Cocaine Cowboys I & II

Miami in the 80’s is synonymous with cocaine.  You know, Miami Vice, Scarface and all that shit.  Well this is the real deal folks.  This doc has players from the time tell their stories.  And holy shit do they have some good ones.  They lay out exactly how their operation went, how the police were outmanned and outgunned, how people were killed if they fucked up and how they all eventually got caught.

The whole thing, every detail is incredibly engrossing.  Each individual story would be by far the most interesting thing that ever happened in an average person’s life and these guys have a million of them.  For example this dude named Rivi was at a club one night when he was informed that there was going to be a hit at a particular table.  Rivi then rounded up his crew to get the hell out of there so that none of them would get hurt by a stray shot or something.  However in the process one of Rivi’s guys unknowingly told the man that was the target that night so he split too.  The hit got fucked up accidentally which put Rivi in deep shit.  This leads to him meeting Griselda Blanco, aka the Godmother (she was a billionaire, or at least a hundreds of millions-aire, in the coke biz and she was responsible for something like two hundred murders), who eventually ends up hiring Rivi as her hitman.

Even a little tale like how the Colombians weren’t wrapping the cocaine right in plastic at first which would cause the package to come undone when it was dropped from a plane into the ocean is fascinating.

This is a must see if you’re interested in crime, drugs or even the history of a city.  Miami was the murder capital back then with something like over 600 murders annually in the early 80’s.  And it wasn’t just drug gangs killing each other, innocent bystanders were getting caught in the crossfire.  There were shootings in public places during the day.  These motherfuckers didn’t give a shit.  Like the Godmother ordered a hit on a guy in an airport terminal.  Rivi wisely turned this job down because he knew it was impossible to get away with.  But some other crazy sonuvabitch took his place and was arrested almost immediately after stabbing his target with a bayonet several times.

Apparently at that time you couldn’t go anywhere in Miami without stumbling across a corpse.  It got so bad that special forces had to be sent in.  A combo of that plus the fact that the cartels were just running out of people to kill finally brought this chapter to an end.

I highly recommend checking this picture out.  Everyone in this is very forward and candid about what they did and how they did it.  They don’t hold back on anything.   

Cocaine Cowboys II picks up where the first one left off.  The Godmother is in jail but she gets sought out by an up and comer named Charles Cosby.  He becomes her right hand man on the outside.  Again, it’s more interesting stories from those that lived them. 

One thing about this series that’s refreshing but also a little off putting is the brutal honesty about shit that you feel like you shouldn’t be hearing.  For example in part II they tell you step by step how to make crack.  Not even in Breaking Bad where the entire show revolves around the production of meth do they actually show how to create the stuff. 

Overall part II isn’t as captivating as part I but it’s still very cool.  And with these two parts this all really does feel like a movie and its sequel.  The original was great and is self-contained.  But the studio wants to make another one so they bring back one of the characters while introducing new ones.  It’s a new adventure.

If you liked the first one you’re definitely going to want to see the second one too.