rakontur Miami Herald Feature - Remembering Miami as a Battlefield

Remembering Miami as a battlefield

10/26/2006

Howard Cohen - hochen@MiamiHerald.com

Bylines is an occasional series in which Herald staff writers share personal stories.

The sound of gunfire echoed louder than a Led Zeppelin drum solo around the fuel-stained cement ramps inside Miami's Omni International Mall parking lot.

Flying from a crouched position, abandoning the idea of locking a $110 blue 10-speed Gitane -- not cheap in 1979 dollars -- I left the beloved bicycle for the taking outside the mall's third-floor entrance. I was hundreds of feet inside, behind the glass counter of a Hallmark gift shop, stammering incoherent orders at a startled cashier to ``Call . . . Guns! 911 . . . Shooting!'' before the bike even hit the ground.

Visions of Dadeland danced in my media-saturated mind. This incident, after all, came within days of the July 12 carnage outside the Dadeland Mall in Kendall in which a group of assassins -- quickly dubbed ''the Cocaine Cowboys'' by a police officer on the scene -- opened fire with submachine guns outside a Crown Liquors store, killing two shoppers. Dadeland and the Cocaine Cowboys changed everything if you lived here. Loud noises in a parking lot became cause for alarm. Paranoia set in.

Maybe it was just backfire from a car. To my knowledge, the Omni incident never even made the news.

''[The media] didn't have the resources to cover it,'' says film producer Alfred Spellman, whose documentary Cocaine Cowboys, which opens in theaters Friday, covers the bloody period when the drug trade exploded here and Miami drug lords made the Mafia seem like peacemakers. The local media couldn't possibly recount every incident.

''[Last week] every 24-hour news station cut in with breaking coverage on the Turnpike and the family that was killed. It's extraordinary how that story is that important the world over. In the '80s, that would not be the most important story of the day,'' he says.

The film, directed by Miami native Billy Corben (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent), plays like an episode of Miami Vice crossed with Scarface. One difference between those and Cocaine Cowboys, though: The fictional bad guys wither compared to the real-life Griselda Blanco, a k a the Black Widow. Blanco was named by prosecutors as the most notorious killer of the period, roughly 1977-1984. The documentary portrays her as a ruthless murderer of men, women and even children.

In a jailhouse interview, Jorge ''Rivi'' Ayala recounts for Corben and Spellman, with chilling charisma, the many hits he made on her orders. No one seems remorseful in Cocaine Cowboys, especially a chatty Jon Pernell Roberts, a cocaine trafficker and distributor for the Medell