Cocaine Cowboys: Reloaded

In the eighties Colombian cocaine barons moved into Miami, and the city quickly became America's capital for drugs, murder and cash. The documentary tells it through witnesses: the smuggler Mickey Munday, the dealer Jon Roberts and the hitman Jorge Ayala describe what they did themselves. The part played in the city by Griselda Blanco and the Medellín cartel is set out alongside news footage from the period. This is the expanded version of Billy Corben's 2006 documentary, stretched to two and a half hours with hundreds of hours of additional interviews and newly surfaced archive material. The strength and the weakness of the telling sit in the same place: everything rests on the accounts of people who were involved in the crimes, and those accounts are not challenged. The side of the victims stays largely silent in the film. It remains one of the fullest documentaries about Miami in that period.