Cocaine Cowboys

I not only saw the documentary, I lived it, I became a Metro Dade county police officer in Aug of 1980 and retired in 2002, I was on the scene of at least half the drug related killings pictured in the video, and a whole lot more that were not. As if that weren't enough, I also went to High school with the quintessential Cocaine Cowboy Mickey Munday, oddly enough I didn't make the connection till I watched this video 50 something years later, I recall him as a redheaded nerd who the girls wanted nothing to do with, if they had only known that one day he would be buying entire neighborhoods and burying trash bags full of 20s and hundreds.

Although I had the opportunity to see the unfinished version of what is sure to be an award-winning film, I was thoroughly impressed by Cocaine Cowboys. Without giving anything away, let me just say that this film refrains from the type of overly preachy or overly glorified view of the cocaine business in the late 1970's and 1980's. A nice balance of character analysis mixed with an abundance of archival data kept my interest throughout the experience...and I walked out of the theater feeling as though I really learned a great deal, not only about historical occurrences, and their impact on a few central characters or society as a whole; rather, I left the cinema with a grasp of the time period from many different perspectives: Columbian drug lords, Cocaine transporters and dealers, special task force members assigned to find the aforementioned groups, local media then and now, land developers, vacationers, car salesmen, and your average Miamian. Perspectives offered were not limited in scope. I highly recommend this film.

Life was good in Miami in the 70s. You could blow into town with $500 dollars in your pocket, and the next things you know, you are burying millions in your bag yard, driving the hottest cars, have two or three cigarette boats, a string of race horse, and land all the way up to horse country in Marion County. You didn't think twice about dropping $20,000 on food and drink because you had so much. The Miami skyline was booming with two dozen construction cranes operating, cars were selling like hotcakes, and there was no trace of the recession that was occurring elsewhere in the US.

But, then came the 80s and there were 100,000 illegal Colombians in Miami and Castro had just flushed Cuba's toilet and dumped his criminals into the city in the Mariel boat lift. War began between the drug dealers on these two sides, and it came to the attention of Reagan and Bush that there was a problem in Miami that affected the whole country.

Long before I got attracted to Carl Hiaasen's fiction, I was reading his columns from the Miami Herald. Forget Scarface, this was the real thing. Shootouts with shotguns and automatic weapons on the streets in broad daylight. Miami had become Dodge City and Chicago during Prohibition to the tenth power.

This is the story of those two decades in Miami and the results today - a booming international city built on cocaine. The truth really is more exciting than what you see on Miami Vice.

Cocaine Cowboys is a great movie. A must see for sure. Never has a viewer gotten to experience the real cocaine world until now. Interviews with a top hit-man/enforcer, a pioneer pilot, kingpin, and tons of stock footage make this film completely unique.

The sequel, Cocaine Cowboys 2 - Hustlin With The Godmother,is going to be even better. It focuses around Griselda Blanco, Rivi (the enforcer/hit-man) and a character named Charles Cosby. There is an advance screening June 20, 2008 at the CineVegas Film Festival and this time around the documentary has worldwide distribution checkout www.charlescosby.com for some pictures of Griselda Blanco and Charles Cosby.

Prohibit a substance and its price will rise; with big profits available beyond the protection of the law, violence will follow. Concentrate the trade for an entire country through one city and an economic boom will combine with a murder epidemic. This was what happened to Miami with cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a story told exhilaratingly in Billy Corbern's fast-moving documentary 'Cocaine Cowboys'. It's a gripping tale, and the sheer quantity of money and death in it is truly horrifying. And yet, there's also a sense in which this film leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth, as essentially it's a platform for a pair of major smugglers and one psychopathic killer to wax lyrical about the good old days, relatively free of moral condemnation. Still, it's an amazing story, one that seems more fit to video games than to real life, and its epilogue was the construction of much of the modern city with the proceeds from the trade.