- LA is where you go when you want to be somebody,
New York is where you go when you are somebody,
and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else.
It's America's Casablanca, America's Riviera.
Anything goes here.
- The most prolific drug traffickers in U.S. history.
- [Anchor] The offshore powerboat champions indicted
for trafficking more than 75 tons of cocaine.
The largest drug case in history.
- "Cocaine Cowboys" was supposed to be the Willy Falcon
and Sal Magluta story, Los Muchachos, The Boys,
the story of what the government alleged
were the biggest cocaine traffickers in the history
of the country, certainly in the history of South Florida,
75 tons of cocaine, they were accused of smuggling.
One of their co-conspirators says
that that estimate is way low and upwards of $2.1 billion.
It was essentially our number one industry over
and above legitimate industries like real estate
and tourism, was drug trafficking in Miami.
Billions of dollars a year, I mean,
as much as $12 billion a year.
We were a factory town.
You know, we don't have any indigenous industry.
We just sell the sun. It's all tourism and real estate,
all the jobs that just attract tomorrow's newcomers, right?
It's a Ponzi scheme, so we subsist from hustle to hustle
and cocaine was one of the biggest hustles we've ever had.
In Colombia, in those days you could probably buy a kilo
on the ground for like $5,000.
The real value was in the risk of smuggling it
into the United States.
You can get as much as $40, $50,000 wholesale
for it, down here in Miami.
So, what was happening is that the Colombians were kind
of in that wholesale business in Colombia,
and they needed someone to transport it.
They needed someone to help move it around the country
and sell it, both wholesale and retail.
And they found a lot of very willing people in Miami,
in all communities, but the Cuban American community were
really early adopters, you know,
there was a certain generation of young immigrants
whose parents had lost their country in Cuba,
who lost their money, who lost their property,
who came to America and were working their asses off,
two, three, four jobs, living with, you know,
in multi-generational families in modest, you know,
one bedroom or two bedroom homes, everybody's sharing.
The younger kids, though, saw their parents struggling
and also had heard about the mythological American dream,
right?
The streets are paved with gold in America, and they saw
their young friends become millionaires overnight.
It was a boom, it was a gold rush.
To them it must've seemed like this was the American dream.
There were very few opportunities and good jobs
and corporate gigs and companies
in which to work your way up.
This was, this was that.
What every young boy dreamed of in Miami
in that era was a Colombian connection.
And Willy and Sal managed to find a Colombian connection
through a friend that got busted in Panama,
in fact, and sent to prison, and he handed them the keys,
pun very much intended, the keys to the kingdom.
And these guys went from selling nickel and dime bags
of weed to selling grams and ounces of cocaine,
just street level retail dealers, to friends,
and kind of cultivating this new market
of weekend warriors in Miami.
And then, the next thing you know,
they move 40 kilos, which was extraordinary.
$1.2 million. Then shipped it to LA, Hollywood
where there's movie stars and money and shipped it
to New York where there's Wall Street and nightclubs
and Miami was still a sleepy retirement village.
Ocean Drive looked the way it looks in "Scarface."
It was a lot of predominantly Jewish,
elderly people just kind of waiting to die.
It was really with Willy Falcon
and Sal Magluta that that started to turn around.
They really invented a retail market
and a wholesale market here in Miami
and Willie and Sal built a multi-billion dollar,
multinational corporation, bringing
in 800 kilos a month on a slow month.
It happened very, very quickly.
I mean, that story that I just told you happened
in probably about less than two years time.