Dramatic documentary recalls South Florida's bad old days

Rene Rodriguez

Miami Herald

Published: Friday, October 27, 2006

Cocaine Cowboys, the second feature-length documentary by Miami filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman (Raw Deal: A Question of Consent), is an exercise in blood-soaked nostalgia, a look back at an era (the late 1970s and early 1980s) when Miami was a bad and dangerous place to live. Although the movie doesn't exactly romanticize the period, the film still generates a twinge of pride in viewers who lived in South Florida during that time -- and lived to tell about it.

Corben, who directed Cocaine Cowboys, and Spellman, who produced it, have built the movie around the recollections of the drug traffickers, dealers, assassins, police officers and reporters who chased after each other during those madcap, coke-fueled days. Intercutting talking-head interviews with loads of archival footage, vintage TV news reports and crime-scene photographs, the movie attempts to deliver a panoramic history of the rise of the cocaine trade in South Florida as told by the people who lived it.

Some of this stuff is undeniably interesting, like the claims by former dealer Jon Roberts and smuggler Mickey Munday that in the 1970s, authorities were so preoccupied with busting marijuana dealers that they practically ignored cocaine traffickers, which allowed the drug to gain a foothold in the States.

But Cocaine Cowboys becomes genuinely engrossing -- and horrifying -- in its second half, once the drug cartels had entrenched themselves within South Florida and war broke out between rival factions. Using the infamous daylight shootout at Dadeland Mall in July 1979 as a prime example, Cocaine Cowboys illustrates the brazenness of drug dealers who struck at their enemies with utter disregard for the consequences their actions had on the people and city around them.

This kind of above-the-law sentiment is best embodied by Jorge ''Rivi'' Ayala, a charming, intelligent and thoroughly unrepentant hit man, now serving consecutive life sentences. Interviewed in prison, Ayala's tales of carrying out executions for his boss, the Colombian ''Godmother'' Griselda Blanco, make even Tony Montana's antics in Scarface seem like kiddie fodder.

Cocaine Cowboys would have benefited from a voiceover narrator to sharpen its ambitious scope and give the movie some narrative focus. Occasionally, Corben's hyper-kinetic editing (which is often racing to keep the beat with the synth-pop score by Miami Vice's Jan Hammer) gets in the way of the movie. But the film does provide some fascinating perspective on the beneficial effects of the cocaine boom on Miami's economy, arguing that without the copious violence and bloodshed that went on in that era, the city wouldn't be what it is today -- just like the Wild West.