Cocaine Cowboys: How ’80s Miami Became America’s Drug Capital
In 1985, authorities at the Miami Airport discovered cocaine inside a shipment of tropical fish. A drug task force report later explained how it's typically done. A fish in a bag of water is placed in the second bag full of clear liquid cocaine. But while colorful, the fish ploy wasn't that unusual.
South Florida has the dubious honor of being the cocaine and marijuana capital of the United States. - [Narrator] Because at that time, traffickers move product to Miami in everything, boxes of Valentine's Day roses, or hollowed out mainframe disks, or even the in-service commercial airplanes that 22 Eastern Airline employees converted into steel drug mules, jetting $1 billion worth of powder into the country before they got caught.
But the fish do provide a way of thinking about Miami. Because much like the city in the late 70s and 80s, they were beautiful, wild things you could only see through layers and layers of cocaine. Which is why Miami of that era could be called the American narco-state, a place where drugs were so big they accounted for a third of the economy.
We'll explain. (upbeat Latin music) So if you're American and you picture a narco-state, I'll bet it's somewhere else, run from a Colombian jungle perhaps, or powered by Afghan poppy seeds, not in a city where you've gone on spring break. Many academics don't like the term because it doesn't have a settled definition, but that hasn't stopped journalists from using the label everywhere, from Guinea-Bissau to the Netherlands.
So there are some recurring themes you can pick out in the reporting. Like a narco-state is typically a place where the drug trade has unleashed violence, altered the economy, and corrupted the government on a significant scale. So even though Miami in the 70s and 80s was still a cool place where celebrities lounged by the pool, where artists created enormous works in vivid colors, where cutting edge food movements began, and simply where a lot of regular folks, many of them Cuban immigrants, worked and lived.
It was also a city where the drug trade had ballooned to such unthinkable proportions that had outshined and even warped the traditional economy. To give you an idea, one drug kingpin's operation allegedly netted her up to $80 million a month. (money dinging) Although admittedly reported drug numbers are all over the place.
But even if you assume it's a smaller figure, it still might be more than Apple's revenue at the time, which average, only about 28 million a month in 1981. And that's just one operation. Drugs from Columbia flowed through Miami on their way to domestic distribution centers at such a frenzied pace that Miami output 70% of the nation's cocaine, more of other drugs.
The DEA measured the South Florida drug trade at $12 billion per year, making it the biggest sector in the area's economy. Snort that in. But wasn't all just in the shadows. Regular people could feel its impact as drug lords spent, and spent, and spent. Real estate proved such a useful way to launder money, so that even in the midst of a national housing slump, Miami boomed.
10,000 new building permits, 20 new skyscrapers prompting the mayor who ran the city in the latter half of the 80s to say that the Miami skyline was built on cocaine. Even cocaine's top kingpin, Pablo Escobar, had a pink Miami pied-a-terre until it was seized and demolished, as obsessively documented by news crews.
The telltale sign for investigators on the lookout, one out of every three Miami homes was paid for in full with cash. But that wasn't the only place investigators watched, because drug money swamped the South Florida banking system. One small Latin owned bank saw $12 million in annual deposits in the 70s swell to 600 million by 1980 because of drug money.
All that cash trickled up to the Federal Reserve Branch that included Miami, which ran up a $5 billion surplus during the era, twice as large as that of the 11 other branches combined. Sometimes the banks apparently didn't know it was drug money. And sometimes they were allegedly willing actors. The Carter and Reagan administrations started throwing task forces at this huge problem, including the first ever multi-agency money laundering task force, Operation Greenback.
So why even risk the banks? It's so simple, you might not even think about it. The weight of cash the traffickers got was more than the cocaine they flew in. The planes couldn't take off. But despite the heat, cocaine wasn't always hidden. It was part of a daily life in a way that's hard to imagine now. There are accounts of dentists and barbers accepting it as payment.
And young men went into it not only because of the possibilities, but because there wasn't the same stigma. - Growing up, you know, you see your parents going through hard times, and then you're in a room with three or $4 million. I mean, how are you gonna say no to that? You know. - If you were to tell us that we were criminal, we would have laughed.
We were 20 year old kids, we were just having fun. - [Narrator] And here's the crazy thing, The drug trade may have created 25,000 legitimate jobs, enough to make a politician jealous. Of course, like any functioning economy, the Miami narco-state had its own trading floor, its own treasury. It was the Mutiny Hotel, the inspiration for the Babylon Club in "Scarface" where huge deals were allegedly negotiated.
We had a way to let older organizations know that we had material. We will get a Burger King hat and we would put it on the table. That was the sign to everybody in the club that, hey, we got material, let's talk. - [Narrator] So what if it had a dance floor that rivaled Studio 54, and its very own Mutiny Girls? Legend has it that these compelling hostesses would hide guns from the cops in their skirts, or check for ankle holsters with their stilettos.
Here too, drugs and wealth were all out in the open. It was normalized. But unfortunately violence became normalized too. This famous picture marks the unofficial start of an era. It's the Dadeland Mall Massacre. In July of 1979, 2 hit men attacked Colombian trafficker, German Panesso and his bodyguard at the mall's liquor store in broad daylight.
Witnesses said it was like a wild west shootout went down in the parking lot, leading to one cop's quip that these were cocaine cowboys. It's one of the alleged origins of that term. Panesso and his bodyguard were killed, store employees were wounded, and the two attackers fled and then ditched their van, incongruously marked as "Happy Time Complete Party Supply.
" Police described it as a brand new bulletproofed war wagon, prompting these terrified headlines about war wagons. But there were lots more scary headlines to come as violence flared to narco-state like proportion. In 1980 Miami set a record with 573 homicides, only to break it in 1981 with 621. Propelled in part by a high proportion of execution-style slayings.
It was the so-called murder capital of the country, at least three times during the 80s. And lest we forget, the 80s were not the safest time for American cities. One symbol of this uncontrollable violence is that the morgue had to rent a refrigerated truck for seven years to keep up with all the extra bodies, which must have been strange since the Miami Herald reports that it was rented from Burger King.
In cartel fashion, drug kingpins even used violence to silence potential witnesses like lawyer Juan Acosta in 1989. But what you might not get from the relatively understated empire of Saul Magluta and Willie Falcon, at least until they got into trouble, is how brazen Miami drug crime could be, like how you picture a narco-state.
Again in 1979 in broad daylight, dozens witness a high-speed chase down Miami's main drag, the drivers sprayed each other and then approaching cops with automatic weapons fire. As you can see, art began imitating life one chase at a time, Michael Mann built his career off of the legends of narco Miami with his hit Miami Vice.
And when the cops eventually stopped the cars, they naturally found a corpse and 45 pounds of cocaine in one of the trunks. High-speed chases, automatic weapons, corpses, and coke, all around noon on the U.S. 1, violence wasn't underground, nor were there any moral limits on it. As shown by Griselda Blanco, the so-called godmother of cocaine, a Colombian with Medellin connections who was drawn to Miami during the 70s and 80s.
Griselda was known for her cartel-like savagery and fondness for torture and reprisals, perhaps as a message for the male-dominated drug world. But whatever her reasons, police estimated that she was responsible for over 40 murders, including the Dadeland Mall Massacre, and a heinous drive by shooting of a two year old, an act which allegedly pleased Griselda because it hurt the boy's father, but which ultimately led to murder charges in 1994.
But maybe the drug Lords would have been a little less free if local officials, particularly law enforcement, hadn't been riddled with corruption, the third pillar. You could see its extent in the so-called River Cops case, which scandalized Miami for decades. In 1985, along the Miami River, six men dressed as cops approached drug traffickers unloading cocaine from a boat, and threatened to shoot.
The traffickers fearing these were disguised cartel rivals fled into the water, three drowned. But some of the assailants were actually cops, part of The Enterprise, a hot shot partying group of young officers who ripped off drug dealers to the tune of 10 million per raid. Even after their arrest, three of them attempted to pay a hit man $100,000 to kill a drug dealer that had turned state's witness.
But the subsequent investigation into the River Cops turned up 100 crooked cops, one 10th of Miami's police force. At that time, the largest police corruption case in Miami history. police authorities largely blamed these acts on an allegedly under vented class of recruits drafted in haste after a 1980 race riot, and a sudden influx of 125,000 Cuban refugees.
But according to one trafficker at least, there were probably more cops who may have just chosen a quieter kind of corruption. - All the detectives, vice squad, homicide, everybody. This went all the way up to the head of the homicide department in Miami. Judges were paid for, high people all the way in the United States government.
[Narrator] There's some evidence that drug dealers penetrated the judicial system too. In 1991, just as the drug frenzy was dying, Operation Court Broom caught five state judges accepting bribes in return for lenient treatment of fictitious drug traffickers. Fickle Miami juries let some of the judges go, but they admitted it.
So all the elements were present at some level or another, corruption, and violence, and the currency of cocaine that overshadowed the economy. To be clear, for many, life in Miami was still the pure sunshine of one of the state's tourism ads, like this one. But drug cultures threatened to distort the story.
And you have to wonder, how far did it go? Narco-states are, by their very nature, secretive. So we may never know its true depth. - It was probably like 175 tons of cocaine, not 75 tons. - [Narrator] In the same year as the fish from the intro, authorities stopped a shipment of yams. They were cleverly disguised fiberglass fakes full of white powder.
But those yams are another way of thinking about the city. Miami in the 80s looked really good on the outside, but on the inside there was a lot of cocaine. (upbeat Latin music)
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