![]() “There are several people who have said they were Pablo Escobar’s son who might not be Pablo Escobar’s son.” He adds that now the challenge is vetting all the people who come forward. “There’s a lot of folks in Miami, when they get released from prison, the first call is to their mother and their second call is to us,” says Corben. He also says that the proliferation of the genre over recent years made it easier to acquire subjects, since nowadays people are far savvier about documentaries and more willing to tell their stories in front of a camera. Photograph: Courtesy Of Netflix/NETFLIXĬorben credits 2015’s The Jinx and Making a Murderer with opening the true crime floodgates, making the current iteration of Cocaine Cowboys possible. Salvatore ‘Sal’ Magluta and Augusto ‘Willy’ Falcon. “I think Ken Burns was the only person who could do anything like that,” says Corben, referring to the documentarian behind The Civil War and The National Parks. ![]() One of the benefits of Corben and Spellman not getting to tell it their first time around is that they have more room to explore the case as a series, which wasn’t really an option 15 years ago. “They often joke down here that Willy and Sal and the satellite cases helped to support the South Florida Criminal Defense Bar for 10, 15, 20 years,” says Corben.įalcon and Magluta’s story was always going to be too big for a feature film. Lawyers, jail wardens, witnesses and jurors were all within reach for Falcon and Magluta, whose organization corrupted the entire criminal justice system while also keeping it afloat. ![]() But with every episode the wily kingpins slip away thanks to the people on their payroll. The Kings of Miami plays like a courtroom drama that gets going at the point in the narrative when most movies and television shows about cartels end: with Falcon and Magluta getting busted. If their 2006 documentary was about how “cocaine cowboys” built Miami’s real estate, the Netflix series reveals how Falcon and Magluta were the crooked joists holding up its halls of justice. “If you were a grocer, a jeweler, in real estate, sold wine or had a restaurant or a nightclub, you were touched by those narco dollars.” ![]() In it, Corben and Spellman present a thesis that Miami was the “only successful case study of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics”, because the benefits from a drug trade bringing in upwards of $7bn made its way to every facet of the community. The original Cocaine Cowboys became an epic mosaic depicting the Miami we know today as a city that was built brick-by-cocaine-brick. Our conversation hops back and forth over the 15 years between their 2006 documentary and their new series, which covers the ground that Corben and Spellman couldn’t the first time out. The story hadn’t ripened yet to the point where everybody had some hindsight and some distance and was ready to talk about it.” The director explains that the court cases that finally put Falcon and Magluta away were just wrapping up in the early aughts, and the peripheral players, some who were just getting out of prison or witness protection, were not yet ready to come forward in a documentary. “The Kings of Miami is the fourth title in the franchise, but it’s the first story we wanted to tell,” Corben tells the Guardian. ![]()
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