Director Billy Corben is extending his Cocaine Cowboysfranchise, established with a 2006 documentary on the Miami drug scene, with a six-part docuseries about Sal Magluta and Willy Falcon, two high school dropouts who became one of the biggest cocaine dealers in Miami, trafficking in billions of dollars worth of blow that originated with the Medellin cartel in Colombia. But the series is less about their rise but about what they had to do to keep their freedom after the feds closed in.
Opening Shot: An ’80s era shot of the bridge to the Florida Keys. “FLORIDA KEYS 1986” flashes on the screen, and we see a boat racing team called the Seahawks.
The Gist: The first episode talks briefly about Malguta and Falcon, whose families migrated to Miami from Cuba, and how Sal was almost always the brains behind whatever they did together and Willy, who was handsome and chatty but not too bright, was the face and voice. Sal’s ex-girlfriend, Marilyn Bonachea, talks about how they met and how he’d trick his parents, who didn’t speak English, by saying all the “Fs” on his report card stood for “Felicidad”, despite never attending class.
As the story of the two careens forward, we get a glimpse of their org chart, and people who acted as pilots, dealers and other important members of the team talk about the pair, along with Jorge Valdes, the kingpin that trusted the pair with his operation when he was hauled to prison.
Like Valdes talks about, Sal was especially eager to live a life different than his parents, who owned a bakery, worked hard, and just scraped by. After starting with dealing a few ounces of weed here and there, they quickly graduated to the more portable coke, working their way into Valdes’ trust. When he challenged them to sell a “leftover” 30 klios in a short period of time, they brought in millions of dollars in the span of a few days.
Willy and Sal, and the people who worked for them in Miami and later Los Angeles, didn’t know what to do with the millions in cash they were getting. One of their traffickers, “Pegy” Rosello, talks about having millions of dollars sitting in a box in the closet of his bedrooms in his parents’ house. Willy and Sal spent wildly and conspicuously, not the least of which was on the champion boat racing team that was often featured on ESPN and other cable networks.
They kept getting busted, in both cities, but kept wriggling free and jumping their bond. In Miami, they were sentenced to 14 months for trafficking but their lawyers delayed their sentences for years by endlessly appealing it. Even when the feds caught up to them in Miami — thanks in part to someone in LA seeing them racing boats on TV — Sal Magluta paid someone off to get him out of jail, even though he was supposed to serve out that 14-month sentence.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The tone of Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings Of Miami seems to be in the more upbeat and almost nostalgic vein of drug-related docuseries like Queen Of Meth.
Our Take: Certainly, the people describing the “glory days” of Sal and Willy’s operation — which got them the moniker of “the most prolific drug traffickers” in the nation’s history — aren’t looking at those days with remorse or guilt. Their view of it is more nostalgic than anything else. But Corbin’s goal isn’t to show how Magluta and Falcon quickly rose to the top of the drug trafficking heap in South Florida. It’s to show how they operated when they were at the top, what they did when the feds closed in on them, and how they conducted themselves during and after their trial.
It’s why the first episode felt fast and perfunctory. These two guys have such a convoluted history of beating the rap, even after finally standing trial for their operation, that setting up how they got to that stage is going to end up being a speedy process. The first episode seemed to be a blur of vignettes about how the two of them faked it until they made it, until the point where they were flamboyantly spending their millions, getting snagged by law enforcement, and consistently escaping any major prison time.
We often complain that docuseries take six hours to tell three hours of story, which leads to a lot of filler. Here, it feels like there’s about eight to ten hours of story, squeezed into six 45-50 minute episodes. So as we speed through Sal and Willy’s rise, we don’t get too deep of a look at the conditions in Miami that led to such massive operations to exist, and how relatively uneducated guys like Sal and Willy could quickly rise to the top of that operation.
We’re not asking the show to be some sober treatise on the war on drugs, though. The theme song by Pitbull and the constant Latin beat that pulsates in the background drives the attitude of the show, which is about how these two guys managed to stave off prison time for so long. So there is a tone of admiration and amazement to all of the interviews, which matches the upbeat soundtrack. Corben doesn’t position this as some dark, scary, noirish true crime series, and that is refreshing.
One thing we wish we could have seen was interviews with Magluta and Falcon. Falcon was deported to the Dominican Republic (not his native Cuba), and Corben doesn’t know his whereabouts. But Magluta is in a Supermax in Colorado; the fact that Corben didn’t get a chance to talk to him makes the show a bit less dynamic than it should be, given its pacing and tone.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: As a metaphor for Magluta’s ability to pay off the right people and stay out of prison, we see the Seahawk racing team, with the sportscaster doing the play-by-play saying that the team seems to be having a little trouble but Magluta is pushing them to speed up.
Sleeper Star: We’d watch Marilyn Bonachea all day. She’s got a heck of a sense of humor about her time with Sal, and that sense of humor informs the rest of the docuseries.
Most Pilot-y Line: Going down the org chart of Willy and Sal’s organization feels a bit dry and doesn’t really shed any light on how a team like this is structured or built.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we really disliked the pacing of the first episode of Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings Of Miami, the story of Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta is just getting started. It’ll be interesting to see how the two of them consistently beat prison time and how they finally were able to be put away.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Stream Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings Of Miami On Netflix
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
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