South Floridian Billy Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys depicts the business of drug running and the staggering corruptive fortunes it accumulates; the regenerative effect of both drug and money on stagnant 1960s-‘70s old-age home Miami; and the mind-blowing violence of cocaine wars as Colombians battled Cubans, both soldiered from among the hundred thousand 1980 outcasts Castro gloated of having “flushed from the toilets of Cuba on the United States.”

Emotionally though not physically addictive, unlike concentrated crystalline street crack, coke is the oxymoronic recreational drug of the rich and often famous and thus has not acquired the bad press of the poor man’s abusive substance. Imaginably from the fabled medieval Land of Cockaigne of delicacies of food and drink, the destructive but euphoria-inducing hallucinogen energizer has been the subject of unwise wisecracks from Tallulah on to Richard Pryor and Robin Williams, mournful songs that despite disclaimers popularize it, i.e., Rev. Gary Davis’ and J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine,” and De Palma’s absurd cult-status distortion of Hawks’s Scarface.

In this vein, one worrisome aspect of Corben’s documentary relates to the absence of any condemnation of self or substance on the part of the three principal participant-interviewees. Incarcerated 1992-99 after a spell on the lam, pilot Mickey Munday speaks dismissively about the Latin suppliers and traffickers, then boasts of his innovative delivery methods that revolutionized the trade and dramatically multiplied the quantities smuggled in with near impunity.

Closest to being Munday’s partner in crime, and the original germ of the picture as well as its most frequent talker, is Jon Pernell Roberts, let out of jail in 2000 and not unwillingly back in Miami as part of the release conditions. Never a user himself, this trim, glib transplanted New Yorker who furnishes much of the information about trafficking back in the day, calls himself neither buyer nor seller but rather a middleman who distributed over two billion dollars’ worth from the Medellín Cartel to the final retailers. His accounts of the weekend warrior partying, social changes wrought and, particularly, the money available, are almost beyond credence but nonetheless true. (With, among other reverses, the 1989 fall of Noriega’s money-laundering Panama, many lost their illegal stashes. “The thing I want to know,” asks Roberts’ ex-girlfriend Toni Mooney, “what happened to all the money?”)

Third major player is Chicago-reared car thief-turned-stone contract killer Jorge “Rivi” Ayala. Handsome, unrepentant while serving two concurrent life sentences, obscene but charming enough almost to make you forget his atrocious acts, he is the connection to his “Black Widow” boss, “queen of cocaine” and “angel of death” Madrina/Godmother Griselda Blanco. A lone woman in Colombian macho drug circles, the lesbian former prostitute is shown only in still photographs, unemotionally oversaw the most repellent brutality, and was inexplicably released from California custody in June 2004 and now assumed to be somewhere back in her native country.

The latter half of the movie is “Rivi’s,” although, distilled from a hundred sixty hours’ interview footage plus fifty from archives and over a thousand stills and mug shots, a poorly identified array of others does appear, in quick cuts separated by at-first puzzling fades-to-white. Among the honest or venal, local and federal, judicial and agency officials, now-retired police Detective Al Singleton is most persuasive in calmly assessing the situation, beginning with the 1979 Dadeland Mall liquor shop internecine overkill and ensuing escalation.

Held within the world it depicts, Cocaine Cowboys does not judge, either, which non-fiction supposedly should not do, anyway. The only overview, a sane one, comes from Miami Herald police reporter Edna Buchanan. Noting Latino hoods’ emotional lack of a Mafia code of decent restraint, backgrounded by her city’s jet-setter Gold Coast she wonders “how many people have to die for a pretty skyline.” Between Time’s 1981 cover story “Paradise Lost” and Newsweek’s later feature “American Casablanca,” Henry Flagler’s town was remade, but at what cost?

Culled from the Wolfson Florida Moving Image Archive, TV news, hokey tourist promo clips and home movies are interspersed, along with footage that must be reconstruction, all in the biggest grain one can imagine for tape to film. Such “outside” material does not, however, furnish any man-in-the-street feeling, so the film has to sink or swim on its three principals. It stays afloat but, with lots of flash and backed by the 1984-90 series composer Jan Hammer’s nervous score, leaves one wishing for a personal, less distanced view, maybe some fiction piece to come on the Godmother and enforcer “Rivi.” 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)