Cocaine Cowboys - Billy Corben interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
BILLY Corben talks about his new documentary Cocaine Cowboys and meeting the types of people (pictured) who inspired films like Scarface and television shows like Miami Vice…
He also talks about the allure of Miami to filmmakers and games manufacturers and why it’s the new Chicago…
Q. What inspired you to make Cocaine Cowboys?
Billy Corben: Well, living in Miami my whole life is the simple answer. The more complicated answer is that I went to the Sundance Film Festival in 2000 with Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, which actually aired here on Channel 4. We did 60 interviews in five days but no matter where they were from – America or Europe – the last question was always the same thing. It was: “Now that you’ve come to Sundance – which is the peak of American independent filmmaking – are you going to move to LA or New York?” But our answer was always the same: “Well, no we’re going to go back to Miami.” It seemed obvious to us to go home.
There are so many wonderful stories to be told out of Miami that have been completely untapped for some reason. Miami is very well exploited as a location for films but it’s never considered an indigenous filmmaking location. But that was important to us because you can always be another schmuck filmmaker in New York or LA – there’s a dearth of those. But there’s nobody associated with Miami. If you think New York, you think Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese, in Baltimore you’ve got Barry Levinson and John Waters and in Austin you have Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater – there are plenty of filmmakers who are associated with the city they come from and vice versa. So, we decided to start this production company, Rakontur, that was associated with Miami.
Raw Deal was about the University of Florida – so it was a Florida story but not a Miami story. So it was very important to us for the next one to be a real Miami calling card piece to establish Rakontur in the way that we wanted – to say we’re cool, independent, ballsy, non-fiction films. And then we came up with a very powerful title for our next film, Cocaine Cowboys, which is very recognisable and something that people can take to instantly. It’s also very easy to remember. This has been something that we wanted to do for years.
Q. So what was the biggest challenge of getting Cocaine Cowboys made?
Billy Corben: Like anything in life, the road to success is access, access, access – whether you’re a journalist or anything. In the case of a filmmaker it’s access to financing, access to information, and access to a story, script, character or documentary. We needed access to archive footage, access to the criminal files and access to a good composer. So, when we found ourselves with Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday we realised that we had the real deal here and something very extraordinary. So, we got in touch with Jorge “Rivi” Ayala (pictured above) and the whole thing snowballed.
Q. How easy was it to get hold of Rivi, given that he’s still in custody for the crimes he committed?
Billy Corben: All we had to do was write a letter to him in prison. But there’s no guarantee he’s going to get it, there’s no guarantee he’s going to write back and there’s no guarantee he’s even going to want to meet up with you. You can’t visit a prisoner unless he invites you or adds you to his list. Even if you’re a member of the media he has to approve your visit.
So, he responded positively and we went and met with him prior to arriving with a camera crew and he was golden. This is a guy who’s got a lot of time on his hands – he’s already served over 20 years. I’m sure that as soon as he got our letter he was excited by the prospect that there were people out there who were interested in what he had to say after all this time sitting in prison. He also has a very unique plea bargain arrangement with the prosecutor in Miami Dade County that allows him to discuss the 12 murders that he committed in Miami. And he remembers them with striking detail.
He has to be a little coy about some of the other murders, because he doesn’t have a deal, and in the case of any of the Florida murders he could still face the death penalty – but not for the Miami ones. But he’s still got three life sentences to serve, so I think it was a nice change of pace to his typical, mundane, repetitive existence in prison.
Q. What about Mickey Munday – he seems a little more apologetic in the documentary…
Billy Corben: Mickey took a little coaxing. He didn’t really understand the significance of the drug trade and the economic impact or the historical significance on the community – not to mention he had no concept of this new hip-hop generation that represented this new young Miami or that there was this new level of intrigue with this era and lifestyle, or this dangerous, sexy, cool world that they existed in. I had to explain to him that there would be 12-year-old kinds who cite this [Cocaine Cowboys] as their favourite movie. I know this because they write to me every day!
Q. They do?
Billy Corben: [Smiles] I have to admit that when they tell me it’s their favourite ever documentary, I have to ask: “How many documentaries have you seen?!” But that’s still cool because it means that we’re also introducing a new generation to non-fiction filmmaking, which is very significant. We’re telling them a story they clearly want to know more about. It’s a history lesson packaged as a gangster film. So, it’s cool to hear kids saying to one another: “You don’t know anything about Miami until you’ve seen Cocaine Cowboys. If you’re going to come to Miami, you have to see it; if you live in Miami, you have to watch the movie.” Fortunately for us, Miami is a very international city and it’s very well known all over the world and so there’s an added appeal already.
Q. There have been a lot of films and computer games and even musicians who seem to have cashed in on the city’s drug history – whether it’s on shows like Miami Vice, in computer games like Grand Theft Auto or rappers. Do you ever feel like Miami’s bloody past has been exploited?
Billy Corben: We finally embarked upon this project in the wake of the 25th anniversary of the release of Scarface and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City having become – at that time – the most successful video game of all time. That took place completely in the Miami of the 1980s with all the appropriate sights and sounds.
So, obviously the nostalgia was real and the interest of a new generation was real. It was in that environment and for that demographic that we did this movie. It also influenced the way we structured the story – the smuggling, the money and then the murder. It was a basic three-act structure. It gets a little bit glamorous because these guys were very sophisticated and clever and people get a little bit of a kick from seeing them rub law enforcements’ nose in shit, for lack of a better term. I mean the story of Mickey being picked up by the Coast Guard while he had a load and then being asked to tow them back inland is such a phenomenal story. The audience just love that.
But then by act three, even though we have this incredibly cool character in Rivi and this extraordinary character in [Godmother] Griselda Blanco, the reality sets in. The toll on the community and the public safety issue becomes very real. We even have people at the end of the movie saying: “Whatever benefits we received from the industry were not worth the cost on society and having this kind of public violence.” Whether or not that’s true is a matter of opinon but I think the very real moral of the story is that in this trade you either end up dead or in jail, so I think that’s understood.
Q. And yet Miami has benefited greatly from the drug trade?
Billy Corben: The unique, post-modern twist on the whole thing that we do mention in the epilogue is that during the 1980s we saw the advent of jet travel. Miami Beach was no longer the premiere seaside destination for Americans because they could now get to the Caribbean, or Mexico and they could do much more exotic things rather than taking the family down to Miami Beach as they did in the ’50s and ’60s. Tourism was still our biggest industry at the time but it had peaked and now it was on the decline. We now know that the cocaine industry rivalled the tourism industry at that time as the biggest industry in the state of Florida.
But then an interesting thing also happened post-cocaine wars in that art began to imitate life and we had the popularity of Scarface and Miami Vice. We had this world-renowned reputation of Miami and Miami Beach being this sexy, cool, destination, which ultimately attracted the modelling industry, the European tourists chasing models and created this whole sort of Renaissance of South Beach in the 1990s as America’s Riviera and the premiere nightclub destination of the world. This was all as a direct result of a reputation built in what was otherwise a very dark part of our history.
But what’s interesting, too, is that the same thing has already happened in Chicago with its Prohibition era tales of Al Capone and The Untouchables. If you go to that city, you can have gangster tours of Chicago, murder tours and visits to the St Valentine’s Day Massacre site!
They’ve really embraced their salacious and dangerous past. For Miami, it’s a little bit of a younger city and the wounds are fresher… but there are a lot of young people who are now discovering this movie and saying: “I think it’s fuckingg cool that here’s now this testament, this tribute, this love letter to Miami and our history.” And I think we’re going to start to see more of that.
b>Read our review of Cocaine Cowboys