Billy Corben's Cocaine Cowboys -- darkly exploitative, titillating and ultimately sobering -- is a tabloid documentary built along the lines of an E! True Hollywood Story about the evolution of the cocaine trade in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s. Fueled by archival footage, interviews with detectives and drug traffickers and a few cheesy re-enactments, it's a nonfiction Scarface story, populated with over-the-top characters and machine gun murders. While the film revels in the blood and sensation of the murder epidemic touched off by a sensational public shootout in 1979, it never defaults to cheap, hypocritical moralism -- crime not only pays, it builds skylines and props up economies in recessionary times.
   The first third of the film is a case study of the cocaine importation business set up by smuggler Jon Pernell Roberts and Mickey Munday. These men grew incredibly rich with very little risk by handling the transportation of cocaine from Colombia to wholesalers in Florida. Roberts and Munday were strictly mules for hire who contracted with the Medellin Cartel -- they come off as contemptuous of the hot-blooded and reckless Colombians who, by their lights, killed off a fantastically lucrative enterprise with their greed and propensity for violence. There's little in the film to contradict these chatty swashbucklers' claims that had they not been ratted out by a federal informant, no one would ever have discovered their elaborate network of secret airfields and radio towers.
   Phase two of the movie begins with the violence perpetuated largely by Colombians and Cuban criminals exported by Castro during the Mariel boatlift (those familiar with the rise and fall of Tony Montana will find this part familiar). If you weren't paying attention to the war that was waging in Miami at the time, you might find the body count staggering. Veteran crime reporter Edna Buchanan asserts that an entire Miami police academy class from the early 1980s ended up either dead or in jail on corruption charges.
   Given the staggering impact the cocaine trade had on Miami's economy during the period, it's not difficult to understand why honest cops never had a chance. Apparently no one involved in the cocaine trade -- from foot soldiers up to high-level dealers -- ever had to worry about what anything cost; it was nothing to wave a bribe of a few hundred thousand dollars under a cop's nose. Roberts tells a story about how a police chief not only gave him permission to unload coke behind a police station, but used police patrol vehicles to move the drug to safe houses.
   In this version of the story, the good times curdled with the rise of unbelievably cruel kingpin Griselda Blanco, "The Godmother" of the Miami coke trade, and her very efficient -- and disturbingly affable -- chief enforcer Jorge "Rivi" Ayala. Blanco is portrayed as a sadistic butcher who was angered when Ayala failed to follow her instructions to the letter and kill everyone in the house, including children.
   Ayala, who takes over from Roberts and Munday as the prime storyteller in the film's second act, is chillingly engaging (if self-serving ) in his matter-offact delineation of events. (Ayala tells us that when Scarface opened, he went to see it with nine of his colleagues, killers all. They laughed at the myriad attempts on the title character's life -- "We would have got him," he says.)
   Like the importers, Ayala thinks of himself as a pro's pro and holds Blanco and her irrational impulses for bloodshed primarily responsible for drawing the heat that eventually got the city under control in the late 1980s. There's something deeply distressing about watching a man who has confessed to 29 murders (and is suspected in at least a dozen more) describing his former boss as an over-thetop madwoman. It's even worse when we find ourselves agreeing with him.
   The film's third act, really more of an extended coda, muses about the cost -- and benefit -- the drug trade had on the city. While the bloodshed was enormous, Miami's infrastructure undeniably benefited from the influx of untaxed capital that flowed into town during the drug years. Although Buchanan professes to prefer the old sleepy Miami that existed before the era of the cocaine cowboys, there's no question Miami was refreshed with the blood, that the glitz and glamour of South Beach has its roots in dope and murder.
   

Cocaine Cowboys
   BCast :
Documentary, with Jon Pernell Roberts, Mickey Munday, Jorge "Rivi" Ayala

Director:
Billy Corben

Rating:
R for pervasive drug content, gruesome violent images, language

Running time:
118 minutes

This story was published Friday, December 08, 2006