rakontur blog

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“Notorious car thief”-turned crooner Akon takes a stab at a Cocaine Cowboys track:

Cocaine Cowboys

download: zshare

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Why Prisons Could Become Business Schools:

Watching a recent documentary called Cocaine Cowboys about the growth of the drug trade in Miami in the 1980s, I was reminded that many forms of crime are simply uninhibited capitalism – but on an illegal basis.

That implies that prisons are likely to be full of entrepreneurial talent that has strayed to the dark side. Moreover, there are plenty of hugely successful business leaders who have spent time inside, including Gerald Ronson, Martha Stewart and Lord Black, who is just starting his sentence in Florida.

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I can’t say too much about this yet, but since Variety ran with this story this morning I thought I’d post it. Stay tuned for more details as they get worked out:

Bruckheimer, Bay eye reteam
Blockbuster duo consider drug drama
By CYNTHIA LITTLETON

Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, together again?

It may happen at HBO, on a Warner Bros. TV drama series project loosely based on the 2006 docu “Cocaine Cowboys.”

If a deal comes together, series would revolve around the drug trade in Miami in the 1980s. Instead of the flash of Crockett and Tubbs, skein would focus on the cutthroat world of drug dealers and the Colombian cocaine kingpins who set up shop in the once-sleepy Florida city. Bruckheimer and Bay, who collaborated on a string of blockbusters in the 1990s including “Bad Boys,” “The Rock” and “Armageddon,” would serve as exec producers.

Insiders caution that no deal has been finalized between HBO and Warners, though the Time Warner siblings have been in discussions on the project for some time. There is no writer attached.

Docu “Cocaine Cowboys,” directed by Billy Corben, made the film fest rounds a few years back and was distribbed domestically by Magnolia Pictures. Corben’s followup doc, “Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin’ With the Godmother,” was acquired in February by Magnolia’s genre arm, Magnet.

The first “Cowboys” docu has already piqued Hollywood’s interest. Paramount is developing a feature about Jon Roberts, one of the drug lords profiled in the doc, with Mark Wahlberg attached to star and Peter Berg onboard to direct (Daily Variety, Jan. 18).

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Miguel Perez, one of Griselda Blanco’s favorite enforcers, is scheduled to be released from state prison on March 4th after serving just over ten years for the machine gun murders of 2-year old Johnny Castro and Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo in 1982. Perez had previously served five years of a fifteen year sentence for the bayoneting of Papo Mejia at the Miami International Airport on September 15, 1982.

Perez arrived in Miami from Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel Boatlift. Normally convicted felons born in a foreign country (like Griselda Blanco) are deported to their home country after they complete their sentence. However, the Cuban government will not accept deportees from the U.S. and the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the U.S. government cannot detain convicted Mariel refugees after they complete their sentence.

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via Page Six:

Mark Wahlberg will play the drug kingpin Jon Roberts in the remake of the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys, which chronicles the story of the largest cocaine trafficker in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s, and he’s persuaded Leonardo DiCaprio to play the supporting role.

The untitled flick “will blow Blow out of the water,” says a movie insider who added that Leo “is excited about the opportunity to play the airplane pilot who travels with Mark’s character to obtain kilos of cocaine from Pablo Escobar.”

This will be the third film that the pair has been in together. Mark, 36, and Leo, 33, starred in 1995’s The Basketball Diaries and most recently in 2006’s The Departed.

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Steve Jones, the legendary Sex Pistols guitarist, had Tommy Chong on his radio show Jonesy’s Jukebox (103.1 in LA) last Friday when Cocaine Cowboys came up:

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Today’s the day for our peoples down under (I see you, James) — Cocaine Cowboys hits the streets of Australia and New Zealand.

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“Scarface was a pussy compared to these guys” — Empire Magazine (UK)

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Pirates feast on bootleg films and CDs
Officials tackling the $7 billion DVD and CD piracy problem are keeping an eye on South Florida

Some in the entertainment industry don’t consider bootlegging to be all bad.

Alfred Spellman, producer of the acclaimed 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys, billed as the true story of incidents that inspired Scarface and the 1980s TV series Miami Vice, says he was shocked to learn how many people in South Florida had pirated copies of his documentary before it was even released to the public.

Spellman responded with a second documentary, a video titled Streets of Miami about the bootlegging of Cocaine Cowboys, and posted it straight to the video-sharing site YouTube.

”Cocaine Cowboys premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2006,” Spellman says. ‘We were in the middle of another project, and people were coming up to us saying, `Hey, I saw your movie.’ ”

“We said, how? And people would get bashful and embarrassed and not want to say. Eventually, we were able to trace a copy to the Carol City Flea Market, and we actually met the guys who were selling bootlegged copies of our movie!”

Spellman says he also found barbershops, corner stores and even royalty in Miami’s hip-hop community — like superproducers Cool and Dre and rappers Trick Daddy and DJ Khaled — in possession of illegal copies of Cocaine Cowboys.

`WE EMBRACED IT’

”We had a choice,” Spellman says. “We could get angry about it or we could embrace it. We embraced it. Bootlegging has been happening in the hip-hop industry for years. And it has worked for a lot of artists. It has built fan bases and careers.

“We figured the real fans would want to purchase the official version, because it contained extra footage, bonus tracks, things like that. We were right. To date, we’ve sold 100,000 legitimate DVDs of our film.

“Bootlegging helped us. . . . The biggest challenge for small filmmakers like us isn’t piracy, it’s anonymity. And as long as we’re being bootlegged, that’s not a problem.”

The Associated Press and the Documentary Blog wrote about the bootlegging of Cocaine Cowboys last year.

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