In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with renowned true crime author T. J. English for an insightful conversation on organized crime, focusing on English’s latest book, The Last Kilo. English, well-known for his work on the Irish mob and the Cuban drug trade, dives into the complex world of cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, examining the rise of Cuban and Mexican cartels and the historical forces that shaped the cocaine industry.

T. J. English begins by sharing his journey into crime journalism, explaining his unique perspective on crime writing as a means to explore broader social themes, from the pursuit of the American Dream to the stories of marginalized communities in America. He explains how organized crime can act as a lens for understanding cultural assimilation and survival strategies across generations, pointing out that many immigrant communities, such as the Irish and Italians, were historically pushed toward illegal activities as a means of survival.

The discussion then turns to the Cuban drug trade in America, especially during the cocaine boom of the 1980s. English highlights key players like Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta, who used political connections and resources to pioneer cocaine distribution networks. The conversation explores how Los Muchachos, a Cuban drug trafficking group, established a stronghold in the U.S. by strategically lowering prices and expanding cocaine’s reach, setting the stage for explosive demand.

Throughout the episode, English contrasts Los Muchachos’ tactics with those of other criminal organizations, particularly noting their reliance on loyalty and community ties over violence. This approach, forged through the shared experiences of exile, helped them maintain unity and discipline in their operations.

Jenkins and English also discuss the evolution of the cocaine market, from its glamorous early days to the more violent era marked by the rise of crack cocaine in the late 1980s, which reshaped public perceptions and spurred aggressive law enforcement responses. T. J. English explains how these shifts pressured Los Muchachos to adapt, prompting alliances with Mexican cartels to continue thriving in an ever-changing landscape.

Tune in to this episode for an in-depth look at the history, culture, and operations behind the Cuban drug trade, and how organized crime continues to reflect the broader social dynamics at play in America.

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Transcript

[0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here

[0:02] in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective, a later sergeant. Now, I’ve got this podcast going, Gangland Wire, and we have another guy that I was just talking to TJ a little bit. I picked up a book called The West years ago before I even thought about doing a podcast or any of this entertainment business, and I was entranced by that book, The Westies. It’s about the Irish mob in Manhattan in New York City. Now they ended up working with the Gambinos and that’s a page turner. He’s got a new one out here that I’ve been going through it. I just got it the other day and it is a page turner too. So it’s TJ English. Welcome, TJ. My pleasure. Great to be here. All right. So you are the man when it comes to reporting on the mob. There’s a few of you guys. You know, Nicholas Pelleggi has got Las Vegas sewed up and Anthony DiStefano, he’s got New York sewed up. But I tell you what, when it comes to Cuba, especially with your trilogy, your Cuban trilogy, you’ve got that sewed up. You are the man in that. And you’re the man as far as the Irish mob is concerned to me. So I really am excited about doing this interview with you and meeting you. You want, you know, TJ, you won more book awards and been on the New York Times bestseller list. that I can’t even count them all. I don’t know how many there are.

[1:29] You know, let’s talk just a little bit about, I guess, where you came from, how you got into this. How did you get into this true crime writing and what is it that attracts you?

[1:40] Well, you know, I started as a journalist, and for me as a journalist, crime was kind of the ultimate calling. It was what requires the greatest skills from a journalist. It’s a subject that nobody wants you to write about, especially the people who are engaged in criminal activity in particular.

[2:03] And it would seem to be a subject that’s impossible to get at. And that, of course, was the challenge, is the challenge that most any journalist should find alluring on one level or another. I always did. And it requires entering into worlds that I don’t know personally. I’m not a criminal. I’ve never lived a criminal life. I’ve never made what I would call a poor life choice to choose crime as a way of life. I’ve never done that. But I’m fascinated by it, and I’m fascinated to hear from people in that world about why they made those choices. So I started to follow that path early in my journalism career. I guess what led me to the writing of the books, and if I do have a distinctive quality as a crime writer, it’s my desire to take criminal stories and place them in a historical and cultural context that actually elevates the stories, makes them about something more than just the nuts and bolts of that particular story. And this is why I’ve chosen ethnic stories of the Irish and Cubans. I wrote a book about a Vietnamese gang. I’ve written about.

[3:23] Organized crime in America from many different ethnic points of view. And to me, it’s so fascinating because ultimately all of these stories are about one thing, the pursuit of the American dream, the pursuit of the American dream by individual people or by groups of people, the belief that you can carve out a path for yourself in the United States. If you have to do that on the so-called wrong side of the law, then so be it. It’s an avenue of success. And so I find it to be an inexhaustible topic. Once I learned that I could write contemporary versions of this, modern stories, but I could also go back in history and write historical, books, like a book I wrote called Havana Nocturne, which was about the era of the mob in Cuba in the 1950s. I wrote a book called Paddywhack, which was a big sweeping history of the Irish-American underworld in America. Once I learned that you could do contemporary and historical versions of this subject matter, I realized that there was really no end to the possibilities of examining this subject from all these different perspectives.

[4:42] Yeah interesting i’m glad the way you your view of this genre if you will because i like i always if i do a talk and it talks are in kansas city about the mafia in kansas city and of course it’s all italian last names and i always remind people that you know when italians first got here like any immigrant when they first get to this country they’re squeezed out they are not welcomed into to the economy and the jobs, you know, but when the Irish got here, the English didn’t really want them here, you know, Irish, no Irish need apply and that kind of thing. When the Italians got here, you know, they were darker, they spoke another language and the Irish had all the good jobs sewed up, you know, all the government, the police and the fireman’s jobs and the decent businesses. And so they kept the Italians forced, really squeezed out. And, you know, when they, when people come up from south of the border today, people complain about that, but you You’ve got these bright young guys that are looking to live the American dream. And they’re, you know, because of language barriers, many times they not, they’re not accepted in and it’s hard for them to get a foothold. So you’re a bright guy.

[5:52] You’re bold and you can’t get a foothold anywhere else, you can get a foothold in crime. So I really like hearing that somebody’s taking that into consideration. It’s much more than that. Oh, no, listen, it’s part of the American process. It’s part of the American process of assimilation. And it is as American as apple pie.

[6:13] Virtually every ethnic group in the United States has gone through some version of this. We think of traditional organized crime as Italian and Irish and Jewish, perhaps, simply because those were the ethnic groups that controlled the criminal underworld at the time of prohibition in the 1920s, the legal boost, which was the biggest criminal racket to ever take place in the United States, in America, up to narcotics. And so now Now it’s Cubans and Colombians and Mexicans involved in that criminal business. But it’s the same process. It’s eerie in its similarities. It’s led me to the conclusion that there’s something very American about it, that it is part of the American process. And so people oftentimes will ask me, don’t you get tired of writing about organized crime? And that’s an easy answer. No, because organized crime to me is an inexhaustible topic. It can be, it’s like a prism you hold up to the light and you can look at it from many different angles. There’s so many different angles. I feel that I’m just writing about American culture and American society from a particular point of view, from the point of view of the gutter, perhaps.

[7:32] But to me, it’s as relevant and a lot more interesting than writing about sports or politics or entertainment. Yeah.

[7:41] You know, and speaking of politics now, this most recent book and your last one, The Corporation, all revolves around the political problems between the United States and Cuba and Castro. And you really bring that into this last trilogy. You know, you start with the mob in Cuba and then the communists take over. Castro takes over and people, refugees from Castro, then come in, in your book, the corporation, you deal with that. And that was Bolida and gambling and some narcotics. But now you get into the big money. It’s just like prohibition, just like alcohol. Cocaine became the way for somebody to really make it big. You’re retelling the story, the real story behind the movie Scarface. It seems to me like in this last kilo. So this third-year trilogy about organized crime along our southern borders, and it includes Mexicans, too, I noticed in this last Kilo episode.

[8:43] And it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. You know, I noticed you use a lot of the usual sources, you know, cops and police reports and reporters and newspaper articles and all that. But you also were able to talk to our hero of this story, Willie Falcone. And I believe it was Sal, all of a sudden I’ve lost his last name. Sal Magluta.

[9:06] Yeah, did you talk to him too? No, he’s buried away in prison. Okay, but you talked to Willie Falcone and really got how that business worked. Yes, well, not only that, Willie Falcone led me to, the organization was called Los Muchachos, and they basically invented this distribution system of cocaine in the United States, starting in the late 70s and throughout the 80s. And Willie Falcone and Salma Gluta were the leaders of that organization. Willie led me to a lot of others within the organization who had done long prison sentences 12, 15, 20 years. In Willie’s case, it was 27 years behind bars. So most of these men had paid their dues to society and come out on the other side.

[10:00] And because Willie gave me his seal of approval, they were willing to talk to me. You know, I try to do this with all the books that I write, and I get some criticism for this from some people who don’t like it or don’t understand it, and that is, look, I, We can go out and talk to cops and people in law enforcement. And I do that. And I tell their story within the story of the criminal organization. But to me, as a writer and a journalist and an author, the more valuable thing is to try to get the point of view that we don’t know and we don’t hear from very often. And that’s the people who lived it on the criminal side.

[10:41] And so I try to find them and talk to them. I get accused sometimes of glorifying or being overly empathetic and perhaps getting played by the gangsters as sources. I don’t get played. I verify everything I receive. I don’t sit down with a Willie Falcone and interview him and then just put it right down on the page unexamined. I do my due diligence, but I treat criminals as human beings. I start from the basic fact that we’re all human beings. Clearly, they made choices that were misguided choices. In some cases in the criminal world, yes, you find sociopaths and psychopaths, but you also find people like Willie Falcone, who I talked to many, many people about Willie Falcone, and not one person had a bad word to say about Willie Falcone.

[11:35] He had a code. He was a decent human being. He just happened to apply it to this field of endeavor that was criminal activity and was against the law and he paid dearly for it in the end, but a fascinating guy, an interesting guy, and I was lucky that he, he felt that he could trust me and talk to me and lead me to other sources who helped me flesh out this incredible story.

[12:02] You know, and Willie Falcone was the right guy in the right time and in the right place to, and he had some forethought and some, he was prescient, if you will, about the future because cocaine at that point in time, when he first got going was, it was like this little recreational drug that everybody liked. And the movie stars could get it. Just a few people could get it, and he saw that opportunity, and he leaped onto it, it appears to me. Remember, what did he talk about getting started in this business before it was so widespread? He was an early, early adopter.

[12:43] Well, he stumbled into it, really. I mean, we got to get into this. It has to do with the politics of the Cuban Revolution and the desire of certain factions within the United States, the CIA in particular, who were part and parcel involved with Cuban exiles in an effort to eliminate Fidel Castro and take back Cuba. And so Willie Falcone comes over as a 19 or 20-year-old kid. I mean, he was 11 when he first came over, but by the time he’s 18 and 19, he’s working construction, And because of his family history of having been kicked out of Cuba, basically by the Castro government, he’s devoting himself to the anti-Castro movement. So he’s showing up at rallies and all the things that young male Cuban exiles would have done in South Florida during this period of the 1960s, we’re talking about. And some leaders of that movement came to Willy Falcone because they recognized his dedication.

[13:47] He was showing up at all the meetings. He and a number of his friends that were also around his age. And some of the older members of that movement came to him and said, hey, would you be willing to help us with a certain operation? Well, that operation was to smuggle weapons to the Contras in Central America, in Nicaragua, because it was believed that, well, if we can’t kill Fidel Castro, because CIA and, And Cuban exiles had been trying to kill Castro for years. That’s all come out in the wash. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff. That’s finally been, those records were released by the CIA that there was a program called Operation Mongoose where they were attempting to assassinate Fidel. And they were failing on a pretty regular basis. And then they decided, well, if we can’t kill Fidel, we can stop the spread of Castroism. The Castro philosophy, there was a great concern in the United States that communism could spread into Central America. And so that was seen as the battlefront.

[14:57] For the war, a dirty covert war of the United States versus communism. It would take place in Central America. So the CIA was arming the Contras, a secret counter group to the Sandinistas and the revolution that was brewing in Nicaragua that had an eerie resemblance to what had taken place in Cuba. And so they come to these young kids and they say, we have a plan of selling cocaine. We can get cocaine from Central America. We can bring it into the United States through pilots who are CIA connected and therefore they won’t be searched or investigated. They can come in as part of a covert operation. We need someone to sell the cocaine. We need someone to open up a market for this thing and create a new market for cocaine. Now we’re talking about 1977.

[15:54] And as you so rightly said, by then cocaine was pretty much just an elite activity for people who had the money to buy it. The idea was to bring in enough cocaine that we could lower the price and make it accessible to people in nightclubs, working class people, to people that wouldn’t have been able to afford cocaine. And so there you have it, the beginnings of the cocaine smuggling business. I’m not the first person to write about this, of course. It has been written about. But I think Falcone gives names. He gives details about the beginnings of this process of bringing cocaine in the United States to sell it and how that was sanctioned by people within the CIA. So it’s pretty fascinating to me, and it’s history that everyone should be aware of. That is the origins of the cocaine business in the United States, all tangled up in politics.

[16:52] Really. And you bring forth the point here that they had this relationship with people who were connected to the CIA and connected to governmental agencies.

[17:03] And so then they realized that they need to corrupt more people. And I remember when the cocaine cowboys and all that kind of got going, we were hearing up here that there was so much bribery and so much graft and so much money flowing around. I mean, when you’ve got millions and millions of dollars, you hand a guy a hundred thousand dollars, you can buy a lot of goodwill. You hand a guy a million dollars and you could buy a whole small police, you know, small county police department or a small city police department. And that was going on. So that’s, you know, and really prohibition that totally corrupted most law enforcement in the United States in the 30s. And now the cocaine wars or the cocaine distribution is starting to corrupt law enforcement all over the United States, but particularly in South Florida. You tell a great story about the mutiny hotel and the sheriff that Willie was buying off down there. Could you elaborate on that mutiny hotel and the sheriff? Yeah. Well, one of the things that they did early on, Los Machachas, is they created their own landing strip in central Florida.

[18:11] And they realized that to do that, they would need to buy off local law enforcement. And it wasn’t difficult because we’re talking about access to money that people working in small town law enforcement could never have dreamed of making in their lifetime, much less all in one or two payments over the course of a month or two months or whatever. So yes, they found a sheriff in the county where they were wanting to open up this landing strip and they bought him off. Actually, he was a deputy sheriff. He was the son of the sheriff at the time, but the actual sheriff.

[18:49] In a totally unrelated crime got murdered and so the son took over as sheriff and now they had the sheriff and this guy was not only in their pocket he was gleefully in their pocket he was dedicated to showing them all the things he could do for them and went at it enthusiastically and created a possibility for them to do that but you know i have to say one of the things as the business business started to boom. It started to boom right away in the late 70s and on into the 80s, because what the Los Muchachos organization discovered was if they could bring the price down to something that was affordable, that it was an incredibly popular drug in the social scene, in nightclubs, everywhere.

[19:41] And within a few years, cocaine became so popular in the United States, It went well beyond the nightclubs. It was being used by professionals, lawyers, doctors, maybe even people in law enforcement, anyone who could get their hands on it. It was kind of the ultimate party drug. And so it boomed. Like the numbers are just phenomenal how quickly it started to grow. It was growing faster than Los Muchachos, Falcón and Los Muchachos, could bring it in to the country. They couldn’t get it fast enough. The demand was above and beyond anything they could meet. So they had to create a system that brought the cocaine to the people. Part of the system was boats, was airplanes. That landing strip in Florida was essential until it was discovered, and they shifted their operation in a different direction. But through all of this, who reminisce about those years, and they’ll tell you, you know, it was kind of ominous. You started to get the feeling that everyone was on the take because judges were on the take. People at all levels of federal and local law enforcement were on the take. It was kind of like invasion of the body snatchers. You were slowly realizing that, that everyone in the system had been corrupted to one degree or another. So it was a daunting and terrifying task, I think, for some people in law enforcement to come to terms with it.

[21:11] Yeah, I noticed you talk about, oh, let’s go back. You described the Mutiny Club or the Mutiny Hotel.

[21:18] Tell the guys about that. Right out of Miami Vice, this place. Everyone wants to hear about the Mutiny. Yeah, the Mutiny. Well, the Mutiny was a hotel and nightclub in Coconut Grove in a very beautiful setting right on the water. And it quickly became kind of the Rick’s Cafe from Casablanca of Miami at a time when Miami was probably the most fascinating criminal universe on the planet. It was at that time in the 60s, 70s, where Cuban exiles and Contras and Narcos and the celebrity world are all sort of crossing paths at the mutiny. The mutiny became the desired place to be. Of course, Willie Falcone and his crew had the best table in the house.

[22:11] And Willie would tell me stories of when they would get word that a big shipment had come in. There was a song they would play. I’m forgetting the song now. But there was a song, like a disco song, in the club. And everyone in the club knew that that song meant that a huge shipment of coke had just landed in South Florida. And the place would go crazy, and people would start coming up to Willie and asking him, hey, is it going to be a good price? Same price as last time. Is it good quality and all that? He said when he was in the mutiny at those moments, he felt like he was at the center of the universe when that would happen. And so there was law enforcement people passing through there. A lot of very well-known local detectives would come into the mutiny. And it was just kind of the cultural center of the cocaine scene as it was exploding in the late 70s and early 80s.

[23:10] Yeah. It was all fun and games for a while. And what’s happened, I noticed in your book, and that happens happened here is people started robbing the drug dealers. And these guys that robbed drug dealers, these are the baddest of the bad. And you even had cops down there were kidnapping drug dealers or their family members. Cause you get, you know, you can make that a hundred thousand or $500,000 score really easily. So that, that kind of the violence started creeping in to this business at that time.

[23:41] I asked Falcone about that a lot because one of the things I noticed about the story of Los Muchachos as I started to get into it was there was little or no violence in the telling of their story. I’m like, Willie, this makes me suspicious. What do you mean? I said, didn’t you guys use violence to discipline your own people, for instance? He’s like, no, we weren’t. We were obviously we were a criminal organization, but we weren’t a criminal organization like that. He said we were a family.

[24:13] We were all Cuban exiles. We all were guys whose parents had been forced out of Cuba. And we’d arrived here at the ages of 10, 11, 12 and had to adapt. We became a tight family. We became a tight community, probably tighter than most people, most ethnic groups are, because it was sort of us against the world. We were reinventing ourselves as Cubans in the United States.

[24:41] And, you know, in South Florida, Cubans hardly really even thought of themselves as Americans. They thought of themselves as Cubans in exile in America, quite a different thing. And so the end result of that was an organization that was airtight, airtight. Nobody talked. Nobody snitched. You couldn’t penetrate that organization. Even the law enforcement people would tell you this. You couldn’t penetrate that organization. Willie’s thing was like, no, we didn’t discipline our people with violence. If somebody did something wrong and got caught doing something wrong, we simply cut them out of our business. And the worst punishment you could do was cut somebody out of our business because we had so much control over the distribution aspect of cocaine. If we cut you out of it, you were shit out of luck, so to speak. And so that was a powerful weapon that they had. So that was fascinating. The other thing was, and Falcone explained this to me, was they were at the level of distribution. They were bringing cocaine from Colombia and later Mexico into the United States and selling it off.

[25:54] So they weren’t at the street level, which you were just talking about, the competition and rivalries at the street level. Drugs killing each other over territory and things like that.

[26:08] Falcone’s group wasn’t doing that. So they were in kind of a privileged position in the cocaine business where they were sort of not affected by all that violence. They were separate from it. They were above it and didn’t have to deal with it much. It was kind of an interesting thing because the violence eventually created a lot of problems for them because it was bringing a lot of heat to the business and of course they had the added problem of pablo escobar who is their main source and pablo escobar of course not only was willing to use violence he waged war against all of colombian society using violence and so it was a violent business. And the muchachos had to deal with an answer for the violence, even though they themselves weren’t really engaged in the violence.

[27:02] And I noticed in your book, and a lot of the guys out here have watched Narcos, the whole story of the arc of Mexican drug business going from marijuana into cocaine. And then they started, they were transporting four people out of colombian and your book i noticed gets into several of the guys felix gallardo and oh the guy that flew the airplanes the masters of the master of the skies your book gets into that so tell the guys just a little bit about how the los machachos then ended up with the the mexican cartels yes well they started with escobar and uh the medellin cartel and they also did business with.

[27:48] The Cali cartel. And they were doing this at the same time without those organizations knowing that they were double dipping, so to speak. And this was part of the secret of their success and why they were making billions. Willie will scoff if you ever bring up a name like Griselda, who’s so well known now in the business. His feeling of that is she was small potatoes compared to what they were doing. In fact, most of the names we know of people in the cocaine business who are small potatoes compared to the dollars, the money that Los Muchachos was generating. They started with the Colombians and they were doing just fine with the Colombians.

[28:29] Business was booming in the 80s. But then the DEA came in and sort of declared war on drugs, starting with Reagan and then Bush. They started investing billions and billions of dollars into the war on drugs. In the mid-80s, they had some successes and shut down the Caribbean as the primary route of smuggling. They made some inroads into those Colombians smuggling kilos through the Caribbean islands into South Florida.

[29:03] So the Los Muchachos had to improvise and come up with a whole new scheme starting about 1985-86. They created an avenue of importation through Mexico. And so they shifted and they were now doing business with all these big Mexican cartels, some of whom you just mentioned, who were the big names at the time. It was really fascinating to me because I got to go from the history of cocaine in Colombia and the Colombian cartels and what cocaine meant to that culture. And now we’re dealing with Mexico and the Mexican cartel. This is like a separate universe.

[29:43] It was like, oh, I’m in the midst of the Latino narcotics universe from Colombia, Mexico, to the Cubans in South Florida. This is when I started to refer to it as the narcosphere because we’re not talking about a specific region or country. We’re talking about a universe of crime that spans boundaries and jurisdictions. It’s its own world. This is one of the things that law enforcement had to bend their mind around, too. You couldn’t pin this all on one country or one region. You had to bend your mind around the fact that this was international economics and that it was playing out on a level that was above and beyond individual law enforcement jurisdictions. It was a challenge. So anyway, Los Muchachos were smart enough to have shifted their mode of transportation through Mexico into Southern California.

[30:45] And then they created distribution networks using semi-trucks that ventured out with the kilos of cocaine from Southern California to Chicago, to New York, to the West Coast, and back to Florida, which they always joked about how nobody would have guessed that they were smuggling cocaine in the United States into Southern California and shipping it to Miami, not the other way around. Yeah. When that took place, that was like a second golden age. That was the late 80s. That was the second golden age cocaine where, I mean, it must have been frustrating in law enforcement where you’re spending millions of dollars and busting your butt. And all of a sudden, after doing this for a decade, they’ve created whole new avenues of importation and the business is booming twice as big as it was before. And so they were pioneering an illicit trafficking business. These were all guys with very little formal education. They were exiles who came here with nothing.

[31:48] And, you know, I was fascinated by the psychology of it. What was it that was driving these guys, other than just money, but what was it that was driving the will to success? Because that’s what it was. And it was a very uniquely Cuban process connected to the humiliation that their parents’ generation went through when they were exiled from Cuba. And many of their parents were professionals, doctors and lawyers that were kicked out of the country and came to the United States and all of a sudden

[32:19] had nothing, had absolutely nothing. And so I think the children of that generation were determined that they were going to create something in America that, quote unquote, would make their parents proud by succeeding in a way in America that no one could have imagined. And that was a big part of the psychology of what was driving them, I think.

[32:42] Yeah, I got a question here. Did he talk or did you interview him much about how, I mean, how do they… How do they set up this distribution network throughout the United States? You know, they get to the border. They’re big in Florida. They just, because of their start in Florida, get to know people who were the big time, the kingpins in New York, kingpins in New Jersey, Atlanta.

[33:12] Dallas, Fort Worth, that kind of thing. They get to know them, and then they just dealt with them only. And they had their own networks that dealt with another sub-network. It’s so compartmentalized. It’s just always been amazing to me how that works. Obviously, they didn’t have a mafia structure. Right. Mafia was everywhere.

[33:33] Well, the mafia could, you could plug into other, the mafia was a fraternity and a network spread all over the United States where you could go to different cities and you could do, you could plug into the mafia family there and you could do business. to both your advantages. Maybe if you heard about some shipping scam that you could get in on that was taking place in Kansas City and you were from New Jersey, you’d come into town, you’d meet the boss of the Kansas City mob and you’d say, hey, we have this thing we want to do. We’ll give you a piece of it. Now, sometimes that didn’t always go well and there were wars over who got a piece of what. But generally speaking, it was a network of like-minded criminals that you could plug into to do business all around the United States. The Cubans did not have that. But what they did have was Cubans were everywhere. Cuban exiles were in a lot of places. You mentioned New Jersey. Union City, New Jersey has the second highest concentration of Cuban exiles anywhere in the United States. So there are a lot of Cubans in New Jersey and New York area immediately that plugged into, that they were able to utilize.

[34:51] They were all anti-Castro. They all had that like-minded philosophy about how they had been wronged by the Cuban revolution and how they wanted to make that right. And that became a bonding mechanism for them. And it was a bonding mechanism they could use to tap into Cubans all around the United States. And if they didn’t exist, Los Machachos was smart enough to send them there and establish a foothold there. Southern California, they had their eyes on Los Angeles almost from the beginning. And so they had some emissaries that they sent out there and said, you’re going to live in LA for a while. We’re going to put you up in a really nice place. We’re going to buy you a car. You’re going to try to find some local job and you’re going to learn the lay of the land and that you’re going to be our contact there. They used foresight um and and they did that in in san francisco they did that in a few different places they basically branched out and franchised the way you would franchise any sort of business that you were trying to make exist on a national level um and so they did that very successfully and everywhere they did that they had that mentality that i was talking about before of like total loyalty and dedication to each other as Cuban exiles. That was the glue that held that all together.

[36:17] So I guess they get in these bigger cities and then they would, if they didn’t already, a Cuban population there, they would know who the local kingpins were. Yes, they do that. You move into a city, you don’t know anybody. How did that work? Did he talk about that? Well, they would just simply, no, they didn’t connect with local kingpins unless they were Cuban. And they just ignored local kingpins. They came in and started up their own operation. Wow. And they undercut the local market.

[36:50] They undercut the local market by charging less, way less per kilo than that market had ever seen before. They single-handedly created a cocaine boom in Los Angeles, Southern California, that was unlike anything anyone had seen. And they did that simply by selling the kilo price way below what the market had previously established. And so they just took over by offering a superior product at a lower price and they had this airtight distribution system of going right to the source in Colombia and making a deal with Pablo Escobar directly and bringing it in themselves it was a a controlled operation from start to finish. They weren’t selling it off to other factions. They had so few customers because they were selling in huge amounts of bulk. They’d just sell it off to some guy who controlled all of, let’s say, the Bay Area. Now, that guy might take that coke and sell it off to people below him, but that wasn’t Los Muchachos’ business. They were merely importers and distributors at the highest level. Where it went from there was not their concern.

[38:13] Well, interesting. I’ll tell you what, folks, this book is a hell of a stroll through the world of cocaine in the 1980s, which as TJ said, they were selling it cheap. I know from the start of my career to the end of it, 76 and in the intelligence unit up to when I retired in 96, the price of cocaine was actually cheaper than when I first started. It was just, it was crazy. And there was more and more and more of it. And then, you know, crack hit and that was Katie barred the door. They had, I don’t know how much money. I mean, it was just, it was a crazy time. Let’s talk about that a little bit, the crack phenomenon, because it’s pretty fascinating. Let’s say late 80s, mid and late 80s when crack cocaine explodes on the scene. Up until that point the cuban narcos that were distributing cocaine i mean yes there was violence out on the street among colombian cartels and whatnot but as i mentioned los muchachos weren’t really affected by that and within their social world they were kind of seen as they were kind of put on a pedestal they were the bringers of good times i mean all all this fun everyone was having at the nightclubs and using cocaine to spice up their life and add excitement to their life.

[39:36] The guys, people like Los Muchachos were sort of seen in a benign way. But then along comes crack, which, you know, they had nothing to do with. Crack was something that was created at the street level. It was a phenomenon where someone discovered how you could boil down the components of cocaine and extract the part of cocaine that really made you high, that you could crystallize it into a rock and that you’d smoke it in a pipe and you’d get an instantaneous hit that was 10 times greater than you might get from snorting cocaine. And this was a phenomenon and it brought with it a lot of immediate and sudden and uncontrollable social decay, crackheads and violence associated with it and a kind of fevered.

[40:27] Activity that had not existed up to that point in the cocaine business. And all of a sudden, Cubans, let’s say in Florida or New Jersey, as I mentioned, started to feel like this is a dirty business. We have blood on our hands. This is not fun and games anymore. The crack era made it clear that this was not fun and games anymore. All of a sudden it turned ugly and a lot of public opinion shifted against cocaine and against people like Los Muchachos, the dealers themselves. And even within the Cuban community, the mood changed. The view changed. It wasn’t a benign activity anymore. People were dying from it. It was ugly. It was awful. It changed everything. It shifted the focus. And Falcone himself told me they were embarrassed by, they were ashamed by crack.

[41:24] And what it represented. It was not anything they had anticipated. And in fact, Falcone and Magluta started to think about getting out of the business at that point.

[41:33] They decided amongst themselves, this is ugly. It’s an ugly business. It’s going to bring, among other things, bad karma our way. Let’s get out of the business. And what they learned is by then, by late 80s, They had a multi-billion dollar business that employed thousands of people spread all over the United States. You can’t just shut that pipeline off overnight. You shut off that pipeline overnight and the consequences will be profound. There’ll be killings. There’ll be maneuvering for control to pick up the business. There’ll be a lot of ugliness. So obviously, if you’re going to get out of the business, you have to phase out. You have to phase out. And they kept telling themselves they were in the process of phasing out. But of course, they kept increasing the size of their shipments over and over again. Once you get in that deep, apparently phasing out is not an easy thing to do. But the business you’ve created makes it very difficult to do that.

[42:43] Really yeah it’s uh that’s that’s really interesting that that they saw what the cocaine was doing and and at least acknowledge it i never figured they’d ever even acknowledge it at that level but they did see it and they did at least acknowledge it uh yes they did they did with crack crack was different you know crack was.

[43:06] I think they should have also acknowledged that law enforcement was going to ramp up their efforts, and they already had been. And so that you can only last so long. I used to follow guys around that were, you know, thought they were big time criminals. I think if you only knew the forces that were arrayed against you right now, you cannot stand up against this. So they cannot stand up against it in the end. And somebody is going to start breaking. And so I have to assume, if I remember right, this David Borov was one of their, was he a former DEA agent or a CIA pilot or something? Well, he was. Somebody like that breaks, and then they just start unraveling it. Yeah. Well, they put a lot of faith in the power of corruption. They were big believers in the in the power of corruption because you know they’d started in the business in partnership with the cia yeah and and and and they knew that people like george bush former director of the cia who became president was privy to what they were doing or had been doing They knew that people at the highest levels of the U.S.

[44:25] Government had to have known how this business had started. And so they always felt like what we know makes us untouchable.

[44:35] They can’t screw with us. We know too much. And this was the philosophy of the Cuban, the fallout from the Cuban revolution and this whole thing of the intelligence community going into business with anti-Casso exile. It was a dirty, it was a dirty alliance that they formed. And it was based on covert operations, stuff that the American people were never supposed to know about. And so this was at the root of what they were doing. And I think they always just kind of believed when the shit hits the fan, we’re untouchable. You know what I mean? We were partners with the U.S. government. In fact, when the Iran-Contra scandal happened in the 80s, and they started to investigate a little bit, not much, But they started to investigate a little bit this possibility that the financing of the Contras had taken place through the selling of cocaine and that perhaps the CIA and even other factions of the U.S. Government were part and parcel of it.

[45:48] Willie said at that point he was on the lam. He’d been indicted and he was on the lam. And he was watching the Iran-Contra hearings. And he was saying, this is our story. Willie was watching the Iran-Contra hearings and he knew way more than what was being revealed at the Iran-Contra hearings. He knew the truth behind all that that hadn’t come out yet and he watched it thinking, will it ever come out? And it didn’t come out, not really. John Kerry had a report in the wake of the Iran-Contra hearings that was about as close as the U.S. Government ever got to acknowledging the sale of cocaine in exchange for money to buy arms for the conference. He did spell it out a bit, but nobody paid any attention to that report. It got very little coverage or attention. So the Cubans felt they were touched by the hand of God in a way, that they were in a privileged position. you know, and they put a lot of faith in that. We’ll, we’ll buy our, we can buy our way out of anything. And they kind of believe that about law enforcement in general.

[47:03] Well, well, in the end, uh, they didn’t, it didn’t quite make it out. They made it out, you know, reasonably intact. And one Sal’s still in the penitentiary, but Willie’s out here having a merry old time. Did he ever go back to racing power, power boats down in Florida? No he’s too old that’s a young man he’s getting a young man job you get this book you’ll you may have even seen that I’ve seen some blog pieces or videos about uh the Los Muchachos and and how they were uh Willie and his partner Sal were big time big time in the press in the public view all the time uh power in the powerboat racing down in Florida oh yeah they were they were champions I mean uh, Powerboat racing in Miami, in South Florida, is as big as football is in Kansas City and Green Bay. Really?

[47:58] It’s the biggest thing there is. And so their involvement in that kind of put them in a position in the community that was on a very exalted level. I mean, there were always rumors and chatter about them being in the cocaine business and that the powerboat steam was just a cover for the cocaine business. And that’s not entirely true. I mean, it was a cover for the cocaine business. And they did use the boats for moving cocaine from the islands, Caribbean islands, onto the coast of South Florida. But they were devoted and legitimately dedicated to powerbowl racing. And it was Willie and Sal and Willie’s brother, Gustavo, Tabby Falcone, who was also brilliant. And they were just great at it. They were young guys with unlimited resources. They weren’t just champion powerbowl racers. They owned a boat-making company. So they created boats. They created the engines that were used in the boats. It became a great source of laundering their money from the cocaine business back into the powerboat business. And it was fun and good times for about a decade there in Miami where these guys were on top of the world.

[49:22] Wow. Crazy, crazy, crazy. It’s a, it’s a heck of a story, guys. You got to get this book, the last kilo was the, and you might want to get the first two, the trilogy he has about the, about organized crime down in the longest Southern border, really all the way over to Mexico, but particularly in Florida and down into Cuba. And you can see for yourself, all those stories about funding the cocaine business was funding the Contras and all that stuff that’s been in the headlines for a long time. So I really appreciate you coming on the show, TJ.

[49:59] It’s been a pleasure for me to interview you. Hey, the pleasure is mine. Great to meet you. Keep doing what you do. It’s valuable. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Good to talk to you. All right. Take care. So guys, don’t forget, like ride motorcycles. If you’ve got a motorcycle and you’re out there, watch out for cars. No, I’m just kidding. If you’re in a car out there, watch out for motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD, go to the VA and get that website hotline number. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go to Anthony Ruggiano, go to his website, get that hotline number, get some help from him. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s that 1-800-BETS-OFF or something like that. We’re just getting online sports gambling in Missouri. I believe the election is coming up this November. And I just about assure you that we’re going to have the app be able to bet on the apps. And, you know, that gambling, a lot of people can handle it. Some people can’t handle it. And if you can’t handle it and it’s causing your problems, why they’ve got a hotline number for that. You know, don’t forget, I have that new book out there, the Windy City Mafia.

[51:16] Chicago outfit. I have, uh, my movies, gangland wire and brothers against brothers and ballot theft, burglary, murder, and cover up are all on Amazon prime. You know, that windy city mafia, you know, buy that book, give me a review. That’ll help me sell more books. That’s a good way to support the podcast. Even if you don’t have a Kindle, just get you a dollar 99 Kindle book and, and give me a review, be a verified purchaser. And you can, uh, you can help the podcast. I get a little piece of the action and you know all every little piece of the action helps i like having that money coming in while i’m sleeping it’s like a mobster huh anyhow thanks a lot guys i really appreciate y’all tuning in.