Cocaine Cowboys

Cocaine Cowboys is narrowly focused on how Miami became the drug capital and the most dangerous city in the United States during the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The film is lasciviously fascinated with the lavish lifestyle and the grotesque violence generated by the drug trade. Many obviously find such material quite fascinating. There's no denying that several anecdotes shared by dealers, smugglers, cops and veteran reporter Edna Buchanan are very amusing. Fans of TV's Miami Vice and Brian de Palma's Scarface are advised to rush to a theatre playing this film. They'll find that the real-life models of the fictional villains are even more flamboyant and vicious (the life of Griselda "the godmother" Blanco could be turned into a nifty fiction film). CocaineCowboys combines talking-head interviews with old TV footage in rat-tat-tat editing style. Shots of piles of cash and large stashes of cocaine are used as would-be punctuation marks; and there are more snapshots of bloody, perforated bodies than you've ever seen in your life.

Cocaine Cowboys is documentary film-making as tabloid journalism. Its cheap thrills provide a measure of entertainment but its reportage is devoid of context and thoughtful commentary. Director Billy Corben is a native, but as one born in 1979 his view of the material is decidedly second-hand. Towards the latter stages, Cocaine Cowboys strains to present Miami as "the city that cocaine built" by hyperbolically describing late-70s Miami as a "sleepy hamlet". There is some truth to the argument but it is a self-serving and simplistic one. Moreover, the content as presented here is likely to perpetuate certain ethnic stereotypes about the Colombian community and Cuban "marielitos" (Cubans who arrived when Castro allowed migration to the US through the port of Mariel in 1980).

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.

I never could have guessed how intricate the cocaine industry was at this time. I was born post the cocaine era so I did not know how incredibly different the laws were during that time. This documentary gives so much insight into this high-speed world of drugs. I loved how the director allowed the members involved to tell their stories; however I wish that he had let them tell all of their stories & it was kind of jumpy when moving a narration when moving from one involved member to another would help the transition to be better understood. But now I'm hooked I wished that some of the involved members had not passed away because I have got to know more the system was so complex I want to know how it all works.

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.