It says something about the brutal world of 1980s Miami, depicted in lurid detail by the high-octane documentary Cocaine Cowboys, that one of the subjects casually confessed to an unsolved murder during an interview for the film.
Speaking of the contract killer Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, the director Billy Corben says: “He told me where there is a body buried in Miami, by the Florida turnpike. It’s all developed now, malls and condominiums. He knows where all the bodies are buried. We told the police. I think he told the police too. I just don’t think they care.”
Now serving three life sentences for 12 counts of murder, Rivi is a chillingly cool customer. He affably reels off the names of the victims he dispatched as if he were running through a shopping list. “The guy is one of the most pleasant interview subjects, the most laid-back, easy-going, polite, friendly and simple to deal with. But we’d be sitting there in an interview and you would have to kick yourself in the head to remind yourself what it is that this guy is talking about. He might as well be talking about the weather outside. But he’s talking about murdering women and children.”
Rivi was, for a time, the hit-man of choice for Griselda Blanco, aka the Black Widow. Griselda was the grande dame of the Miami cocaine business, a Colombian mother of three, of impoverished origins, who slaughtered and intimidated her way to the top of a billion-dollar industry. She is a central character in this movie, the most deadly figure in a story in which the bodies are stacked like dominos. Conspicuous by her absence as an interviewee, she is one of the few key survivors of the era whom the film-makers were unable to coax before the lens. “Her release was imminent at that point, as was her deportation. I think she has changed her mind since, because we have been reapproached,” Corben says.
The film’s approach is an unabashed tabloid assault of sensational images. Police and press photographs of nameless bodies, the collateral damage in the cocaine wars, dominate the screen, their twisted bodies leaking blood on to the Dade County sidewalks.
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Rapid-fire editing unleashes an onslaught of information. This is documentary-making for ADD sufferers and has now inspired a feature film to star Mark Wahlberg, based on the the drug dealer Jon Roberts, featured in Cocaine Cowboys.
Corben, a Miami native with a conversational style like a runaway train, acknowledges the drug’s influence on Cocaine Cowboys’ aesthetic. “My intended effect was that after this movie, you felt like you had been on a bender.” Besides Griselda and Rivi, the key characters in the film are Roberts and Mickey Munday. They are the “cowboys” of the title, two outlaws who imported but didn’t sell the drugs. The way they tell it, their clever smuggling methods transformed the fortunes of the once sleepy backwater of Miami.
Corben’s memories of growing up in Miami during the cocaine-fuelled 1980s are of nightly news stories with a body count to rival a small war, and an awful lot of money. “I remember being in this working-class neighbourhood and everybody was doing very well. Whatever business you were in, the city was flush with so much cash that it trickled down, sort of a Reagan theory of economics. The trickle-down theory worked as long as you had successful drug king-pins in the community.”
Cocaine Cowboys takes a nonjudgmental stance on the antics of Roberts and Munday. In fact, is there perhaps a grudging admiration for their business acumen? “I admire their story. I’m a storyteller. However, I also allow the story to dictate the style. Which is to say their depiction of themselves – they are the only narrators of the story – is to place themselves on a pedestal.” If Corben is cautious about expressing admiration for men whose chosen work brought misery to millions, others are less so. Munday and, in particular, Roberts have found themselves celebrities in the hip-hop community. This notoriety has fed into what Corben describes as a cottage industry. “We’re doing a series of direct-to-DVD sequels, two or three a year for the next several years. We’re doing a dramatic feature based on Griselda Blanco’s life. We’re developing a one-hour Sopranos-esque TV series based in Miami. And a half-hour animated comedy series that Pharell Williams is executive-producing with us.”
So this period of wealth and violence in Miami’s history continues even now to feed into the city’s economy? “Yes,” Corben says, “the emulation and reverence of the cocaine wars is going to be Miami’s new major source of income.” And he’s only half joking. Cocaine Cowboys is out on DVD on Monday