentle handshake, an easygoing way about him, and one of the first things he asks us is, “They treatin’ you good here?” He’s asking us!

And yet he’s a cold-blooded killer.

CORBEN: That was the thing. Like, within a half hour, you’re kibitzing with the guy and thinking, “This is great! Oh, wait, this is not great.”

SPELLMAN: And from Rivi’s perspective, he’s a soldier. And the way he looks at it, there were people out to kill him and to kill his partners. It’s consignment business: If you give someone five kilos of cocaine at fifty grand apiece, you give someone a quarter of a million dollars. If they don’t come back and pay you when they’re supposed to pay you, you don’t call the cops and say, “This guy robbed me of a quarter of a million dollars,” you’re not filing a lawsuit. And if you don’t do anything about it, you’re not gonna be in the business very long.

Tell me about Jon, because he also seems to lack remorse.

CORBEN: I probably cut out more of his remorseful material in the end for time. But he did in the epilogue, in the extended scenes, talk about how in this business you only end up one of two ways: dead or in jail. And that was true for everyone in our movie. He didn’t serve as much time as he would today—he’d serve several lifetimes today. He’s an interesting character because he’s an Italian from New York who ran nightclubs for the Gambino crime family. And then goes to Miami.

Which was considered kind of hickville at that point, right?

SPELLMAN: Oh, it was.

CORBEN: It was. And by the time this guy is 30 years old, he’s been a member of two of the largest criminal organizations in the history of the world. The Italian mafia and the Medellín cartel. And as he puts it, the Colombians made far more money than the mafia ever dreamed of making.

Did anyone from the civic body of Miami see the film? And what do they think about the thesis that their city is built on a foundation of cocaine?

CORBEN: It’s the history of Miami. I don’t know that anybody really wants to deny it. I’m not saying that the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce is gonna sponsor a screening….

SPELLMAN: They were very upset with Miami Vice. They were very upset with Scarface and, in fact, the film commissioner at the time, based on the script, tried to ban the filming of the movie in Dade County altogether. But with 25-30 years hindsight now? People in Miami almost whimsically say, “Oh, it was a lot of fun back then.” Lots of people said that to us.

Time didn’t seem to think so. What was their coverline?

SPELLMAN: “Paradise Lost.”

CORBEN: Oh, they were outraged at that! What’s funny is that it was a wild time if you had money. If you were a realtor, a jeweler, a car dealer, a restaurateur, if you owned a clothing boutique, you were doing great. Yeah, there were murders and this and that, but it was all cash, no taxes. You just had to take the occasional Panamanian check, of course.

So, are those wild times back along with all the coke?

CORBEN: You have to remember, the shit literally grows on trees. If oranges were a pain in the ass, if we didn’t just have groves and groves, we probably wouldn’t have much of a citrus industry. But the shit just grows on trees.