(foreboding Latin music)
- [Alexia] One day I got into an accident
or something happened to my car or something,
and he was close by and he's like,
"Oh, why don't you just come to my house,
and I'll lend you a car?"
The house was a little bit suspicious.
Who lives here? This house like, looks half empty.
It's kind of weird.
He's like, "Oh no no, it's my cousin's house.
You know, he still hasn't bought furniture.
You know, he needs to do the living room.
You know, he just moved in here, blah blah blah."
So I just walked into one of the rooms,
which was the office.
He opens up the closet and I see all these things,
like these bricks, rectangular bags.
Like wrapped in brown paper
from the floor to the ceiling, all stacked.
And I'm like, what is that?
Like, it was a rectangle,
I mean, I'd never, ever seen that in my life.
And then he slashed it like that.
And then I saw what it was and it was cocaine.
I'm like, "Okay, here. I'm getting out of here."
I think maybe he was kind of testing me
and testing the waters.
I'm not going to lie.
It's not like he wasn't like the first drug dealer
that I went out with.
There were other guys that I dated
that would come to my house to pick me up,
in a $80,000 car.
And my parents would be like,
"Hmm, okay, you're not going out with him.
You know, we're like both doctors and we make adult money
and we don't have that car.
I moved in with my mom when my dad passed away,
I start dating Peter.
My family doesn't want to know about Peter
because my mother's always had this thing.
Well if you like them that much, he must not be any good.
Look who's talking,
she's been married and divorced five times.
So she's like, I don't want to meet him,
I don't know what you're doing,
but you need to get out of my house.
And Peter tells me why don't you move in with me.
- Willy and Sal went in the racing business
'cause they liked it.
They were competitive, they raced boats.
They had a softball team that could outdo
the Marlins any day.
Let's put it that way.
They named it Seahawk.
- [Jim] Sal was really the driving force behind that
Sal liked playing softball
and so he created his own softball team.
- [Reporter] One of the world's great softball team
people too, Sal Magluta.
Good luck to you, and all the Seahawk Racers.
- [Pegy] Willie played shortstop. Sal played outfield.
Tabby was the pitcher.
- [Reporter] Okay. One important question.
How'd softball team do?
- [Willy] We finished second in the nation.
- [Reporter] Second in the nation. Not too shabby.
- [Willy] It's not good enough, but it's okay.
- You had a big budget for the softball team,
huge budget.
- [Jim] They would hire private jets and then fly
the entire team to tournaments around the country.
- [Pegy] They had guys playing there that used to play
professional baseball.
- They imported the players from the major leagues.
- They rigged the softball league.
Their whole thing was to go out and find ringers from Canada
to come in and play on their team
so they would beat everybody.
- [Reporter] Who pitched?
- [Willy] A Canadian and my brother.
- [Reporter] Uh oh.
- They used to bring this pitcher
that used to pitch 100, 105 miles per hour
underhand and pay him like $30,0000, $40,000 a game.
They gave the guy a Porsche.
- Sergio Frego.
He was an aspiring baseball prospect.
He was a hired gun on their softball team.
And he was asked to store cocaine in his home.
- I wasn't allowed to play,
because I tried out and I sucked.
But I had the whole uniform.
(whistling and yelling)
- [Pegy] The other teams were competitive too.
The same way. I mean, not as much as us.
Nobody likes Seahawk. If you played for Seahawk,
you were going to get paid.
- [Reporter] Second in the nation in softball.
Number one in South Florida, in offshore racing
Seahawk racing, the Falcon brothers. Get 'em.
- Thank you.
- Willy's mom got kidnapped back in '79 or '80.
Mirta. She was driving, they pulled her over
in an undercover police car.
They told her her license was suspended,
she was going to be placed under arrest.
They handcuffed her,
that was the kidnapping right there.
They called Willy and told him
"Hey, we have your mom. You want her back,
we want half a million dollars."
This is the house where Willy's
parents used to live.
When Willy and Taby's mom got kidnapped,
we were all staying here waiting for the phone call
so they could take the money and save her.
I was 13 years old.
Guns were all over the house. If they would've told me,
"Hey, we got to go over here and take her business."
I mean, they would've given me a machine gun.
I'd go with them, too.
- Willy understood it was all business,
so even when his mother was reportedly kidnapped
he didn't take it personal. He understood his business.
- The ransom was half a million,
it would have been ten million.
He would have given the ten million, you know,
to get his mom back. Of course.
- So what do you do? Well, he negotiated the ransom,
paid the ransom fee, supposedly a half a million dollars,
got his mother back, did whatever he needed to do
to protect his family from there on out and move forward.
- But they were waiting for the phone call
to be told where to turn the money in,
where to leave the money. And they got Mirta back.
- I hadn't seen Sal for three years, since 1983,
but then I got a call from my mom and she said,
my little brother was getting into a lot of trouble.
It was my job to take care of my little brother.
Willie was out of control. He was doing crack.
He had been at a shooting and my brother killed some people.
Two months went by, and Willie's in Dade county jail.
I got to do something for Willie because my mother
had hired a real estate attorney to like defend him
who knew nothing about criminal law.
We were losing all our motions
and he was gonna get the death penalty.
And I said to my parents, I'm not going to call Sal.
If I call Sal I'm going to owe him forever.
Because one day he will call upon you.
If he needs you, he knows he has you. He bought you.
I didn't want to owe him anything.
Sal gets on the phone. And he said, "what happened?"
And I started crying and said,
Willie killed three people, he killed two and one,
you know, is in the hospital.
He said, "hang up.
I'm going to have an attorney call you in five minutes."
After that, I started seeing Sal regularly,
my little brother was deaf and I have to be at the jail
every day to translate for people because he doesn't
understand anybody.
And then I stopped working because Sal said,
"you can't do everything, so stop working.
I'll give you $5,000 a month to do it."
And he said, you know,
"you don't need to work for $10 an hour."
He says, I'll give you the money.
you know, and just like take care of Willie",
and basically take care of him. Start taking care of him.
'Cause he was on the run now.
- [Pegy] Late '84 drugs weren't coming in like they used to.
- Here in the Bahamas everything got different,
more tight, so he couldn't work there that much.
- [Reporter #2] A federal passport is helping Florida
reduce the drug tide, now estimated at
seven billion dollars a year.
- [Reporter #3] It was the vice-president on Monday
who sized up the importance of the current crack down
on drugs.
- Operation Hat Track is the D-Day of our War on Drugs.
- [Reporter #3] The war is being waged in the Atlantic.
Ships and planes to stop drug trafficking.
- We're at the boat races and Willy tells me,
"Hey, listen up, Benny is going to go up to Houston
and pick up about 300 or 400 keys.
I need you to go with him, so he won't go by himself."
You know, because it was a dry spell.
It was a time when no flick was coming in from Bimini
and these were like the last keys. I mean, these keys,
we could be with them two or three months.
And that would say it was over.
We drove the 400 keys back to Miami, to my mom's house,
out of those 300 or 400 keys we needed to make
at least 150 extra.
Willy and Taby told me, you know, we're going to go
to your house and we got to make 150 extra keys
from that because we don't know how long
before we get more merchandise.
We were there probably like a whole week.
We had a 55 gallon tank of ether in the back.
And what would you do? You break up the key.
You put like nine ounces of cut in this big filter
and you spray with the ether and you put it in a mold
and throw it in the oven for like 30 minutes.
When they would like drive to the house in the morning,
they would go,
"Hey, you can smell that ether a block away, man.
This is like two blocks.
You can smell like the coke and the ether."
That's how strong that was.
- Earl Diez Jr. Sheriff up in Hendry County.
Now Hendry County is up by lake Okeechobee.
The boys had a ranch up there and they had a landing strip
and they would fly the cocaine into the landing strip
offloaded at the compound there and then divvy it up
and move it throughout the country wherever it needed to go.
- [Reporter #4] Hendry County residents continue to talk
of mysterious nighttime landings of small planes
on isolated fields and roads,
and state officials are investigating reports of huge
unexplained deposits in local banks.
From all indications, some of the good old boys
of Hendry County have turned from Gator skinning
and running moonshine to the fast,
get-rich world of international drug smuggling.
- They had paid off the sheriff of Hendry County
to provide so-called protection.
- I was making about two trips a month.
We're talking about 800 keys a month.
They had control of the local law enforcement.
- [Interviewer] You mean the Sheriff?
- The Sheriff.
- [Interviewer] You ever meet the Sheriff?
- I only saw him from the air inside his patrol car.
I remember one time as I'm getting ready to land
in the middle of the night, it's not a paved runway.
It's hard from the air to pinpoint
all the ranches around look the same.
So I had trouble trying to find the runway
and I circle once, told him to cool down that,
hey, I can't find it, I can't find it.
Two sheriff's cars come in to the middle of the runway
to turn their blue lights on.
And I said, I got it.
- Earl Dyess Jr. is as redneck a caricature
as you could imagine, he wasn't wearing cowboy boots.
That's the only thing that would've made him any better
was to put him in boots.
He gets caught.
He flips in return for a deal and he testified
in Willy and Sal's trial.
He sits in the witness stand and he just has this sort of
like slow-witted Southern way to him.
And he starts talking about how he remembers
all these deals he does with the boys,
except the only way that he can remember the deals
is based on the food that he was eating at the time.
Oh yeah. I remember that cocaine shipment.
That was a good shipment.
I remember we got some barbecue after that.
Oh, that was good barbecue. Yeah. I liked that barbecue.
The prosecutors would go,
"Yes, I'm sure that was very good barbecue.
What about this other deal?"
Well, we got beer and crackers after that,
I remember the beer and crackers, the crackers were good
and gave me a little indigestion later.
For that I had some jerky.
- [Reporter #5] Miami lawyer, Juan Acosta was
bumped off by a Colombian hit man just days
before he was due to testify before a grand jury.
- One of the, probably the biggest breaks for us,
not such a good break for an attorney
named Juan Acosta was when he got murdered,
turned out that Juan Acosta had been the money man
and money mover and lawyer for the organization.
- Falcon and Magluta used persons
like Juan Acosta and accountants
in order to channel their illegal proceeds
that were generated from drug dealing in Miami
and be able to put them off shore out of the reach
of federal authorities in the United States,
as well as to conceal where their money was going.
- Acosta was involved with. I mean,
he was laundering money for half of Miami, I guess.
- [Pat] And all these records in his file showed
all this money going to and from Panamanian banks.
- His name appeared in documents
in which these shell corporations were used
to fund the construction of apartment buildings
in Magluta and Falcon's father's names.
- [Reporter #6] Shell companies set up by Willy and Sal
in places like Panama with the help of some very
well-connected lawyers here in Panama City.
So well connected, in fact that the lawyer who's listed
as an officer and director on some of these
corporation papers now lives right over there
in the presidential palace,
the President of Panama Guillermo Endara.
The man the United States helped bring to power
after it invaded Panama to get rid
of the drug-connected general Manuel Noriega.
- [Jim] So we removed one guy, Manuel Noriega
for his association with drug traffickers
and installed instead Guillermo Andora,
who is the treasurer on the very companies
that are laundering drug money for Willie and Sal.
You got to love that country.