'COCAINE': MIAMI'S VICE

Welcome to Miami Vice: The Real World.

MTV-style cutting and camera tricks make you think directors Billy
Corben and Alfred Spellman are trying to out-Michael Mann the
original "Vice" show for a while. But soon it's clear "Cocaine
Cowboys" is an alternately jazzed-up/talking-too-much-heads
documentary about the Miami drug trade of the 1970s and '80s.

Things settle down once all the main players are established, and a
wealth of information about an extraordinary organized-crime
phenomenon is imparted.

And a lot of it is done by the people who were in the thick of it.
Those who are still alive to talk, anyway. And rattle on they do,
like recovered addicts with more energy than outlets for it.

Only what these guys were addicted to wasn't so much the cocaine they
trafficked (though some did partake), but the insane amounts of money
they made doing it.

Native Floridians Corben and Spellman, who made the controversial
"Raw Deal" about the questions surrounding a university gang-rape
case, talk to the local operators and pilots who struck the earliest
import deals with Colombia's Medellin cartel. They show how the
burgeoning illicit business fueled a wider economic boom for the
fading tourist town (with attendant officialAdvertisement corruption,
like one whole police academy class that wound up either dead or in
prison). And they go deep into the bloody violence that inevitably
took over the trade.

Rather than an Al Pacino "Scarface" type, this movie zeroes in on
Griselda Blanco, aka La Madrina and The Black Widow, as the most
ruthless godmother of the era. She is an amazing character, but it's
hard to believe that some equally nasty monsters haven't been
overlooked orshortchanged by "CC's" third act focus on Blanco and her
chatty hit man, the incarcerated Jorge "Rivi" Ayala.

With that possibility in mind,We otherwise come out of "Cocaine
Cowboys" greatly informed about a lot of things. We learn the best
ways to stash tons of product, how to waste vaults full of money and
what it feels like to know that you can get away with doing anything
to anybody and sometimes consider it your duty. It's a remarkable
immersion in a world turned morally inside out. And you know what? It
doesn't look too much unlike the rest of America.

COCAINE COWBOYS Our rating: 3 of 4 stars
(R: violence, drug use, language)
Director: Billy Corben, Alfred Spellman.
Running time: 1 hr. 58 min.
Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West
Hollywood; University Town Center 6, Irvine.
In a nutshell: Documentary about the South Florida narcotics trade is
stylish and informative, if perhaps not the whole story.