If I had caught sight of the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ movie before I moved to Miami, I don’t think that I would have ever dared settle here. Billy Corbin’s 2006 Documentary told the true story of the local drug wars in the 1980’s when ruthless Columbian cocaine barons invaded Miami and bought a level of violence that made the antics of the old time gangsters like Al Capone look quite tame. Corbin’s movie traced how my future hometown became the drug, murder and laundered cash capital of the US, something that was strangely missing from all the Welcome to Miami literature I picked up from my Real Estate Broker back then.
Corben’s new movie traces the much gentler trade of marijuana smuggling/dealing that evidently was also big business locally in the 1970’s and 1980’s. He divides his story into 3 segments, the first focuses on the colorful Coptic Church whose members lived in a millionaire’s mansion turned into a commune on exclusive Star Island and openly smoked ganja and claimed it was legal because God created it.
The second part covers two local Miami businessmen called the Black Tuna Gang who ran their marijuana smuggling operation out of the Penthouse Suite of The Fontainebleau the city’s biggest and most luxurious hotel, and their majorly successful operation really pissed the Authorities big time and so they framed them with more serious crimes invoking the Judge to give them ridiculously long and unjustified sentences.
The third chapter involved practically the entire population of Everglades City, a very small isolated coastal town which was struggling to survive after federal red-tape decimated their fishing industry, and they all turned to smuggling dope and along the way getting standards of living beyond their wildest dreams.
Corbin’s immensely interesting and entertaining movie takes a strongly partisan view that is so sympathetic to those involved in giving us all some weed, and along the way enjoying an extravagant lifestyle in return. And if we are to believe him, there was never even a hint of any of the violence like with ‘hard drug’ trafficking. And the only reason they all got caught in the end was because their very success embittered FBI and DEA Agents and all the other Authorities. And if you appreciate a good toke, then I think you would want to believe Mr Corbin’s spin on this fascinating chapter in our local history here in South Florida.
P.S. The title of the movie is slang for the bales of pot thrown off boats or planes into the ocean.
Labels: 2011, documentary
