Product Description

The cocaine trade of the 70s and 80s had an indelible impact on contemporary Miami. Smugglers and distributors forever changed a once sleepy retirement community into one of the world s most glamorous hot spots; the epicenter of a $20 billion annual business fed by Colombia's Medellin cartel. By the early 80s, Miami s tripled homicide rate had made it the murder capital of the country, for which a Time cover story dubbed the city 'Paradise Lost'. With COCAINE COWBOYS, filmmaker Billy Corben paints a dazzling portrait of a cultural explosion that still echoes as Hollywood myth. Extras: Original Theatrical Trailer; Hustlin with the Godmother Featurette; Deleted Scenes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5139 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-02-04
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

"Never forgive, Never forget" (the drug dealing code of honour).
This is a first class documentary with an easy to follow style which flows naturally and time passes quickly. I'm not a fan of gangster films and I hate violence so I was a little unsure about this documentary but it had me hooked from early on. There is an endless amount of eye-opening and eye-popping information. I became engrossed and I don't even like drugs!

Before seeing this, I recently saw the Panorama programme with Alex James, (the base player with Blur who claimed he blew a £1 million on cocaine), as it followed him on trip around Colombia to see the realities and hidden hardships this drug has caused, and I became interested to know more.

Cocaine Cowboys - the documentary's title - comes from the tagline that was given to the feuding Cuban and primarily Colombian drugs dealers shooting it out on the streets and houses of 1970s to 1980s Miami which made the actions of the Chicago gangsters of the Prohibition era look fairly subdued by comparison.

The film opens with coverage of an execution-style shooting in broad daylight in a liquor store in Miami '79 and asks where will the Cocaine Cowboys strike next? The next ¾ of an hour back tracks in time for us to understand how we got to this stage and does so by concentrating on testimonies of 2 of the central characters of the US cocaine trade; Jon Roberts who distributed over $2 Billion of cocaine for the Medellin Cartels and Mickey Mundey who smuggled over 38 tons of cocaine from Colombia to USA

Both come across as articulate, easy going, even charming people who could've been successful businessmen in any field if fate had been different. Roberts' network was immense reaching through to all levels of the feted of society (the only ones who could afford the drug), whilst Mundey's operational nous was so highly tuned they were able to operate for years without any detection or intervention from the authorities - a bit like a brilliant but warped Bond villain.

But the emphasis all changes with the liquor store murders in '79 and the film starts to reveal the other side of the story, the human cost from the emerging power struggles that were beginning to spiral out of control. Over a 15 year period the average number of cocaine homicides rocketed from 1 per annum to 2 per week.

The film then takes narration from it's 3rd main character, Jorge 'Rivi' Ayala who grew to become the head enforcer of La Madrina (the Godmother) an incredibly despotic and ruthless dealer who controlled the drug trade through fear.

The death tolls of shoot-outs got so bad and so frequent that the media stopped being interested in reporting only double or even triple-murders! They would concentrate on multiple homicides of 5 or 6 or more. Yet no matter how bad the death tolls got, nobody stopped buying cocaine, the demand for it kept growing higher, and kept outstripping supply.

This film shows how money ruined morality; banks, the police, mayors - there was no one that wasn't touched, and if they weren't directly involved in the drug trade they conveniently didn't ask questions like; "why are you buying a $1 million dollar airplane with cash?"

This film covers so much more than I ever imagined, you won't need cocaine to blow your mind, this documentary will do the same thing! Yet it never judges people's actions it just presents them. Nor does it get too gory, there are some strong photos which are shown in context but the camera never lingers.

There are only a few documentaries that have made a big impact on me and this one stands up there with the best of them. The deleted scenes and special featurette are worth watching also for extra insight.

The Real Miami Vice
Cocaine Cowboys is a film about a moment in time, not quite old enough to be history.

It is a film with huge ambition to tell the story of cocaine's golden age in the US through the words of some of those people involved in bringing it there.

A combination of 70s hedonism and greed collided in Miami with the rise of the drug trade. In parallel to this business, was the rise from cocaine being very expensive to taking over from cannabis as the weekend drug of choice to celebrities like American Football players and professionals including doctors and accountants.

Cocaine eventually became egalitarian with the rise of crack.

It is weird in a cool way hearing the story from a range of narrators including a New York-based Italian American dealer Jon Roberts who moved to Miami to get away from trouble with his drugs business in New York.

He ended up getting involved in the cocaine business and dealt with the Columbians (the Cocaine Cowboys of the title), a pilot who graduated from flying in bales of cannabis to bring in cocaine and a former super-model Teri Mooney who moved in Miami's narco-business circles.

My favourite line: When you are bringing someone a millon dollars a week, you get a connection a bond between you.
This first-person testimony is mixed in mixed with news footage from the time. The whole lot is played out with a Jan Hammer soundtrack in a strange reference to the fictional shows like Miami Vice that stories of the real dealers inspired.

The real violence portrayed in the news footage takes the veneer of glamour away from the drugs business, which Scarface and Miami Vice provided.The news footage brings the brutality and criminality of the business home to you.

One of the most interesting additional features on the DVD was an interview with Charles Cosby who was involved with The Godmother Griselda Blanco. Cocaine Cowboys II will focus on Griselda's role in the drug trade.

A city built out of Cocaine
Prior to the 80s Miami was a place where pensioners went to die, by the end of that decade it had become one of the most debauched places on earth. "Cocaine Cowboys" may not look new (talking heads, dodgy titles, loads of photos and news footage) but telling a story is all about timing and Billy Corben's brilliant editing has more than a little Scorcese energy to it. Add a Jan Hammer score - think Crockett's Theme crossed with Moroder's Scarface - and some truly dangerous and flamboyant characters and you have a perfect companion piece to Brian De Palma's classic. A word of warning; the photos here are incredibly explicit in there representation of death, unless you are truly desensitized to violence you need to be prepared to be shocked. That said this is a brilliant, brilliant documentatary that deserves to be seen.