Cocaine Cowboys

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Mayor Randy Christmas,

of Miami, Florida.

The film you're about to see is a stunning expose

based on fact.

It concerns a vicious attempt by organized crime

to take over the entire state of Florida.

But for the alert and courageous work

of Florida's law enforcement agencies

and the integrity

of its governmental administrations,

this threat might have been made good.

I take this opportunity to issue a warning

to the people of every state in the nation.

It could happen in your state.

We are dedicated here in Florida to the belief

that it will never again happen to us.

My name is Jon Roberts.

I was born in New York.

I lost my father when I was nine.

My mother when I was 13.

My stepfather threw me out of the house when I was 13.

My sister tried to raise me,

failed miserably because of me.

I went to see my uncle, and my uncle took me in.

First he had me collecting money

because he was a loan shark.

So he put me with one of his guys

who also happened to be the driver for Carlo Gambino.

And my uncle said, "Don't worry, this guy will take care of you."

Some guy owed my uncle money.

We kidnapped him, we threw him in an apartment,

and the guy that I used to do it with me

was strung out on heroin.

I said, "Look, I'm going home to sleep,

you watch this guy."

Well, he ends up shooting up and OD-ing,

so the guy he's watching just opens the door

and walks into the street,

because my friend's dead on the floor.

He ran to the police.

The police came, and you know,

they got me and they put me in...

At that time they had a place called the Tombs in New York,

which was one of the original jails.

And they came around to the Tombs

and they made people offers.

If you go to Vietnam and you leave

with an honorable discharge, your charges will be dropped.

I said, "Okay, that sounds like a good deal."

And I signed up for a year, and they interview you.

And they said, "Look, we're going to give you

advanced training.

We're going to send you here and we're going to make you...

You can do some crazy things if you want in Vietnam."

And what it was for was, it was 101st Airborne,

and I got to like it, because I had a bad mentality,

and I ended up staying there 4 years.

I got blown out of a tree.

I got a metal plate in my head,

and you know, I don't want to get into stories over there

and shit like that,

because everybody has a story, so...

And when you come back, and you can't do anything,

it's like, what am I trained to do?

And I lost everything.

My uncle, he said to me, "You and I are going

to make a lot of money together,"

and we opened a restaurant there.

Opened it? We bought it or took it from somebody,

if I remember, back in my childhood.

And it was called Alice's Restaurant,

and then we went into nightclubs and we opened

about four or five nightclubs.

It became very big and we were doing really well.

One day they just came in, the police,

and they told us that our partner,

they had found him out on the Long Island expressway.

And he had been killed

and he had like 11 bullet holes in him.

So, who knows what happened to him?

The best thing that I could think at that time was,

"Just let me get away from all this heat,"

so I moved down here.

And started into the cocaine business.

I think there's something about the location here.

It's at the end of the map, the bottom of the map,

the jumping off place.

People who are running away from each other

or from the law or from their own personal demons.

Eventually if they run long enough, they come here.

The City of Miami area was very, very quiet,

and it was just a very pleasant place to live.

Miami back then was the South.

It was like Alabama.

There was no money here, there were no big buildings.

Downtown was pretty barren.

Miami Beach, it was a lot of old people

just sitting around in rocking chairs

on South Beach waiting to die.

It was a whole different world down here back then.

I'm an old South Florida boy,

and one of the few that's that old, I was born here.

I was in the import business,

doing some exporting, but mostly importing.

Back then the city was like a virgin city.

South Florida was vulnerable to penetration

by drug suppliers.

Florida is a drug smuggler's paradise.

It was wide open back then.

It was wide open.

1200 miles of coastline, much of it remote,

deserted, thousands of rivers and bays.

Nobody even knows how many islands offshore.

The pirates operated here in the 1700s.

During the Civil War, gunrunners would run

the Union blockade in from the Bahamas.

Rum runners used the same technique.

This city has always had something coming in.

In the 1960s, this was a jumping-off place

for soldiers of fortune,

who ran commando raids into Cuba.

Several dozen miles south-west of Miami

is a military training camp located on 40 miles

of Everglades swamp land for Cuban refugees

who are planning to return to the island to fight.

These guys had been trained by the CIA,

had gone into the fishing industry,

and they were making a very good living.

The change in 1975 was precipitated by a lobster.

There was a law changed in the Bahamas

which prohibited Cuban exiles based in Miami from fishing

in Bahamian waters for the spiny lobster.

It put out of work tremendous amount of fishermen.

Obedio Perez sold his gold watch

and ring last week to feed his two children.

He expects the bank to foreclose on his boat

before month's end.

Francisco Gado's boat is taking on water

from lack of use.

He says it might sink before his next payment.

More than 1,000 other lobster fishermen,

a majority of them Cuban exiles,

have not left these docks in six weeks.

They had their boats, they had their knowledge,

they had the training.

That's when we started seeing

the mother lode method of transporting marijuana.

The fishermen were acting as intermediaries,

and the go-fast boats

would bring them into the coast.

At that time everybody in Florida was smuggling pot.

And you could drive in with a boat, stacked up,

] pull up to the dock and unload it.

Nobody said a thing.

There was no defense of the border to speak of.

There were thousands of fishing boats in this area,

hundreds of thousands of pleasure boats.

Many of them capable of the run to the Bahamas,

with another ship on a marijuana

delivery cruise out in the Gulf Stream.

If they thought there was a problem,

they'd just throw it overboard.

They would order 40,000 pounds and they'd send out 50,000.

And they'd only have enough boats to carry

the 40 and they would throw the stuff away.

You could be out in a boat

and find bales of marijuana floating.

The proverbial square grouper.

You would get guys who would go over,

unload the ship, and they would get their dentist

or their attorney or their doctor,

because forevermore he could tell

his grandchildren, "I was a smuggler."

South Florida has become the drug smuggling

capital of the United States.

No other place in the country even comes close.

The first marijuana trip we made,

we found through a guy who was a fireman.

He had a twin engine plane called the Piper Aztec

that he would fly to Colombia.

He offered us, if we would go down and pick up

1,000 pounds, $50,000.

I really wasn't thrilled about the amount of money it was,

but I said, "Well, at least it gets

our foot in the door."

And we did it. And it was a fiasco from one end

to the other.

We ended up having to throw it all away.

They didn't have an alternate where we came back to.

There was a sentinel police officer sitting on

the road that they wanted to land on.

They used a used airplane radio on an old battery,

and they didn't realize the battery was dead.

From that trip, our very first trip,

with all the problems, we took it as a lesson.

From then on in, we'd have one, two, three,

four alternates.

I ran into some Jamaicans, went down to Jamaica,

physically looked at the place.

For Jamaicans it was... The pot wasn't really good.