MOVIE REVIEW: Cocaine Cowboys - An Exploration of The Town That Snort Built

By Brian Abrams

The feature film Cocaine Cowboys opens with a mélange of grainy stock footage of Miami’s Dadeland Mall, circa 1979, spliced with dramatizations of Latin thugs firing off fully automatic weapons into a suburban liquor store. The montage is supposed to represent the first significant battle of Florida’s cocaine wars – the first, at least, that caught the national media’s attention and earned Miami a reputation as one of the biggest crime capitals on the planet. For the dealers, this meant the beginning of the end.

Director Billy Corben jumps from this illustration to years prior and wastes no time conveying the rise-and-fall story of The Town That Snort Built. He breezes through the 1960s, where he paints a terse picture of how Miami was once a “virgin city,” as one of his interview subjects puts it, and how Latin-American influences changed the city’s zeitgeist into a drug-running empire. The 28-year old filmmaker interviews former cocaine moguls Jon Roberts and Mickey Mundee as well as a slew of retired enforcement officials who survived the late 70s/early 80s drug trafficking bloodbath.

Corben delivers an elaborate telling of the nuts and bolts of the business, from Colombian air traffickers’ drop-shipping product in the ocean to dealers’ laundering money through corrupt banks and real estate deals. Seriously, when it comes to the Generation X cocaine craze, Corben’s got it covered.

But the problem is that, while the director gets an A-plus on his reporting and research skills, the movie itself becomes overtly dense, too much like an episode of 60 Minutes. There might be a helluva lot of material on the masterminds behind the Miami drug scene, but little is leftover for the viewer who isn’t dialed into this world. It’s a documentary made for fanatics of Scarface and Blow, not an introductory piece for novices.

Nonetheless, Cowboys is still fun to watch. The shrilling soundtrack from Jan Hammer (original composer of Miami Vice’s title theme) smacks of 80s kitsch, and Corben’s rat-tat-tat-tat narrative never slows down. It’s about as jacked-up as a pair of Miami models chatting away in a nightclub bathroom stall or as relentless as a gangster’s MAC-10 rattling away at his kingpin’s competition. You might get a little confused, but you’ll never get bored.

Every minute Corben commits to detailing the ruthlessness of these Colombian cartels, that’s just another minute leaving the more naïve viewer wondering more simple, albeit obvious, questions: why are all these Floridians marked for death? Is it a Colombian vs. Cuban issue, or are they all just junkies in debt?

The last half-hour of the picture focuses on a Griselda Blanco, the homicidal godmother of cocaine who dealt directly with the Ochoa family in Colombia and had no qualms about murdering the children of her enemies. (One hit man in the film claimed everyday she wanted to wage war against somebody.) But while Cowboys continues to follow Blanco’s trail, a few of us viewers – those that aren’t in The Biz, anyway – are left hanging back at the beginning, wondering why that liquor store was shot up in the first place.