For director Billy Corben, the explosive Netflix docuseries Cocaine Cowboys has been an odyssey 12 years in the making.
Over the last two decades, Corben and his producing partner Alfred Spellman have made several docs about the Miami drug trade—starting in 2006 with the original Cocaine Cowboys documentary, which focused on the brutal reign of Griselda Blanco. That doc was followed by two sequels, diving deeper into the “Florida fuckery” genre the Miami duo created and cornered.
The latest installment is the Netflix series, which follows the wild lives of Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon, the drug-dealing kingpins known as “Los Muchachos,” who ran the coke trade in Miami in the 1980s. They were accused of smuggling at least 75 tons of the stuff into the U.S. and raking in more than $2.1 billion over the years. They lived dangerously, two larger-than-life Tony Montanas outmuscling the law at several turns before their inevitable arrests. But as it turns out, Cocaine Cowboys isn’t just the apotheosis of Corben and Spellman’s work. It’s also the genesis.
“It’s actually the first story that we wanted to tell,” Corben says.
When the duo originally set out to tell this story in the early aughts, no one from the Magluta-Falcon orbit was ready to talk. That dam broke a few years later, when Marilyn Bonachea, Magluta’s longtime girlfriend, confidant, and occasional bookkeeper, saw the original Cocaine Cowboys and reached out to Corben. The filmmaker was pleasantly surprised, but not shocked. The original Cocaine Cowboys doc had become a cult hit, to the point where he and Spellman fielded calls for interviews with an increasing frequency. The director says Spellman often jokes that when people leave prison in Florida, “their first call is to their mother, and their second call is to us, to make a documentary about them.”
Bonachea was finally out of the witness-protection program and ready to talk, offering the duo a way into the Magluta-Falcon orbit. After she got in touch, Corben and Spellman began putting feelers out for more subjects, mentioning the project in an interview with Ocean Drive Magazine. The piece, shockingly, caught the attention of Sal Magluta himself—an Ocean Drive subscriber who is currently serving out his prison sentence in a maximum-security federal prison in Illinois. He reached out to the filmmaker in a letter, offering access to his parents’ house and his archives, including photos, videos, and legal records.
“I wind up in Sal’s parents’ home, and his mother is making me cafecito and feeding me pastelitos,” Corben recalls with a laugh. “I’m going through their photo albums from Cuba all the way through basically Sal’s third arrest in 1991.”
Cocaine Cowboys is a map of Magluta and Falcon’s unbelievable lives, tracing their humble beginnings up through their lavish peaks. As the series shows, the duo constantly avoided legal troubles, getting arrested several times but easily shaking off charges—thanks, in part, to their deep pockets and the network of people they strategically paid off. And even when they were arrested, they maintained their impossibly high, luxurious standards; Bonachea, for example, notes that when Magluta was in solitary confinement during the duo’s first trial, he paid off guards and instructed close friends to become paralegals so that when his attorneys came to visit, they could tag along as associates. Magluta paid his attorneys for frequent, hours-long visits so he could hold court with friends, who smuggled in Xanax and lobster. Magluta could easily afford it, with he and Falcon allegedly spending upwards of $25 million on their defense.
“No one else could afford that,” Corben says of that era. “There was no other prisoner who could have someone pull them out of a cell 24 hours a day and who could pay off guards. This is some Goodfellas shit.”
But as the documentary shows, Magluta and Falcon’s good luck eventually ran out. In 2003, Magluta was sentenced to 205 years in prison for money laundering and bribing a juror. Falcon, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to a money laundering charge and was sentenced to 20 years.
So where are the key players now? Bonachea, according to Corben, is living quietly in retirement, and plans on writing a book about her life. “She has really compelling stories, even deeper than what we get into in the series,” Corben says.
Magluta, meanwhile, is still serving out his sentence in prison. Corben has corresponded with him via snail mail and email, and says the drug kingpin is, frankly, living a terrible life.
“It’s really brutal. I think he’s in his cell for something like 23 hours out of the day. He has very limited access to telephone, very limited access to email, very limited access to the outside, like yard time,” Corben says. “It’s a very debilitating life. And I think that, over these years, it’s been very deleterious for both his physical and mental health.”
Through it all, Corben notes, Magluta has stayed religious: “He is very much in touch with his God.” Magluta’s religion is a notable through line in Cocaine Cowboys, with Bonachea noting that as his reign became bloodier and bloodier, he became obsessed with absolution and getting forgiveness so he could still go to heaven.
The last piece in the puzzle is Falcon, who served out his sentence and was immediately deported to the Dominican Republic. After an outcry in the country, though, he “was asked to leave,” Corben puts it. Falcon’s current whereabouts are not publicly known—though Corben has an idea of where the former Miami drug lord has gone.
“I believe that I know where he is now. I haven’t confirmed it yet, so I won’t say, but he’s doing his best to live out his retirement years,” Corben says. “He’s kind of like Marilyn—just trying to live quietly now and under the radar.”
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