COCAINE COWBOYS / Billy Corben

October 21st, 2006 by Scott Marks

Cocaine Cowboys (2006)

Produced & Directed by: Billy Corben

Running Time: 106 min.

Genres: Documentary

Had I trusted my first impression, I probably would have bolted five minutes in after witnessing fuzzy home movies intercut with an equally fuzzy staged hit man spraying the screen with bullets. Hell, it could only get better. I stayed and it did.

It’s Miami in the 70s, a sleepy little retirement community with wide open borders. Coke, rum, pot, illegals, you name it, Miami had it all. Back then, Columbia’s Medellin cartel, controlled 80% of the cocaine trade. It got so you could hardly see the tops of glass coffee tables what with all the mounds of blow.

This shot-on-video documentary is told from the first hand accounts of three battle-scarred survivors: Convicted drug trafficker Jon Roberts, Mickey Munday, a pilot convicted of smuggling over ten tons of powder into the United States, and Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, un unrepentant contract killer currently serving four consecutive life sentences.

These boys were ingenious. Why risk transporting the contraband in their personal automobiles? Instead, they bought a towing service and stashed the dope in beaters that they hauled to their destination. If a cop pulled them over, which they never did, they had the perfect excuse: “It isn’t my car.”

Illegal drugs and violence invariably go hand in hand and it wasn’t long before Miami’s annual death rate neared 700. The police department had to lease a refrigerated truck from Burger King to house all the corpses.

Perhaps the most brutal figure in this unspeakably violent universe is Griselda Blanco, the “queen of cocaine.” Only a tough mother would dare name her youngest son Michael Corleone. Blanco’s never-ending battles with fellow drug dealers almost single-handedly brought about the bloodshed for which Miami became infamous in the 80s.

This is documentary filmmaking by the numbers. Shoot a group of interviewees with compelling stories to tell and pad them out with stock footage and news reports. Technically, it’s a nightmare. I can understand visual loss when bumping VHS up to high definition, but what’s the excuse for all the hideous contemporary interview footage? Was the director trying to make everything match?

As cinematically sloppy as it may be, the film never shies away from the hammering home the awful truth. Ironically, the drug trade helped fuel Miami’s building boom. While it never overtly crusades for drug legalization, I can’t think of a more eloquent defense.

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