Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami

Even as Cuban-born, Miami-based drug kingpins Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon were building a massive cocaine-distribution network in the 1980s and rising to the top of the drug dealing game, they were appearing on ESPN as the smiling and jovial and ultra-competitive captains of Team Seahawk, which won multiple national offshore powerboat championships.
‘Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami’: 3.5 out of 4.Years later, after Magluta and Falcon were acquitted of ordering murders and numerous other serious crimes despite a mountain of evidence against them, the feds started looking into the financial dealings of the jury foreman, an airline mechanic with a modest income who suddenly was paying off all his credit card debt, buying a home in the Florida Keys with cash and purchasing a snazzy boat. The foreman’s defense attorneys came up with an all-time doozy of a defense: Yes, the foreman was spending hundreds of thousands in cash from crimes — but the money didn’t come from Magluta and Falcon, it came from the foreman’s cousin, a crooked Miami cop. In other words, he was spending DIFFERENT crime money.Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami Season 1 Download.

Among the many high-priced, high-profile defense attorneys at one time employed by Magluta and Falcon was Roy “The Professor” Black, who successfully defended William Kennedy Smith against rape charges, and subsequently married one of the jurors, Lea Black. She eventually became a cast member on “The Real Housewives of Miami” — along with the ex-wife of one Pedro “Pegy” Rosello, a criminal associate of Magluta and Falcon.

Don’t worry, I’m not giving away all the good stuff; not by a long shot. That’s just a small sampling of the bat-bleep crazy developments in director Billy Corben’s epic, expanded follow-up to his memorable cult classic 2006 documentary, “Cocaine Cowboys,” and the 2008 “Cocaine Cowboys 2.” This is an extremely well-crafted, fast-paced and consistently involving series, featuring the usual true-crime documentary mix of archival footage, undercover audio and video recordings, present-day interviews with prosecutors, journalists and many of the key criminal players on the expansive Magluta/Falcon crime tree, and some terrific visuals.