Ovalle said that in the ’70s and ’80s there were more than 500 deaths related to the Drug War in Miami each year. “I even remember people telling me that back in the ’80s, our old building Downtown overlooked Biscayne Bay, the editor-in-chief was able to look out and see bodies floating around, and you’d call the police,” Ovalle said. “It was a wild time,” said David Ovalle, a crime reporter with The Miami Herald. The cocaine industry would no longer warrant the title “industry” –it had become a bloodbath. Hailing from Colombia, the high-functioning cartel brought in, easily, $60 million in daily drug money. The Medellín Cartel, founded by Pablo Escobar and made famous by vicious drug lord Griselda Blanco, changed this game. The late ’70s and early ’80s had marijuana and cocaine pouring into Miami ports like champagne at Liv Nightclub. South Florida was the closest entry point into the country for South American smugglers. “But in Miami, you had high-level drug operators generating billions of dollars in illicit, tax-free revenue into the economy and keeping it all here –buying real estate, buying homes, buying condos, buying cars, buying jewelry.” “Everybody had a little extra cash kicking around, and those people were not necessarily in the drug business,” said Corben, director of both Cocaine Cowboys documentaries. The difference between the two? One was built on protein and veggies, the other on cocaine. It seemed like everybody was adding a second story to their tiny, one-family homes and putting in swimming pools they’d probably never use.Ĭorben– only one year old when the Dadeland shooting happened– grew up alongside the city of Miami. Corben returned to his working-class neighborhood after school most days to new pastel-colored Porsches in his neighbors’ driveways. He went to first grade here, had his first kiss here and saw his first dime bag here. Little did they know they’d be the ones to start the War on Drugs, or what many Miamians refer to today as the “Cocaine Cowboy” era.īilly Corben grew up in Miami. The Colombian cocaine traffickers had come to murder two rival dealers that day. They didn’t seem to mind leaving a truckload of deadly weapons behind for police to find, and they didn’t bat an eye while opening fire on innocent civilians in the parking lot. The gunmen fired their machineguns as if they were ruffians in a Western. A pair of Latino cocaine dealers saunter into Crown Liquor Store inside a bustling Dadeland Mall, spew two other men in a non-stop barrage of gunfire and flee the scene, firing their machine guns every which way and leaving an ominous white truck in their wake.īut it wasn’t just the shooting that was so shocking about what came to be known as the Dadeland Massacre –it was the way in which it happened.
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