was the 1992 "New Times" cover story, "Willy and Sal."
Now, if you snorted a line of cocaine
on the East Coast of the U.S. in the late 80s,
chances are pretty good it was Willy and Sal
who smuggled it in.
After their arrest,
I spent the next 10 years covering Los Muchachos,
or The Boys, as they were known.
Those stories peaked the interest
of a young would be filmmaker, Billy Corben.
This Wednesday, Netflix premieres
a six part documentary series
on Willy and Sal called "The Kings of Miami."
COMMENTATOR: The offshore powerboat champions indicted
for trafficking more than 75 tons of cocaine,
the largest drug case in history.
Let the games begin.
And they did.
They enjoyed living on the edge,
being like cat and mouse.
See if you can find me.
They would get arrested, just change your ID,
get new driver's licenses, that's Miami.
I spoke to Corben about a project he describes
as a labor of love.
What was it about the Willy and Sal story that intrigued you
and how long have you worked on this project?
We've been working on it for 12 years,
but it's been a part of our lives in one form or another
since middle school when I'm Alfred Spellman,
my producing partner and the co-founder
of our company rakontur,
he was driving in carpool with his best friend's dad,
who was one of the attorneys on the case.
This is back in the 90s, back in the eighth grade,
hearing him on the cell phone talking
about Los Muchachos, The Boys.
And so, we've been kind of following it along
ever since then, you know, their first trial in '95,'96,
that was our high school era.
I went to school at New World School of the Arts,
a block away from the federal courthouse.
And then when we were in college at the University of Miami,
Sal had his second trial in 2001, 2002.
So, this really charted our formidable years
here in South Florida.
And so, this was a story
that we had wanted to tell since then.
And in fact, had hoped to tell
in our documentary, "Cocaine Cowboys" about 15 years ago,
and Willy and Sal were supposed to be
what "Cocaine Cowboys" was about.
And at that point it was just a little too new.
It was fresh, the wounds were fresh.
Sal's trial, second trial, had just ended
and we just couldn't get the access we needed
because the story just hadn't ripened yet.
And so, "Cocaine Cowboys" turned out to be,
that was our plan B,
that was like our backout plan when we couldn't get
the Willy and Sal's story.
I guess starting in about 2009,
we started to hear from people involved in the case who knew
that we had produced "Cocaine Cowboys,"
that we had a fascination with Miami and this era.
People were getting out of witness protection
and hitting us up.
And that's how it all started.
And we began accumulating almost an archive of interviews
on this case with defendants
and criminal defense attorneys,
and assistant U.S. attorneys, FBI agents, et cetera.
And we accumulated so much footage, in fact,
we realized it was too much
to make a one-off feature documentary.
But, what I guess I'm really trying to get at
is what was it about their story that really intrigued you?
I mean, Miami back in the 80s and 90s,
lots of people got arrested and went to prison for cocaine.
What was it about Willy and Sal
that made them unique characters to you?
Well, first and foremost,
it's like a Cuban crime family story.
There's a lot of godfatheresque kind of elements to it.
The characters are extremely likable
and you watch the original "Cocaine Cowboys,"
there's some dangerous people there.
And so, these guys were just local folk heroes,
celebrities in the offshore power boat racing community,
where they were world champions certainly.
Well, world champions like three, four times over,
but also just locally.
Their tentacles and their ability
to reach out into the community,
I think you might actually say it in your interview
in the "Kings of Miami,"
that there's the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but in Miami,
you were only one or two degrees from Willy and Sal.
And so, people with that kind of influence in the community
who touched sort of every sector, public sector,
private sector, businesses, families, you know,
people would go to them needing rent money,
needing tuition money for their kids' school.
And they were extremely generous, almost like Robinhoods,
someone describes them as.
And so, it was intriguing to me this idea
that these kids came over here from Cuba with nothing.
In Sal's case during Pedro Pan without his parents,
stayed here as single digits,
five, six, seven years old,
staying with distant family members in this country
and trying to navigate this new world
and figure out what is this mythological American dream
I've heard about?
Here where the streets are paved with gold.
But, that wasn't the case.
They lost everything in Cuba.
His family was effectively struggling.
They had a great business with a kosher Cuban bakery,
but he didn't wanna struggle like that.
He wanted the opportunity that America promised
and he found it in Miami in that era,
which a lot of young people did.
Well, you know, the thing that always appealed
to me as well, is that notion of
here are two Miami high dropouts
who go on to arguably be probably
the most successful entrepreneurs
in their line of work at their time,
anywhere in the country.
It was Muchachos Inc.
It was a multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation
that they were the president and vice president,
or the CEO and treasurer, or the CEO and COO, I could say,
It was an illegal trade,
but it did trickle down into a lot of legitimate trades.
They had real estate holdings.
I think they helped sustain Sunshine State Bank
for quite a time.
And so, I say that Miami in the 1980s
during the drug boom, the cocaine boom,
is the only successful case study
of Reagan's trickle-down economics
and Willy and Sal kind of embodied that
'cause they didn't just hoard the money.
They spent it all over South Florida
and that manifested itself in quite real ways here
in terms of employment opportunity.
I'm not saying that the drug trade was a good thing,
but it had a lot of effects positive and negative
on this community.
And these guys in that time effectively ran the town.
Well, let's deal with the negative side of it.
The response to those who say that what you've done
is glorify two criminals,
two criminals that the government claims
may have been involved in having witnesses killed
and other people's lives destroyed,
not to mention just the lives
that were destroyed by the drugs
and the product that they brought into the country.
So, how do you address the idea
that these are not mythic characters
or folklore type heroes,
but really villains and shouldn't be glorified?
Well, the first thing I would say
just to set the record straight
is that Willy was never accused of
or charged with having anything to do
with the witness tampering or the homicides.
Sal was, in fact, acquitted by a jury
for his involvement in those homicides.
But I will say that their lifestyle for a time in Miami
did have some glamour to it.
Miami in the 80s is a sort of, you know,
a time that people look back on with great nostalgia.
The bad ole good ole days.
But the reality is, is that, spoiler alert,
everybody in these stories ends up dead or in prison.
So, it's not very glorious.
And there's no message that crime pays here.
In fact, quite the contrary.
We'll be right back.