MOVIE BRINGS BACK MIAMI'S DRUG HISTORY

MIAMI - The release of the new "Miami Vice" film conjures up memories of
the city's "cocaine cowboy" past, when rival drug traffickers had shootouts
with automatic weapons, bags of drugs washed up on beaches and police were
outspent, outgunned and sometimes corrupted.

"When the drugs came flowing in, it just changed the landscape here," said
Mark R. Trouville, chief of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration
field office in Miami.

"It kind of became the Wild West down here for a while," added Trouville,
who began his DEA career here in 1979.

Miami remains a key command center for the worldwide cocaine trade,
particularly for Colombian cartels, and is still a major drug
money-laundering locale. But the violence has largely disappeared as the
cocaine kingpins have become less "Scarface" and more corporate.

"They have become more diverse and less flamboyant," said Guy Lewis, a
former federal prosecutor in Miami now in private practice. "One thing that
has not changed is the money. The trade is still awash in cash."

The "Miami Vice" TV series (1984-89) accurately reflected those crazy
times, according to people who lived through them. The movie, opening
Friday and starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, is set in the present and
does not resurrect the old days, according to its producers.

Robert Hoelscher, a Miami-Dade County police sergeant and consultant for
the TV show, said: "85 percent of what we put on television was a
paraphrase of actual cases."

"There was a constant turf war," said Hoelscher. "We were out-equipped.
They had better aircraft. They had bigger, faster boats. They had automatic
weapons. We were outgunned in many respects."

Drug traffickers were regularly gunned down on city streets, sometimes in
broad daylight, and bullet-riddled bodies turned up frequently in remote
locations. One lawyer was shot to death in his office after he was
subpoenaed in a drug case. A liquor store at a popular shopping mall was
shot up by men wielding submachine guns and driving around in an armored
panel truck.

Bryan Page, chairman of the University of Miami's anthropology department,
said the "cocaine cowboy period" in the city's history began in the 1970s
when an established Cuban network of traffickers and cocaine users
attracted the attention of Colombians who saw a potentially lucrative market.

"The violence that was taking place was essentially Colombians taking over
Cuban territory," Page said. "They were very bold. People would get shot up
sitting at traffic lights. It was that kind of Wild West atmosphere that
attracted the attention of the people putting together 'Miami Vice.'"

In the 1983 Brian De Palma film "Scarface" written by Oliver Stone, Al
Pacino played Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who rises to the top of the
Miami criminal underworld then dies a spectacularly violent death.

In between, Montana narrowly escapes a chain saw, watches someone hanged
from a helicopter and battles his rivals with ("Say hello to my little
friend!") an M-16 assault rifle and other heavy artillery.

The DEA's Trouville said that wasn't too far from the truth.

"They were shooting each other left and right," he said. "It was a time
when there were no rules yet. Everybody was trying to establish themselves
in the drug world here."

Although cocaine continues to flow into Miami, it has been eclipsed by the
U.S. border with Mexico as a drug trade flashpoint. There is far less
violence today. And as shown by the recent indictment of members of an
alleged drug ring responsible for bringing some 70 tons of cocaine into the
United States, the drug lords have blended into South Florida society.

"They used to drive Ferraris and Porsches," Lewis said. "Now they drive
Camrys. They've gone from the penthouse to the suburbs."

Colombian-born Pablo Rayo Montano, currently awaiting extradition from
Brazil, and 31 members of his alleged drug trafficking organization were
indicted in May on various drug charges. Court documents in that case show
that family members and associates had businesses and other assets in South
Florida, including homes in quiet Broward County suburbs and tried to stay
under the radar.

Hoelscher said the drug traffickers learned that violence - besides putting
their own lives in constant jeopardy - was bad for business because of the
heat it brought from law enforcement.

"There's more sophistication today," Hoelscher said. "You can do it much
easier with payoffs and corruption than you can with the gun-in-the-ear
kind of thing."