“Cocaine Cowboys” Film Review by Bill Corben
Cocaine Cowboys: Riding “High” on History
Movies with “cowboy” in their title bring good things, filled with drama and dry comedy. Remember Midnight Cowboy, Drugstore Cowboy and the older classic, Cowboy, with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon? The newly released “Cocaine Cowboys” is no exception: a documentary, it’s high energy story and editing nevertheless makes it as entertaining as any feature film; in fact, it “leaves them in the dust.”
Filmmaker and “insider” Bill Corben portrays a dazzling big screen presentation that follows the cocaine trade during its heyday in Miami during the 70s and 80s. It is often shown in triptych to cover the overlapping stories. Oliver Stone researched the story for his Hollywood version in Scarface though the melodrama cannot come close to the real drama. The most recent echo of the times as Hollywood myth arrived with Miami Vice the movie last summer.
Composer of the original Miami Vice television theme, Jan Hammer, provides the electric score. It drives Corbin’s edited footage of almost two hours, down from his initial 150 hours of footage. The combination of Hammer and Corben make you feel as though you are actually on coke watching the business of ho w cocaine was imported and distributed and how it transformed the city as nothing else in American history.
Flash back to the early 80s when Miami changed from a sleepy seaside retirement community to an pulsating urban center, helped by the influx of Cuban renegades and criminal rubbish. The potent mix tripled South Miami’s homicide rate, make it the murder capital of the country. A Time cover story dubbed the city, “Paradise Lost” drawing the first attention to it from the rest of the nation but not enough to start the wheels of justice rolling.
This was partly to do with the stunningly profitable cocaine trade’s start as a politely shared enterprise between a handful of people. It soon erupted into a major war zone propelled by greed as Miami became the epicenter of a $20 billion annual business fed by Colombia’s Medellin cartel and its henchmen. Insanely copious amounts of money began to seriously impact on the city’s economy, but the violence turned Miami into a war zone for years. One drug kingpin told of having a “small fight” with his girlfriend – they wrecked two $100,000 Mercedes as though they were inexpensive toys- and to them at the time, they were inexpensive toys.
Meanwhile the trade poured so much money into the city that banks couldn’t be built fast enough to store it. The Miami Federal Reserve was banking more money than the rest of their federal counterparts across the country put together! The movie at the end poses the controversial question of whether it was worth the open warfare to Miami in return for its phenomenal growth.
Personal interviews of the smugglers, kingpin distributors, hit man, police and crime reporter are break taking. A few of the story tellers are familiar. They were features on short if equally astonishing accounts on “60 Minutes.” One major player, famed Miami crime reporter-turned- mystery novelist, Edna Buchanan, tells of her part in the exciting story as though it happened yesterday. And indeed, the era may now seem ages ago but the participantes – who are still alive look practically the same. Another major name attorney who tells his story from behind a huge desk in his sumptuous office on screen, faces jail time. Another talks from prison.
With COCAINE COWBOYS, filmmakers Billy Corben and his partner, Alfred Spellman, follows their 2001 Sundance Film Festival sensation and first feature, RAW DEAL: A QUESTIOJN OF CONSENT.
Says Corben, “It was logical to give time to each facet of the drug industry: the logistics of the business, the money, and the violence, because each gave rise to the next. It was the way it unfolded in the era. But we also found this approach made for the most dramatic and powerful telling. Ultimately, we return to the subject of money, since after the smoke cleared from the Cocaine Wars, a stunning skyline had risen.”
After their initial success the young filmmakers were routinely introduced to what friends and family claimed were “interesting people” for possible films. Says Corben, “Well, one day I was actually introduced to a really interesting person — Jon Pernell Roberts. I called Alfred and asked if that name meant anything to him. He instantly rattled off the guy’s entire life story to me!”
Says Spellman, “Growing up in South Florida, I’d read every book written about Miami in this era. Billy and I had discussed for many years what kind of piece we could do about this era and it finally seemed we were onto something.” “Once we had access to Jon, we set the wheels in motion,” Corben adds. “We were introduced to Mickey Munday shortly thereafter. He and Pernell agreed to speak on camera and Alfred struck a pen pal relationship with some of the more colorful incarcerated characters from the era who turned up in our research.”
Roberts is the slick, extroverted New York transplant, a former cocaine trafficker and distributor of over $2 billion worth of cocaine for the Medellin Cartel. Munday is a pilot who smuggled over 10 tons of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.
The key for the filmmakers became access to crucial players who could relay their firsthand experience , and them got them. Not only the cops, lawyers and journalists who lived through it, but also the people who actually made it all happen. On screen are the guys who smuggled tons of cocaine, made and spent hundreds of millions of dollars and also the guys who pulled the triggers on the MAC-11s.” And opposing them are the police, the FBI and finally the special federal government agents who helped take them down.
And, of course, there is the ironic ending to the fate of the female psychopath who ran the drug trade in Miami and was responsible for hundreds of deaths. After a short incarceration because of a legal snafu, we are left not knowing how she fared once sent back to Columbia to face the drug cartel she helped bring down.