The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America by T. J. English

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America by T. J. English Amazon.com From true-crime legend T. J. English, the epic, behind-the-scenes saga of “Los Muchachos,�� one of the most successful cocaine trafficking organizations in American history—a story of glitz, glamour, and organized crime set against 1980’s Miami. Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents, lawyers, judges, and politicians who made the drug world go round. And no one managed that carousel of dangerous players better than Willy Falcon. A Cuban exile whose family escaped Fidel Castro’s Cuba when he was eleven years old, Falcon, as a teenager, became active in the anti-Castro movement. He began smuggling cocaine into the U.S. as a way to raise money to buy arms for the Contras in Central America. This counter-revolutionary activity led directly to Willy’s genesis as a narco. He and his partners built an extraordinary international organization from the ground up. Los Muchachos, the syndicate founded by Falcon, thrived as a major cocaine distribution network in the U.S. from the late 1970’s into the early 1990’s. At their height, Los Muchachos made more than a hundred million dollars a year. At the same time, Willy, his brother Tavy Falcon, and partner Sal Magluta became famous as championship powerboat racers. Cocaine, used by everyone from A-list celebrities to lawyers and people in law enforcement, came to define an era, and for a time, Willy Falcon and those like him—major suppliers, of whom there were only a few—became stars in their own right. They were the deliverers of good times, at least until the downside of persistent cocaine use became apparent: delusions of grandeur, psychological addiction, financial ruin. Thus, the War on Drugs was born, and federal authorities came after Falcon and his crew with a vengeance. Willy found himself on the run, his marriage and family life in shambles, the halcyon days of boat races and lavish trips to Vegas and parties at the Mutiny night club seemingly a distant memory. T. J. English has been granted unprecedented access to the inner workings of Los Muchachos, sitting down with Willy Falcon and his associates for many lengthy interviews, and revealing never-before-understood details about drug trafficking. A classic of true-crime writing from a master of the genre, The Last Kilo traces the rise and fall of a true cocaine empire—and the lives left in its wake.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Chris Voss here. Come on. Ladies and gentlemen, the Iron Lady sings. That makes it official. Welcome to the Chris Voss Show. show to share their wares and tell you their stories and the stories of course as we always say are the owner's man it's a life that's how we learn we're not alone that's how we learn there's other people in the world that's how we learn hopefully to be better people which is what the which is what the show is about today we had another amazing author on the show he's the author of the book that will come out december 3rd 2024 it is called is called The Last Kilo, Willie Falcon and the Cocaine Empire that Seduced America. An epic narco story with unmatched intrigue and corruption. Perfect for the fall,

experience the rise and fall of a drug empire. I think there's some PR in this title, but it's on Amazon. So welcome to the show, TJ English. How are you, sir? I'm good, Chris. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure to have you as well. Give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interweb?

The best thing to do is just Google the name TJ English, but I do have a website and I'm on all the social media platforms. The website is TJ-English. But yeah, just Google it, and you'll get more information than you need. So you're a prolific writer of lots of different books. How many books do you have total? This is number 10 that's coming out next month. And is this a novel or is this real life?

This is nonfiction. I write nonfiction books about the criminal underworld, organized crime, the criminal justice system. Some of the books are contemporary. Some are historical in nature. But it's kind of the subject that keeps on giving. It's an inexhaustible topic in a sense. Congratulations on the new book. Give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside The Last Kilo. The Last Kilo is the story of a couple of young Cuban-American exiles from Cuba who basically pioneered the distribution system for cocaine in the United States, starting in Miami in the late

70s and then on through the 80s and into the 90s until they were brought down in a major racketeering prosecution. These were the guys who made it snow, so to speak. They created a system that brought it from Columbia into the U the u.s and then all around the u.s to los angeles san francisco chicago new york pretty much everywhere they had a lot to do with the creation of that whole era the the cocaine cowboys era the cocaine cowboys era yeah i i yeah i wanted to make that clear that it's i guess historical fiction would you call it that or is it just fiction we call it narrative non-fiction these days that's the term they use it's it's a basic fictional story using the techniques of of fiction

you know recreation of scenes and dialogue but it's very much nonfiction. A lot of research goes into it. There's 30 or 40 pages of research notes at the end of this book. So it's very much based on the public record. And also, I happen to have done a lot of firsthand interviews with many of the key players in this story, including Willie Falcone, that's the correct pronunciation, Falcone. I did a lot of time with Willie Falcone. It's basically his story. It was an interesting time. I've got Miami Vice soundtrack running through my head right now.

Yeah, you know, in some ways, this book is an attempt to, it's a revision of that history as we know it. Because one of the things I learned in the research of this book were a lot of interesting things. One of them was that this group run by Falcone and a partner named Sal Magluta, Willie and Sal, they ran this organization pretty much without violence. They did not use violence. They did not use violence to punish their members internally. They did not start wars, turf wars with other people. They basically ran it as a family and they ran a pretty smooth operation. And I, like a lot of people, I found that hard to believe. And I started to think about that. And I realized the reason I'm finding that hard to believe is because my head is filled with images from Scarface and all these cocaine era movies, which put a big emphasis on the crazy level of violence to the point where we can't even imagine a cocaine story where there is not, you know, Uzi submachine guns and and chainsaws and things like that.

So it's kind of a reassessment of this era. I'm acknowledging here that the cocaine years were part of the war on drugs and the war on drugs was to a large degree a propaganda war. And so this idea that the cocaine business is filled with violence from top to bottom is kind of a myth that has persisted all these decades. And I think a lot of people, you know, I mean, Americans love guns and movies and the thrill of it. They like the excitement that comes in a movie that's, you know, wracked with violence. And I think they like the mystique of the of you know breaking the rules i think that's why people love the mafia or mobs and maybe why people have drugs on them yeah and what you find out when you write about organized crime is yeah there's violence there's a lot of violence in different aspects of that world. But you also

have to come to terms with the fact that it's just human beings who are engaged in this activity. It's just people who make decisions. It's not necessarily the devil. It's not evil. It's human beings who you could say made some bad choices that took them over to this side of the law and got them deeply engaged in criminal activity. But essentially, and it was very true with this group, these guys weren't even hardened criminals. These were just Cuban exiles who were working construction. And then this cocaine opportunity presented itself. And I'll give you some detail on that because it's pretty fascinating. It reiterates the theory that was in the media years ago, and everyone seems to have dropped

and forgotten, which was that the cocaine era was begun because of a covert op between the CIA and people who were smuggling weapons to the Contras in Central America. And the people who were smuggling those weapons were Cuban exiles who were actively engaged in the Cold War effort to kill Fidel Castro, take back Cuba, to stop the spread of Marxism and communism wherever it reared its head. And in the 1980s, early 1980s, that was in Central America. And so Willie Falcone, who I mentioned, was a 19-year-old kid when he was approached by some major players in the anti-Castro movement who were connected to the CIA. And they told him, we have a plan to bring kilos of cocaine in from Central America. They were bringing them in from Honduras.

And we need someone to sell it. And we need someone to create a market for this cocaine here in Miami. And we think you being a young guy, you and your friends, you could maybe do that. You sell the cocaine, you get to keep a certain percentage of it yourself but the majority of the money is used to buy weapons which are then shipped to the contras in central america contras were fighting against the sandinistas and this is the origins of the cocaine business in the United States. Comes right from it. And the CIA even what? Didn't the CIA help crack proliferate too? Crack comes later.

Crack comes later. I think that's a misnomer. I wish people didn't frame it that way because, no, the CIA did not create crack. The argument was that the CIA brought cocaine in that led to the creation of the crack era. A huge infusion of cocaine brought in through this deal, created, basically created the crack era. So it's worth knowing, it's been brought up before, you know, there was a book written called dark alliance which created a stir in the 90s when this story first came out and most people chose to ignore it but the fact

is is that the cocaine era began out of this cold war politics of trying to fight communism in central america it's kind of funny how we've really, if you really study the history of America and the fuck ups that we've done to South America, we've created the crisis that we have down there. Of course. It's all our fault. Reagan going back to Reagan. And,

and of course this, yeah, the Contras and stuff, but you know, some of the funding we did for el salvador and other countries and trying yeah us mucking about i mean we mucked up cuba we i mean you name it we mucked it up since the 60s and it's funny because we what's going on with the immigrant crisis is our creation really went over over the decades so it's kind of funny so tell us a little about yourself tj when

did you get into writing when did you start writing what inspired you to maybe become a writer and how did you get down this path of writing uh 10 plus books i i started writing early in life as a kid in school and uh got positive feedback about it and you know if you're a kid and you get positive feedback about something, you tend to go in that direction. It could have been a trumpet or a piano, but it was writing. And so in my formal education, high school, college, I always worked on the school newspaper. I think in a way I was apprenticing as a journalist. It's probably the most valuable thing I got out of my formal education. I was born on

the West Coast, went to college on the West Coast, but I immediately went to New York as a young man, 21 years old, and started to try to find work as a freelance journalist. I drove a taxi in the evenings for a number of years and did journalism during the day. And I wrote initially about all kinds of things, entertainment, sports and politics and crime. And I liked writing about crime. I was drawn to it. It provided to me writing about crime in the United States of America, particularly organized crime, which is what I write about, is a vast canvas. It's the largest canvas. Because when you're writing about organized crime in America, you're writing about everything. You're writing about that ethnicity, politics, sociology,

a little bit of everything. So it becomes a prism to address all kinds of social issues in the telling of these tales. And the first story I came upon, I was driving a cab at the time, but I started to write about an Irish-American, the last of a type of Irish-American gangster group from the west side of Manhattan, and they were called the Westies. They were a really violent gang who was known for making their murder victims' bodies disappear. They dismembered the bodies and got rid of them. And they were being brought down in a criminal case. And to make a long story short, I was able to finagle a book contract out of that. I was a 30-year-old kid. I didn't tell them I was still driving a cab they thought i was a legitimate

they thought i was a legitimate writer i kind of bluffed my way into that book contract and i do remember when i signed that that deal laying in bed and staring at the ceiling and thinking oh shit now i have to write a book And I hadn't really bent my mind around that. But anyway, that was the beginning for me. And that book did quite well and sort of established me as a crime writer, which was not anything I ever set out to do. But as I said, the more I got into it, the more I realized that I could write contemporary stories, but I could also go back in history and write historical versions of this. I wrote a book called Havana Nocturne about the era of the mob in Cuba in the 1950s before the

Cuban Revolution. So I could go back in history, I could write contemporary stories, and this is where I came to realize that I could possibly have a career doing this. Because if I use my imagination, there's really no end to the number of stories that you can find to tell. Yeah. And the stories are like we say on the show, the owner's manual to life. They're fun, they're entertainment. And we learned something from them. We learned something about human nature, about who people are. They take us away from different things. And so you've written a lot of books that we can find on Amazon.

People can search through them and order them up. What do you hope people come away with when they read The Last Kilo? I hope it opens their eyes and makes them reassess what they think they know about this history. I hope that it forces them to reassess their feelings about the war on drugs and the U.S. approach to dealing with narcotics. And this all really goes

back to the prohibition era of the 1920s, when booze was illegal suddenly and it created this vast system to deliver the product to the people because people wanted their alcohol and they were going to have it by hook or by crook you could say the same thing about cocaine people want their cocaine and they're going to get their cocaine. So what happens is this vast illegal apparatus is created that is not only a source of commercial opportunities for criminals, but it's hugely corrupting in terms of the system, because these cartels, any narcotics delivering apparatus can't exist without corruption. So people in law enforcement, politicians who facilitate the process in one way or another, it's a huge process of corruption. So there's that. And the other thing is I write these stories as much as possible, number one, from the point of view of the people who live the story to the extent that I can do it.

So that means finding people in the criminal world who will talk and tell their story and trust me in that way. And then telling their story without judgment. I think maybe I'm known for that, for not trying to impose some sort of social moral point of view on it where you demonize the criminals. Criminals are criminals. They pay their price. Willie Falcone, who I interviewed extensively, did 27 years in prison. I would say that he paid his price, his debt to society. And then so telling his story becomes an interesting process of getting to know the people, getting to know him, finding the humanity in it, and telling the story in such a way that the reader will feel they're in the shoes of some of these characters. Even though these characters probably lived lives that are dramatically different than their own lives. But if you can bring yourself to see yourself in the shoes of those people, then you really begin to understand the process of the criminal mentality. Yeah. And I think, like you said, bringing the humanity to it

is, you know, whether we're looking at stuff like this as a form of escapism or instruction yeah you know people people find it entertaining and of course you learn about yourself maybe you know you you get some self-reflection about how maybe i should be less evil maybe i should be better person but i think it's in front of it yeah you talk about escapism and and knowledge i try to do both i mean to me the first obligation of a writer any kind of writer is to tell a good story yeah so i'm trying to tell a good story an entertaining story that grips you and holds you and all those things but i'm also known for i mean this is a close to a, it is a 500 page book. I write long books. I put a lot of, I put years of research into these books and historical research. I spent a lot of time detailing the Cuban Revolution, that's really what this story is about. The politics of South America, the origins of the birth of the cocaine business, what that was all about,

the social circumstances in the United States that led to this cocaine era that was really unlike anything we'd seen in this country probably since the years of prohibition so the idea to me is to take a story and put it against a vast tapestry to try to explain a lot of things about how the world works or doesn't work to the reader that's beautifully said man that's like that's like an advertisement right there that's yeah that's that's that's it's taking entertainment and it's it's acknowledging it as as both entertainment and art that's to me the the ultimate challenge and responsibility tj give us your dot coms as we go out tell people people where they can pick up the book, get to know you better and all that good stuff. Yeah, tj-english.com is the website. Go to the website.

You'll find lots of information there about all the books. As I mentioned, this is book number 10. I write books on aspects of the criminal world, past and present, from all different points of view, different ethnicities. I'm on social media. I'm on Facebook and on Instagram. That's kind of where I draw the line. No TikTok, no X. But I am out there and I can be reached. Pursue those avenues and you'll find lots of information about what I do. TJ, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Folks, order up the book wherever fine books are sold. The Last Kilo, Willie Falcone and the Cocaine Empire that Seduced America. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, FortunesChristmas, LinkedIn.com, FortunesChristmas, Christmas, One, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

We'll see you next time.