Infamous America - MIAMI DRUG WARS Ep. 4 | “The Untouchables”

Episode Date: April 14, 2021

The Cocaine Wars burn hot and fast in the early 1980s. Miami police detectives form a task force called CENTAC 26 to combat drug violence, but their effort is short lived. The U.S. government creates a larger task force to hunt the bigger players in the business. The federal task force makes two big arrests related to Jon Roberts’ operation, but Jon and Mickey Munday adapt and continue their smuggling business. And Griselda Blanco’s years of warfare, drug use, and paranoia take their toll. She makes a major change, but her time is running out. Thanks to our sponsor, Simplisafe. Get free security camera and a 60-day risk free trial at SimpliSafe.com/infamous Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials : blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Griselda Blanco hid under her bed with a gun clutch tight in her hands. She called out for Rivi, her most trusted assassin. Rivi rushed into Griselda's room and found her in her hiding spot. She said there was a man in the backyard who'd come to kill her. She told Rivey to track him down. Rivey explained that the crew of guards had searched the fenced-in estate like they did every night. No one was there. Griselda pointed her gun at Rivi's face and demanded he'd be.

do what she asked. Rivi walked the yard with a vicious German shepherd that Griselda named Hitler. Rivi wasn't the least bit surprised when he and the dog didn't find anyone lurking in the bushes. Griselda had grown increasingly paranoid as she continued to attack her rivals in the drug trade. That paranoia was fueled further by her growing habit of free-basing cocaine. It was In 1984, and Griselda's grip on her operation was slipping. She saw enemies everywhere, and she'd become erratic and sloppy. Rivi and others knew time was running out. Griselda came to realize it, too. She had to get out of Miami. But that begged the question of all questions. Where could she possibly go to escape both the Medelline cartel and the United

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From BlackBarril Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling us six-part story about the Miami drug wars of the 1970s and 1980s. This is episode four, The Untouchables. Miguel Miranda murdered for business, fun, and faith. He was a drug bomb, and a club owner. In his spare time, he practiced a version of the Afro-Cuban religion, Santa Ria. A detective would later say that for Miguel, killing was like getting up in the morning and eating breakfast. When Miguel killed someone, he didn't make it clean. He shot a Santa Ria statue maker 20 times after getting angry about the amount of money the man had charged him. He put the body in a trash bag and dumped it on the side of the road. He killed. He killed a

two cocktail waitresses and threw their bodies in the trunk of a car. He once shot a man, stuck the body in a large drum, and left it floating in the water for the cops to find. Miguel, who had more aliases than law enforcement could count, spent a lot of time at the mutiny. In the book Hotel Scarface, author Robin Farsad said the mutiny was the favorite saloon of the cocaine cowboys. It was a hotel and club where members of the cocaine trade,

met to do business, do drugs, and to be entertained by a group of women who were dubbed the Mutiny Girls. Brzelda Blanco was said to have held court in one of the mutiny's suites in her early days. Smart cops knew the mutiny well. They used it as a place to meet informants and to keep tabs on some of the bigger players in the cocaine scene. By 1981, Miguel Miranda had still eluded them, for the most part. He'd been picked up by police multiple times.

but not for the murders he'd committed. Then one night, Miguel met a mutiny girl who was relatively new to the scene. He told her he worked in film, television, and fashion. He invited her to a VIP party. The last time anyone saw her alive was outside of one of the hotel suites. Her body turned up in Key Largo a few days later. She'd been wrapped in a mutiny blanket and left by the road. injection points were found on her jugular vein, her arm, and her leg.

It was a case of murder by cocaine. Despite the mutiny's reputation as a haven for drug king pins and killers, the murder of one of its own didn't go over well. It was believed the killing had taken place at the mutiny and the body had been moved. When authorities started questioning the employees, some of them started talking. In April 1981, about a month. after the incident, law enforcement was looking for Miguel in connection with the murder. They got the drop on him outside of his club, but Miguel made it into his car and took off.

DEA agents and police pursued. A shootout started as both sides sped down the street and fired back and forth. Finally, a DEA agent steadied himself and killed Miguel with two shots to the back of the head. A later search of Miguel's compound revealed evidence. of ritual animal sacrifice, blood drinking, and a massive weapons arsenal. In the room with the weapons, cops found a sign that read, Heavy equipment of the cocaine cowboys. Homicide Detective Raul Diaz had spent plenty of time at the mutiny while working his cases. He saw what it took for the DEA to bring Miguel down.

When state's attorney Janet Reno attacked the DEA for using excessive force in the shootout with Miguel, the agent who killed him said he had no regrets about what he'd done. Diaz couldn't have agreed more. Since he'd come to homicide from narcotics, Diaz had been arguing that Dade County needed a special joint task force to combat the drug gangs that were waging war on each other and Miami. He looked at the Miguel Miranda case as proof that the only way for law enforcement to win the fight was to increase its firepower and kill if it had.

had to. Diaz believed that if a select group of local detectives and DEA agents were given special authority, they could bring the cocaine wars to an end. He ran up against politics and bureaucracy at every turn, but the DEA's success in cases like that of Miguel Miranda and the growing national spotlight on Miami's violence finally convinced government leaders in South Florida in Washington, D.C., that Diaz was right. After years of local police failing to curb drug-related violence or bring any high-level traffickers to justice, Miami's central tactical unit, Sintac-26, was born.

Like Griselda Blanco, Sintac-T-T-T-X had a list of enemies and a plan to take them down. Raul Diaz wanted to strike fast. Big fish like Griselda-Blanco were talked about, but rarely seen by law enforcement. They operated in the shadows and ordered hitmen to kill for them. Diaz wanted Sintak 26 to focus on someone they could find and arrest quickly. With support from the federal government,

Diaz assembled a small group of homicide and narcotics detectives who worked directly with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Its sole focus was drug-related murders. One of the first demands Sintak made was to get new weapons. Diaz said you couldn't send detectives who were armed with six-shot revolvers up against drug gangs who used Mac10s and Oozys. Once they were authorized to carry machine guns, syntax set out to make its first major bust. A man known as Amalcar was the perfect target. Unlike Griselda and other drug bosses who worked behind the scenes,

Emelcar enjoyed doing the killing himself, and that made him much easier to track down. Diaz got word from a trusted informant that Amalcar was at the Mutiny Hotel. Diaz and another detective staked out the place. When Amalcar and his bodyguard exited the mutiny and drove off in their Pontiac, Diaz followed and called for backup. Amelcar managed to shake Diaz, but another Cintac team quickly picked up the pursuit. Then, Amalcar's Pontiac suddenly came to a dead stop in the middle of the road. As a traffic jam piled up, the Cintac members on his tail feared they'd lose him.

They got out of their car and quickly approached the Pontiac. Bullets shattered the windshield and sprayed glass over the Cintac team. While they took cover, Amalcar and his bodyguard, who were firing from inside the car, made a run for it. Amelcar headed into the parking lot of a fast food joint, hopped into a Toyota, pointed his gun at the driver, and told him to gun. ago. Emelcar eventually let the driver out unharmed and disappeared in the stolen vehicle. On the surface, the first major outing for Cintac looked like a failure, but they had Amalcar on the run and he got sloppy. Two days after the chase, Amalcar called a phone number that Cintac was monitoring and they tracked him to a payphone near the airport. When two

Cintac detectives closed in, Amelcar once again made a run for it. He ended up hiding behind two washing machines in the laundry room of an apartment complex. The detectives cornered him, and he gave up. Sintak had a big win within only a few days of launching its first investigation. After the Amalcar success, Sintak 26 enjoyed a meteoric rise. The group closed new cases with extreme efficiency, and in the process, started closing old cases that had basically been abandoned. Diaz said, Sintac 26 was created to kick ass.

In the early days, they were making good on his claim. Diaz believed informants were the key to bringing down the drug trade at every level. Using informants was an age-old tactic, obviously. But Diaz and his team went about it in a different way. Their goal was to make the lives of potential informants, quote, a living hell. Sintac made it clear that talking to the authorities was the only, only way for them to avoid getting arrested or getting killed. Diaz's methods proved effective, but it was his work with informants that ultimately caused his downfall.

As Diaz's fame continued to grow, not everyone around him celebrated his success. Some cops thought he was arrogant and power-hungry. Homicide detectives outside of Sintak resented the resources the task force was given and the glory coming Diaz's way. Police leadership in Miami and in Dade County didn't like that he'd been given so much authority in such a short period of time. Rumors circulated around the department that Diaz was corrupt, and people Diaz had put in jail claimed he acted inappropriately with informants. They said he helped informants cover up crimes and falsify evidence so they could remain useful to him. Then, a story from his early days on the force emerged.

When Diaz's first major informant was killed over the information he provided to the police, Diaz slept with the dead man's widow. It was a story he couldn't shake. Pressure from within the department to get rid of Diaz grew. After a year of unparalleled success in the fight against Miami drug gangs, he was removed from command of CENTAC 26. The team was left without its leader and struggled to stay together as it was pushed aside in favor of a larger federal effort. The U.S. government wanted more control over the war on drugs.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan commissioned the South Florida Task Force. The FBI, DEA, and other federal agencies would now lead the fight against Miami's drug lords. Reagan gave vice president and former CIA director George H.W. Bush, authority over the operation. Detective Raul Diaz once compared Sintac 26 to Elliot Ness's untouchables, the group of prohibition agents who brought down Al Capone. But now Diaz was gone, and Sintac took a back seat to the federal task force. Syntax funding and resources were cut dramatically. A small band of detectives held the group together,

but their role in the cocaine wars was diminished for a time. When the federal agencies took over, they made a decent size catch. Cocaine smuggler John Roberts worked with Barry Seal on and off for years. Barry was a fearless pilot who thought he could pull off any job that came his way. John's partner, Mickey Monday, had a habit of shutting down his planes for weeks at a time when he wanted to work on them. It was often during these periods that John called on Barry Seal to make smuggling runs. But John wasn't the only one Barry worked for. In 1983, Barry took a smuggling mission for the thrill more than anything else.

He flew into Fort Lauderdale with a large supply of quailudes that turned out to be counterfeit. When Barry landed, the DEA busted him. They weren't even after Barry. The sting operation targeted a known quailude smuggler, but the DEA quickly discovered that Barry could be a real asset. Like Cintac 26, federal agencies went after informants, but on a larger scale. While Cintac often sought out street-level dealers, the feds wanted to flip people who could get them to the leaders of the Medellin cartel. They flipped Barry with the hope of doing just that. John had no idea Barry was now working for the U.S. government, and neither did Max Murmolstein,

who was technically still running the smuggling operation or their immediate bosses in the cartel. There was a chance they might never have found out about it if Barry hadn't set up Medellin cartel kingpin, Pablo Escobar. The DEA coordinated with the CIA. They outfitted a plane with concealed cameras and sent Barry to Columbia on a smuggling run. The cameras took photos of Escobar loading large quantities of cocaine onto a plane. No one could figure out how Barry got him to do it. Escobar didn't usually do grunt work. But somehow Barry made it happen.

Barry flew back to the U.S. with the evidence, and the agencies used it to begin a case against Pablo Escobar. But the cartel's list of informants, from local police up to federal officials, was far longer than the list from the task force. The news of Barry's defection quickly traveled to Medellin, and then orders to kill him quickly traveled up to Miami. Max Murmolstein started to unravel, and his Colombian bosses questioned the loyalty of all the Americans on their payroll.

They instructed John Roberts to find Barry and kill him. Locating Barry wasn't a problem. He'd grown into something of a celebrity. News of him talking to a presidential commission and speaking to a congresswoman got plenty of play in Miami. When he wasn't talking to people from D.C. about the drug trade, Barry was awaiting trial in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for his country. his involvement in the Kualoot case. John sent hitman to Baton Rouge, but they couldn't get to Barry, so John took matters into his own hands. He and Max headed to Louisiana. They didn't know

how they'd slip past Barry's government protection, but they'd deal with that when it came up. They found Barry outside a Waffle House restaurant of all places. John couldn't believe Barry was on his own. Barry pulled out of the parking lot and made his way through the city with John and Max trailing not far behind. Barry slowed down as he approached a row of shops. John gunned the engine. He planned to smash into Barry's car, drag him out into the street, kill him, and then take off before the cops arrived. As John's car headed for Barry's, Max grabbed the steering wheel. According to John, Max panicked and thought they'd never get away if they killed Barry right then and there. John fought off, Max, but the car slid out.

of control. John eased off the gas and watched Barry walk into a shop, totally unaware that he'd almost been killed. After the aborted hit, John and Max returned to Miami. The cartel still wanted Barry dead, but John was allowed to refocus on his smuggling operation. It was the end of 1984, and they were still bringing in huge quantities of cocaine and making millions of dollars. But John had another problem to deal with, a much larger problem than a smuggler pilot. He had to deal with the godmother herself, Griselda Blanco, whose paranoia had reached an all-time high. John Roberts' Colombian boss paid him a visit. John's boss had a soft spot for Griselda Blanco, and John had been instantly attracted to her the first time they met,

for reasons he couldn't fully explain. Maybe a combination of those things was why John agreed to help Griselda. Griselda now feared for her life, and she needed to hide. She'd killed so many rivals by that point, there were few people she could turn to. John lived in a quiet neighborhood. He figured it would be the perfect spot for Griselda to disappear. John went to a nearby house and offered the owner $250,000 in cash to buy the house, and the man said yes. John got some of his people to build fences around the house,

bring in guard dogs, and make it as secure as possible. And that's where Griselda was living when her paranoia finally got the best of her. The sight of Griselda now disgusted John Roberts. When she moved into the new house, he said she looked like a pig. When she wasn't free-basing, she was doped up on tranquilizers provided by a boyfriend who claimed to be a doctor. The woman known as the godmother and the black widow, who once struck fear into all those around her, now hid from the world, terrified of noises in the backyard.

Griselda boarded up the windows and rarely left her room. John arranged for groceries to be delivered. Once, when he visited, he saw the house in complete disarray. He said, it smelled worse than a truck-stop toilet. Despite her life in hiding, Griselda still managed to make deals. She turned to a young woman who was a cousin of the powerful Ochoa family to supply her with cocaine. Griselda quickly fell into debt and owed the woman $1.8 million. Instead of paying the debt, Griselda's people kidnapped and tortured the woman.

They beat her, burned her with cigarettes, and pulled out her fingernails before they shot her and dumped her body. on a road. Griselda claimed she'd paid the woman, but never received the 150 kilos of coke she was expecting. Nobody in the Medellin cartel believed Griselda's story. The godmother had finally crossed a line. Killing in Ochoa was unforgivable, and all-out war was coming for her. With that knowledge and paranoia fueled by who knows how much drug use, Griselda thought she heard a sound in the backyard. It sent her scrambling. She grabbed a gun and hid under the bed. She called for her top hitman, Rivie, and ordered him to check the property with her vicious German shepherd named Hitler. Rivi knew it was a fool's errand. He knew there was no one

outside, but he complied. He and Hitler checked the backyard, and, of course, they found nothing. But the experience that night finally opened Griselda's eyes to her situation. She needed to leave Miami. Late in 1984, she escaped to Orange County, California, between Los Angeles and San Diego, hoping she could hide from the Ochoas and everyone else who wanted her dead. John knew his Colombian boss led Grisel to flee. The Colombian boss couldn't actively protect her, but he still cared about her enough to look the other way when she ran to the west coast.

John was glad to see her go. Her battles with rivals and the added heat from the Ochoas brought way too much attention to his operation and his neighborhood. Griselda's time was almost up, and so was that of John's immediate boss, Max Murmelstein. DEA agent Robert Palumbo spent 11 years chasing Griselda Blanco. He chased her in New York before he even really knew who she was. He chased her in Miami. Now he chased her to California. and his personal quest to bust the godmother finally came to an end.

In February, 1985, Palumbo quietly entered an unassuming house in Irvine, California. He walked up the stairs and stepped into a bedroom. Griselda sat in her bed reading the Bible. She didn't know who this man was, but she didn't try to run. Palumbo walked up to her and kissed her on the cheek. He'd promised himself years ago that if he ever found him, Griselda, that's what he'd do. Then he took her into custody. Four months later, another domino fell. When John Roberts hung up his telephone on June 5th,

1985, he couldn't believe the call he had just received. It was from Max Murmolstein, and Max was near the end of what sounded like a high-speed chase. He had called John while he was driving his expensive Jaguar toward a roadblock. Max was being chased by the cops. or drug agents or someone. He didn't even know who at the time. Max called John from his car phone and told him he was about to be arrested. When John put down the phone, he asked himself, was Max really stupid enough to call him while being chased by the cops or DEA agents?

Yeah, obviously. But John felt a bit of relief when he learned that Max's arrest had nothing to do with their cocaine operation. Authorities had connected Max to an earlier cocaine contract. case that involved automaker John DeLorean. Yeah, that DeLorean, the guy who designed the car that was made famous by the Back to the Future movies. But even though Max's arrest wasn't directly connected to John, it was scary. John informed his smuggling partner Mickey Monday. They didn't think Max would talk. They figured his fear of the cartel would keep him quiet. But still,

they decided to lay low. They paused their operation while they waited. to see how things played out. During the pause, new criminals started stealing the headlines. They'd operated in the background for years. Like all organizations, they started small, just little things here and there. Through the early 80s, while some of the old guard dealers and smugglers in Miami started to falter, this new element rose. It turned its small successes into bigger successes. With more success came the desire for more money,

more action, and more power. With the increased money and power born of easy success, came the feeling of invincibility that nearly everyone in the drug trade experienced at some point, the feeling that usually peaked right before the fall.

For the new group, the peak was the summer of 1985, and it was followed immediately by the fall. When headlines about the actions of the group broke, the general public was probably surprised. But people inside the drug wars, both the dealers and the agents, couldn't have been shot. Drug traffickers in Miami were known as the Cocaine Cowboys, and a nickname for the new group was easy to coin. The Cocaine Cops. A group of young officers started as good patrolmen, but then fell under the spells of easy money and flashy lifestyles.

lifestyles. The month after Max Murmolstein was arrested, they started robbing boats on the Miami River. That was the peak, and what came next was inevitable. Next time on Infamous America, corruption is running rampant inside the Miami Police Department. A number of cops are already heavily involved in the drug trade, and their activities escalate until they pass the point of no return. That's next week on Infamous America. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive early access and the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was co-executive produced by Stephen Walters in association with ritual productions. Research and writing by Michael Federico. original music by Rob Valier Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison I'm your host and producer Chris Wimmer Find us at our website Blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels

We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Beryl Media on Twitter and you can stream all our episodes on YouTube just search for Infamous America Podcasts. Thanks for listening.