Cocaine Cowboys Review - MTV News / Kurt Loder

via MTV News 10/27/2006

"Cocaine Cowboys": Miami Viceroys

by Kurt Loder

Bullets fly and dead bodies drop like whacked weeds in this startling documentary about the bad old days of the Miami drug trade. Working with a rich trove of period TV news reports, tourist footage and home movies from the 1980s, Florida filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman vividly depict a period in which drugs, guns, big money and a vicious new breed of gangsters combined to turn a formerly genteel resort town into the murder capital of America.

The movie arranges its blood-spattered footage around extensive interviews with three very talkative principals: Jon Pernell Roberts, a trafficker who in his '80s heyday smuggled some $2-billion-worth of cocaine into South Florida for Colombia's Medellín Cartel; his associate Mickey Munday, a brusque, ballsy pilot; and, most chillingly, Jorge "Rivi" Ayala, an eerily affable $1,000-a-day hit man for the most savage of the local bosses, a transplanted Colombian woman named Griselda Blanco — "The Black Widow."

Roberts and Munday hooked up in the 1970s, when the previously profitable market for marijuana was tailing off and cocaine — by weight, a much more profitable product to move — was becoming fashionable among the well-to-do. Roberts started out small, grossing about $30,000 a week. Then he and Munday flew down to Colombia to make a direct connection with the storied drug lords of Medellín. ("Bums," says Munday — not the high-tech conspirators of legend, but "just a bunch of street thugs that got lucky.") Soon Roberts was averaging a million dollars a trip, and buying fast cars, helicopters, high-speed Cigarette boats and vast swaths of useful real estate all over South Florida. And he wasn't the only one living high. Local banks were stuffed with drug cash. Expensive nightclubs, jewelry stores and high-end car dealerships (bulletproof limos a specialty) were sprouting up everywhere. Cops got in on the action, too — according to Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald crime reporter, one whole police-academy graduating class eventually wound up in jail on drug charges. It was an astonishing time.

The movie dates the start of the "cocaine cowboy" era to 1979, when two Latino men were gunned down in the Dadeland Mall. The municipal murder rate started trending straight up in 1980, after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's Mariel boatlift deposited 125,000 of his most-unwanted citizens in Miami — a few thousand of whom were later determined to be violent criminals. In 1983, Brian De Palma released his iconic Miami drug-slaughter movie, "Scarface," and Time magazine ran a cover story on the grisly South Florida scene called "Paradise Lost." The following year, the "Miami Vice" TV series, shot on location, started airing on NBC. In the national imagination, the city was beginning to resemble a conquered province in the brutal new drug war.

In the end, though, the feds moved in and started knocking coke planes out of the sky and strafing smugglers to a standstill on the water. In 1986, Roberts and Munday got popped and did several years in prison (they're now free). The assassin Ayala rolled over on his boss, Griselda Blanco, and is still in jail. Blanco herself — who ordered the murders of men, women and children on virtually a daily basis, and was said to have slit the throats of the lovers she slept with — is the movie's most alarming character. After serving a wrist-slap sentence (because of a prosecutorial snafu), she disappeared back into Colombia in 2000, and hasn't been heard from since.

"Cocaine Cowboys" is a model of tight editing and smartly marshaled resources. The movie skids along like a drive-by shooting, and you're a little breathless by the time the darkly ironic ending arrives. In the 1990s, Miami turned a page. It is now an international capital of the glittery good life, thick with fashion models, rap moguls and other fun-seekers of unlimited means. How was this transition facilitated? As it turns out, all the hundreds of millions of dollars churned up by the drug trade in the 1980s had to go somewhere, and a lot of it went into up-scaling the city with luxury construction. The spectacular architecture that now sparkles in the sun above Biscayne Bay turns out to rest upon the bones of untold corpses and the shards of countless drug-shattered lives. An unattractive trade-off, in some people's view. As Edna Buchanan says in the movie, "At what price a skyline? Too many people died for it."