Documentary directed by Billy Corben chronicles how cocaine, cash, and violence transformed Miami of the early 1980s into one of the most dangerous places on earth. The film begins by profiling a shooting at Dadeland Mall on July 11, 1979, in which two Colombians were machine gunned repeatedly in broad daylight at a liquor store. The story of how this came to be is related primarily by three men, all of them superlative documentary subjects:

John Roberts was a former nightclub owner who moved to Miami at age 25, and ended up distributing $2 billion in cocaine for the Medellin cartel. His partner, Mickey Munday – “a redneck from South Florida” – smuggled over 38 tons of cocaine from Colombia to Miami in planes he piloted. Jorge “Rivi” Ayala grew up in Chicago and later confessed to 29 murders, as head of security for Griselda Blanco, the so-called godmother of the cocaine trade. Ayala gives his interview from prison.

The demand for cocaine in South Florida was so great in the late ’70s that Roberts outgrew his Cuban suppliers. A Ford model he was dating introduced him to Munday, who ran transportation for the Medellin cartel. The men went into business. They bought property in Florida, built two runways, and hangars that looked like barns. They had their own towing company, and would haul cars loaded with cocaine to Colombian wholesalers already in Florida. Their operation went for six years without a hitch.

Retail sales in Miami soared. Real estate agents, car dealers, and jewelers all profited from the cocaine industry. Dozens of nightclubs opened (The Mutiny in Coconut Grove catered specifically to drug dealers). South Florida operated more banks than any area in the country. The film points out that prior to the 1960s, Miami was like Alabama. There was no money. The $7 billion a year cocaine economy funded a lot of development in modern day Miami.

Jorge Ayala started out in Miami delivering dope and picking up money. He was taken to meet Griselda Blanco, a Colombian who ran her own family. She had developed a reputation even more fearful than the men in her line of work, typically having whoever she was after shot, and anyone around them shot. Ayala led a ragtag group of enforcers who acted on Blanco’s orders, and were responsible for much of the violence in South Florida, including the Dadeland shootings.

Dadeland was beyond the scope of anything the public had seen up to that point. The “cocaine cowboys” would kill anybody in sight. 86 rounds were fired. The liquor store looked like a wild west shootout. Once police realized what they were up against, with the help of the federal government, they slowly started to regain control of the streets.

If Cocaine Cowboys had been done as a narrative film – with actors playing Roberts or Ayala – it would have been totally unbelievable. The amounts of cash, the impunity the drug smugglers operated with, and the level of violence that was perpetrated would have made Scarface look like a school play. By finding people who knew this world inside and out, and letting them explain how they did what they did, the filmmakers reeled me in from the get-go.

This is probably one of the best gangster movies of the last twenty years. It’s fast paced, ceaselessly entertaining, and at 116 minutes, jams enough historical detail for three movies into one. Corben and his people do a fantastic job cutting together tourist bureau film, local news reels of the time, and recreated footage to tell the story of modern day Miami. It pretty much does for “The Magic City” what Casino did for Las Vegas, for better or for worse.

Corben doesn’t glamorize the drug trade, but makes no bones that half of modern day Miami was built with cocaine. That’s something I haven’t heard anyone admit before. Roberts, Munday and Ayala are straight forward and talk without pretense. Like the film, they’re charismatic, frequently insightful, occasionally witty, and demonstrate again that truth is stranger than fiction.