Cocaine Cowboys: Netflix’s new wild docuseries

The new docuseries, Cocaine Cowboys:  The kings of Miami, focuses on its two yuppie-era playboys, Cuban-born friends, champion boat racers, and kingpins Augusto "Willy" Falcon and Salvador "Sal" Magluta, also known as Los Muchachos. 

In this new docuseries, director Billy Corben breaks down the narc-centric series and reveals where Sal Magluta, Willie Falcon, and Marilyn Bonachea are today.  It's a binge-able series that ignores the darker sides of the drug trade. Before Narcos and Hollywood blockbusters like Tom cruise’s America Made – made Narcos dramas mainstream, there was the cult cable hit Cocaine Cowboys.  Spoiler Alert!

The sensational 2006 documentary recounted the south Florida underworld of feuding drug kingpins whose shootouts sparked panicked news coverage in the 1980s. The filmmakers were the first to obtain behind-the-scenes information from former cartel members. The documentary influenced subsequent books and films about the Miami drug wars. Cocaine Cowboys 2 and many others. lor

The new docuseries, Cocaine Cowboys:  The kings of Miami, focuses on its two yuppie-era playboys, Cuban-born friends, champion boat racers, and kingpins Augusto "Willy" Falcon and Salvador "Sal" Magluta, also known as Los Muchachos. When they were arrested in the early 1990s, they were accused of smuggling over 75 tons of cocaine into the United States, worth more than $2 billion.

Throughout six episodes, Kings of Miami follows the pair's rise, fall, and imprisonment, detailing first-generation Cuban immigrant culture that impacted them, the involvement of drug enforcement agencies, and the resulting intrigue and betrayal.

The filmmakers didn’t have access to Falcon or Magluta for their new series, so all we got is an outside view through their girlfriends and lieutenants. According to them, there was nothing noteworthy about the Miami High dropout's early life that would lead them to a future as cocaine kingpins. Magluta came from an industrious Jewish Cuban family who ran a bakery. Falcon came from a similar background – his early years are not well documented because the accounts come from a distant relative.

Cocaine Cowboys is a map of Falcon's and Magluta's incredible lives, following their humble beginnings all the way up to their extravagant peaks. As the series demonstrates, the duo consistently evaded legal trouble, being detained multiple times but simply escaping charges, thanks in part to their vast finances and a network of people they intentionally paid off.

Even when they were arrested, they maintained their impossibly high, luxurious standards; for example, 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 hired his attorneys for hours-long visits to hold court with buddies who brought in Xanax and lobster. Magluta could easily afford it, as he and Falcon are said to have spent up to $25 million on defense.

But as the documentary illustrates, their luck ran out. Magluta was sentenced to 205 years in prison in 2003 for money laundering and bribery of a juror. Meanwhile, Falcon pled guilty to money laundering and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

All in all, it's a worthwhile docuseries to watch as it’s a top ten series today on Netflix – in Qatar