Cocaine Cowboys Review - Very Short List

10/20/06

Tony Soprano, eat your heart out

The scary, true story of the Medellin-linked mobsters who coked up Miami



Miami Vice — the TV show and the recent movie — had nothing, really, on how things actually went down in the city in the ’70s and ’80s, drugwise. For that matter, some of the real-life characters who pop up in the new documentary Cocaine Cowboys (in theaters next Friday, 10/27) make Tony Soprano seem like a girlieman./p> Cocaine chronicles the making of a $20-billion global enterprise by interviewing many key players themselves — heavies like drug-running pilot Mickey Munday, hit man Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, and Medellin cartel intermediary Jon Roberts — who did their time (except Ayala, who speaks from jail) and now freely talk in often astonishing detail./p> The narrative moves along smartly, propelled by a synth-drenched score by Jan Hammer — yes, the Miami Vice composer. Elaborate business fronts are set up, competitors gunned down — particularly at the behest of psychopathic cocaine godmother Griselda “The Black Widow” Blanco — and obscene fortunes made (Roberts took to burying literally millions in his backyard)./p> And it’s all way more thrilling — and authentically terrifying — than anything Crockett and Tubbs ever got mixed up in.