Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami

The great Seahawk racing team. How do you look forward to the race today?

- We'll see when we get out there. - Don't believe anything he says.

Who just came into this picture here is the one and only Sal Magluta,

the man who is the driving force behind the Seahawk race team.

The way it's going, you may end up with a third national championship

somewhere along the way.

Well, I'll take it.

Why not?

Three in a row's not too bad. They come in threes.

Willy Falcon, driver of Seahawk.

Willy Falcon looks confident to me today.

- I wish him the best of luck. - Thank you.

There's the yellow flag and the flare. They're now on the course.

Right off the bat, look at these two cats going at it. A drag race, if you will.

Willy Falcon makes a bid for the lead

over Sal Magluta.

Uh-oh! Sal Magluta spins out!

You're gonna see the number 20, Willy Falcon,

go by and now he has moved up.

Whoa! And we're starting to fly.

Jesse James has taken over the lead.

Willy Falcon... He's finding some extra power.

Whoa! Seahawk has taken over the lead.

A little happiness on the part of the navigator

as he kinda jumps up and down.

He knows.

They're waving out there.

Look at the excitement in that crew now.

What a thrill for this crew to come here as the second boat of the Seahawk team.

Look who's excited, their teammates who broke early.

Look at Sal Magluta do a dance.

This team will be celebrating for three weeks, I think.

Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta, Los Muchachos, "the boys,"

the offshore powerboat champions indicted for trafficking

more than 75 tons of cocaine worth an estimated two billion dollars.

Making it what federal authorities say was the largest drug case in history.

Witness assassinations,

unprecedented corruption of the American justice system.

Few people in South Florida have been untouched

by the saga of Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta

that has taken these Cuban exiles from dropouts

to the epitome of the Cocaine Cowboys of the 1980s.

I was born in New York City.

My parents are Cuban.

And in 1971, we moved to Miami.

This is Southwest 8th Street or as the Cubans call it,

8th Street of the Southwest. Little Havana's main street.

The Tamiami Trail now symbolizes an economic miracle

brought about by Miami's Cuban refugees.

I was 15 and a half. It was summer, and I needed a job.

My mom said, "Next to Publix is a bakery, a Jewish-Cuban bakery

with the rye bread, the pumpernickel."

And then they had guayabas, and all that kinda stuff.

So I said, "Okay." I went over there.

I met Sal's mom and dad, and uncles.

They all owned the bakery.

The next day, I met Sal.

I just didn't like him. I thought, "Who is this guy with attitude here?"

He was supposed to be working in the back.

But he would set up a stool where I worked in the counter

and he'd sit there and watch because I wore this little pink uniform.

It was really short. He would sit there and wait for me to bend over.

He spent three weeks trying to get my phone number.

I said, "I'll give you one number per week."

I gave him one number

until we went down the line to the seven numbers,

then he got my phone number.

Most of the time we went out, he didn't have a penny to his name.

He says, "One day I'm gonna have

all the money in the world. I'll buy any car I want."

I was like, "Great."

Sal was always up to no good. He was mischievous.

He had just gotten kicked out of Miami High School.

So he ended up in my high school.

And I would sit and do his homework, so he wouldn't get in trouble.

His mother and father don't speak any English.

And he would take his report card home and his mother would say,

"What does that F stand for?"

"That F stands for Felicidad ."

Felicidad means "happy." He got a good grade.

And they believed it all these years,

all those F's, that Sal was doing great in school.

Because he was getting Felicidad, Felicidad, Felicidad.

When he wasn't even attending class.

He would date at least ten girls at the same time

before I found out.

And he got one of the girls pregnant.

I wouldn't date him anymore after that.

Gloria and Manolo Magluta were my parents' best friends.

To me, they were like my parents.

So Sal was like my cousin. Actually, like my brother.

Sal's parents, they owned a bakery shop and they worked very hard,

extremely hard-working people.

They were in church two, three times a week.

Here were these amazing parents, but they weren't there all day long.

I look back now,

and that probably started to become the formation

of what happened in Sal's life.

Every night, Sal would call me. We would chat and he'd read me the Bible.

Sal's main concern, always,

was whether he was going to go to heaven or not.

He said to me one time that, if you repent,

no matter what bad deeds you do, that you will go to heaven.

So I think in his mind, it's like, "I can do anything I want

as long as later I repent, and I feel bad for what I did,

and then God will forgive me and I will go to heaven."

I think that things started to go wrong for Sal.

He was hanging around the wrong crowd.

Sal's best friend during that time was Willy Falcon.

Willy was intimidating,

where Sal wasn't.

Sal was the peacemaker.

Willy was more of the brawler. Like, you know, "I'm in your face."

He had this expression of going like this all the time,

"What you gonna do about it?"

At that time, I had no idea that they were drug dealers.

We all shared one thing. We were poor and didn't wanna stay poor.

Willy and Sal started off as small-time, little pot pushers out of Miami High.

They sorta struggled, don't do well, end up being high school dropouts.

My sister-in-law's boyfriend introduced me to Willy.

"Tony, why don't you give these guys a try?"

At that time, Willy was selling dime bags with Sal.

Willy was a jovial guy, very nice. Uh, not too smart.

I knew his mother and his father and his brother, Taby.

Willy and Salvador were always together. They were like family.

But really, Willy didn't know what the hell was going on.

How much money they had, he didn't know. That was all Sal.

Willy was always kept in the dark.

Willy was, for all intents and purposes, Sal's dummy.

I'd fly the marijuana from Colombia and I was selling it to them.

But then I stopped.

It's not enough money.

There was so many people in the marijuana business,

because it took so many people to handle one load.

Whereas in the cocaine, you can bring in 800, 1000 kilo.

Literally, I could handle that with four people.

They moved from marijuana to cocaine.

I wouldn't have said they were drug dealers.

They were buying ounces on the streets and reselling it.

Sal was just a regular young guy doing a little hustle on the side.

You know, if anybody, I was a drug dealer, right?

I'm the one bringing in 800 kilos a month.

I think that Sal put two and two together.

My father started telling how I was always traveling.

and that I was putting a banana company together in Colombia.

Sal just said, "Impossible. I mean, Jorge is 21 years old,

he's making a million dollars a month. He ain't selling bananas."

"Let me talk to your son. Tell him to give me a meeting."

I finally gave him a meeting.

I had about 15 minutes to meet with him. I was in a rush. He was at my office.

He said, "Give me a chance. I think I can sell some coke here and there."

I'm like, "Well, how much money do you have?"

And he's like, "I think ten or 20 thousand dollars."

I literally almost peed in my pants.

At that time, it was $42,000, in Miami, wholesale for a kilo of cocaine.

I didn't wanna insult him because I've always loved Sal, even today.

I'm like, "All right, let me see

if the opportunity arises because now, we really are committed somewhere else."

My handsome Latin friends, the brothers Falcon, Gus and Willy.

In about 1978,

my older sister, Gina, she started dating Taby, Gustavo Falcon.

As soon as she turned 18, my sister and Taby got married.

Through Taby, I met his older brother Willy Falcon.

And through Willy Falcon, I met his best friend, Sal Magluta.

I grew up in Little Havana when we came from Cuba.

It was like the Cuban ghetto.

Among Latins in South Florida, particularly Cubans,

there is a lingual reference to different aspects of community life.

Police are called la jara.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is la federica.

And when talking about a gun, Latins say, la fuca.

My parents didn't know English. So it was hard for us growing up.

My dad had two jobs. He would leave at seven in the morning

and get back at ten o'clock at night.

I saw my dad working so hard.

That's not what I wanted to do when I was a kid growing up.

I didn't wanna have two jobs.

But now, I was Willy and Taby Falcon's little brother.

I hung out with Taby, like, on a daily basis.

After school, I would go to their house. Willy's friends would come by.

I would wash their cars and get paid 20 bucks.

Expensive Corvettes, Cadillacs, Porsches.

So on a Saturday and Sunday, I would make like $200 in two days.

My dad would make $200 probably in three weeks.

So, I'm like, "Oh, this is good," you know?

I mean, whatever they're doing, it's paying off.

A lot of Willy's friends, they would taunt me, you know?

They would go in and go, "Pegy, here look what I got in here."

They opened the shoe box and it was all money,

and I'm, like, "Damn." You know?

Right then and there, I knew what they were doing.