Hot Doc: Cocaine Cowboys

July 11, 1979. 2:28 p.m. Two Columbian men enter Crown Liquors at Miami’s Dadeland Mall and hose the place down with automatic weapon fire before fleeing on foot, leaving the interior of the store covered in broken glass, spilled booze, empty shell casings, and blood from the two bullet ridden bodies of former players in Miami’s billion dollar cocaine industry. And thus begins Cocaine Cowboys, director Billy Corben’s flashy, audacious, violent, and highly entertaining documentary about the international cocaine business that bloomed from Miami, Florida in the 1970s and 80s.

Munday

The film is a collage of imagery – money, cars, speedboats, planes, bikinis, women, beaches, skyscrapers, guns, blood, and mountains and mountains of cocaine – cut together and projected at a hundred miles and hour. There are clips from news broadcasts, crime scene photos, excerpts and behind-the-scenes footage from film and televisions shows (“Miami Vice” and Scarface being the two most recognizable), mug shots, film brochures (things like “Why You Should Retire in Miami, Florida”) and dozens of other archival material. Intercut among this footage are video interviews with the film’s characters – a slew of cops, federal agents, government and legal officials, journalists, and the major players in the cocaine industry, the latter who more or less serve as the film’s main characters (and narrators).

Roberts

Oh, and it is all cut to a score by Jan Hammer, the composer of the original “Miami Vice” theme.

Among the chief players in the cocaine business are Jon Pernell Roberts, Mickey Munday, and Jorge “Rivi” Ayala. Roberts hailed from New York, where he owned several nightclubs and had connections to the Italian mafia. While spending some time in sunny southern Florida, he saw there was money to be made by switching the focus of drug distribution from marijuana to cocaine, and he capitalized on this opportunity to an extent he never could have predicted. He was partnered was Munday, a Florida native and pilot (and described by Roberts as the real-life “Macgyver”) who is the man responsible for most of the innovations incorporated into drug trafficking, such as using waterproof containers and homing devices, modified boats, tow-trucks, alternate flight routes, and disguised airfields. Together they not only climbed the cocaine corporate ladder, they basically invented it.

Rivi, originally a car thief from Chicago, spent years working as a hired killer for Griselda Blanco, the “Godmother” of the Columbian cocaine trade, and a human monster to whom nothing – not even the life of a child – was sacred (Blanco was unavailable for interview, as she has dropped off the face of the earth after her deportation to Columbia several years ago). During the film Rivi recounts committing and orchestrating dozens of murders, all from his present day prison cell, and all the while disturbingly relaxed, unremorseful, and sometimes even with a smirk of pride on his expression.

One of the most interesting characters in the film, and certainly the one that evolves the most as the story unfolds, is the city of Miami itself. At the beginning of this saga, Miami is basically another run-of-the-mill southern state, not the economic epicenter it is today. Pre-1970s, Miami was filled mostly with tourists and retirees. Cocaine brought a billion dollar industry to the city, which expanded to meet the needs of the economic boost. During the 80s when the rest of America was coping with a recession, Miami banks were literally running out of space to store money.

Rivi

Though this film tells one of the most interesting and engaging (not to mention unbelievable – too unbelievable to be fiction) stories I’ve ever heard or seen, at times I could not just help but admire the sheer style of the film. There is not a single black frame in the entire film; when the film cuts, it cuts to pure white. The color pallet is all bright, warm weather colors (aside, of course, from the blood, of which there are gallons). The opening scene, described in the first paragraph of this article, is all close-ups on bullet-hits and fire spitting from the barrel of a submachine held at the hip of Columbia thugs dressed in sunglasses, jeans and Hawaiian shirts, set against a white background. It is at once reminiscent of The Thin Blue Line, and at the same time the polar opposite. Whereas that film took a somber, understated approach to the act of violence it depicted – a nighttime shooting on an isolated country road – Cocaine Cowboys is appropriately over the top, and fitting for the crime it depicts – gunning down numerous people with a machine gun in public, under the mid-afternoon Miami sun. Excessive filmmaking depicting an excessive time and place.

Magnolia Pictures is giving Cocaine Cowboys a limited release.