The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Cocaine Royalty- Being Raised By The Colombian Cartel (Full Episode) | #31

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Alex Montenez talks about what it was like growing up as narco royalty in Miami, getting into the game himself and then going to prison, and finally-- becoming the first legitimate millionaire in his family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And I remember I told my father, I want to be a gangster. I want to be a gangster, Dad. And my father would look, son, I'm going to tell you something. There's only two ways that gangster is an end. There's no gangster that retires off top of a hill. And I'm going to let you know. Either you go to church or you're in this life. And I said, Dad, I'm in it.

That's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. I didn't even think. I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, hopped out. close the door and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank, like six inches. And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours.

Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. You know what to do by now. Go follow us on all socials. Like, subscribe, share.

Follow us on Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect show. You've got all that hot bonus content every week. All right, let's get into it. Okay. So this is part two of our Miami. Miami series where we follow around the descendants of the world famous cocaine cowboys. In the last episode, we followed around our friend Alex Montanez, who is the nephew to

Rafa Salazar, the number one cartel member for Medellin in the United States in the 70s and 80s. He's the guy that basically opened the cocaine route from Medellin to Miami. At that time, my uncle, late 80s, was estimated to be worth... I want to say like almost a billion dollars back then. Easy. These people were making 25 mil a day. It was ridiculous. Alex's father was Puerto Rican.

He married into Rafa's family, and that's how Alex and his family ended up as cocaine royalty, so to speak. Alex grew up in Medellin, but when he was seven years old, he was kidnapped, held for ransom, and after that, his father said, you know what, we're going back to Miami. Okay, so now it's the late 80s, and Alex is living with his family in Kendall, which is the wealthy Miami suburb where all of the Colombian immigrants involved in the cocaine trade

lived during that era. Alex's father, Robert, was in charge of all of the logistics for the Medellin cartel in Miami, and as we talked about in part one, that included the caletas or stash houses, where they kept the money and the dope. And there were stash houses dotted all through, throughout Kendall. This house now has about five bedrooms. All the bedrooms were, if it didn't have money stacked from the floor up, they didn't even

count money. They used to weigh money. These stash houses were so prevalent in Kendall that to this day, 30 years later, new residents who move into these houses and renovate them are finding drug money and sometimes drugs themselves buried in the walls from that era. It was a guy that bought a fixture opera. and the guy was tearing one side of the house to make it a two-story.

The guy found a wall full of fucking money. And the guy calls and reports it. You know what I mean? Imagine the people that have not reported or have not said shit. Alex's dad, Robert, besides being in charge of the stash houses, also coordinated with the Coke pilots

flying up from South America. My father said that his first million that he made was through this airport. They would use private airports in the Miami area to offload the Colombian cocaine. Famous American pilots like Roger Reeves and Barry Seal would fly their planes in from Columbia

and land directly in a private airport in the neighborhood of Kendall. Imagine doing that today. This is where Robert would meet them and help them offload the shipments. And remember, Alex is just a little boy trying to grow up and have a childhood around all of this chaos. His mother was best friends with Griselda Blanco, one of the most murderous drug traffickers of all time.

My mother was really, really, really tight with Griselda growing up. You know, her and my mother had a real liking to Griselda. My mother and her just got along very, very well. If you go watch Cocaine Cowboys, the documentary, they talk about this Griselda hit where she orders one of her Sicario's to stab a dude to death in the Miami International Airport. That's something that crazy and brazen.

She would do shit like that all the time. My father was the getaway driver. My father was in the Miami International Airport. My father was in the airport. So this is how close Alex was in proximity to all of this madness. But to him, as a little kid, Griselda was just a family friend. I remember one time that I was a kid here in Miami, and Griselda passed me like an arrepita, you know what I mean?

a Una Una Repa and stuff And a family gathering where everybody was at And stuff like that I remember that, you know what I mean? And now it comes out that that was Grizolda. Little did he know that she and his mother were cokeheads who were getting high constantly. There's a famous picture

that Gwazolda's laying on a bed with a hat. I believe the hat's red. I know she's wearing a striped dress and my mother took that picture. Actually, everybody in that era was. If you go back and listen, you know, it's a big myth

that you don't get high on your own supply. Everybody from that era, from the junkies all the way to the highest level drug traffickers, were all snorting coke all of the time. Everybody, man. My mother, my mother got hooked on Coke bad. The father got hooked on Coke bad.

My father said that back then everybody did Coke. It was like smoking a cigarette now. Everybody did Coke back then. And I remember a lady said that it was candy. And I was like, oh, I want candy. You know what I'm saying? And my father went, grabbed me and bring me back.

to all the kids weren't shit. Alex wasn't alone in this experience either. One of his childhood friends was Griselda's youngest son, Michael Corleone Blanco. That's a real name. And to this day, they remain friends, and he is the last remaining survivor of that lineage. His mother's dead.

All of her husbands were killed by her, his father included, and all of his brothers are dead. So he and Alex really are the last descendants of that empire. empire. And now as Alex is getting a little older, he starts to put together what his family does for a living. And I remember I walked into my father's room and they were counting money. My father and my mother were counting money. And I was like, oh, shit, we're rich. His first discovery of this came when he was throwing a tantrum. I had a treasure box, right? And I used to have it with GI Joe's. I was a fucking kid. I was like seven years old. And I remember one time I got mad and I flipped,

I flipped the fucking case over. And when I flip the case over, the whole inside of the fucking treasure box was all full of money. $100 bill, like the stacks. And this is at the height of his family's power. So they have mansions and apartments all over Miami. And we had an apartment here, a house over there. We had another fucking house somewhere else.

And one day, little Alex is playing around in the laundry room and he flips over a hamper and he finds something in there. And I flipped that shit over and I remember, man, it was like brick after brick. It was, I want to say maybe like 20 bricks, 20 keys, maybe even more, bro. I remember that I walked into my mother was there. My father was there. There was a few people then. I remember that I grabbed like six or seven of them.

And I came back to the living room. And I always used to be like, yo mom, what's this? It's like, oh, I told you, Bobby, what the fuck? You know what I'm saying? My father was like, oh, here we go again. You know what I'm saying? And now I was like, oh, so that's the first time I touched the brick. Besides money and drugs, Alex knew that his family was different by the way that he saw his father give orders, the power he wielded with just a single command.

And when my father, my father would do an order, I would see motherfuckers walk out the door. So I always knew that there was a power or that we were somebody. Maybe I didn't know at the extent of the power or the family that I was. was in, but I always knew we had money because I would always talk shit. Imagine that. This is the example and the environment that raised Alex Montanez. What's up, guys? Let's take a minute to thank our amazing new sponsor, Just D8. Right now, they're offering a 420 sale on all of their Delta 8 products. Check this out. For a limited time, you can get a sampler pack with three cartridges each for your vape pens, okay? They've got all

different kinds of flavors, including but not limited to mango cush, wedding cake, forbidden fruit, and much, much more. Look at, look at Runts. I don't even know what that means. Clementine? Not just oranges. Clementine. Delicious. You can get a three pack of this for just $28, including shipping, right? Use the promo code, connect, and you get a free brownie, rice crispy, or other kind of edible. Right? You even got bacon on it? They got edibles, with bacon on it, yo. And there's more. If you use the promo code connect,

you can bundle it and you get two Delta 8 and two HHC cartridges, including one live resin blend cartridge. And a mouth-watering brownie. Are you shitting me? For only 60 bucks?

Let me go over that again because it's such a good deal. If you use the promo code connect, just D8 will give you two Delta 8 and two HHC cartridges, one live resin blend cartridge and a brownie for only $60. Okay, you guys, it's unbeatable.

There's so many yummy flavors here. I love this company so much. Visit their website today. www. www. just-d8.com and take advantage of those amazing deals before they're gone. Guys, that is an unbeatable 420 deal. Go over there right now.

Support us because they support the show. All right, let's get back into it. All right. So cut to the first. early 90s and the cocaine Cowboys era is basically finished. Pablo Escobar is dead, Rafa is dead, Jorge Ochoa is locked up, and all of the people in Miami, the whole gang, has basically split apart. And Robert, Alex's dad has been named as an enforcer in this RICO case against the

Medellin cartel. My father said that when Max disappeared from one day to another after he got caught, my father said it's only a matter of time so this shit goes down. He got pulled over in Miami. They found them with like, I think it was $500,000 cash, a gun and a kilo in the car. He was obviously arrested. He bonded out. And after that, he went on the run.

And this is hard on Alex, obviously. He doesn't know where his father is. Yo, mom, where's Poppy? Where's Poppy? My father would always come the middle of the night, two, three in the morning. Like every two, three months. And I would wake up to my father kissing me on my cheek. And he would wake me up.

He's like, yo, what are you doing? My son. And so I remember, and I remember I get this, bro, I talk this shit, bro, and I get goosebumps, bro. And then five minutes later, he would be gone. And law enforcement was all over the place. He remembers the feds kicking in his door multiple times looking for his father. My father came on my birthday to give me a kiss. And I remember my father woke me up, kissed me, brought me a gift.

Five minutes later, my father leaves. they hit the fucking door. We had we had those big fucking doors. A lady cop had me in her hands and I remember that there was three fucking detectives where is he telling my mother

like where the fuck is your husband and my mother, I remember this shit like it was yesterday my mother spit in the cop's face they fucking put my mother in handcuffs and the whole shabang they wanted to lock my mother up right? And Robert's a slick one

he's got fake passports he's bouncing from Chicago to New York back to Puerto Rico But he finally gets picked up. They ambushed my father at a family member's house in Puerto Rico. The one that turned him in was his sister's husband. Who was a dirty DEA agent turned him in in Puerto Rico. They extradite my father from Puerto Rico.

Remember, Puerto Rico wasn't an American, was an American back then. So they bring him back to the Fed. But Robert had a great lawyer. He was still rich at this time. time and he pled out to 20 years and he ended up serving about 10 of them. He went down as an enforcer on his paperwork. He said that he was an enforcer for the cartel. You know what I mean?

And they tried to put that he was smuggled with drugs but they didn't have the proof. My father had bro racketeering, threatening witnesses. It's crazy because my father had one of the best lawyers still to this day. And after he went away, the Fed seized everything. They took the property, the cars, the money. And for the first time in his young life, Alex was plunged into poverty. I remember shit got real, bro. I remember that the first time I ate eggs with rice with ketchup.

Remember, he was a rich kid. He grew up with maids and bodyguards and drivers in Columbia. I mean, he felt entitled to talk shit to the guys who kidnapped him, right? But as soon as his father left, he knew what it was to eat peanut butter and jelly. His mother had never had a job, and it was, you know, back to the poor house. So now what does Alex do? He's a teenager. He needs to provide for his family and his mother.

Turns to the only business that he's ever known. One time, me and my father had a real conversation, and I'm like, you know, I feel like you weren't there most of my life. And my father told me the only reason why I wasn't there was because I wanted to make sure you and your brothers never had to hustle and go through the shit that I went through. You know, I don't want you guys to know what poverty feels like. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local Total Wine and More to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help.

Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. All right, now it's the early 2000s. Robert Montanez paroled out of the feds. At that time, I want to say I was about 18, 19 years old.

I get into the game. I see my dad start making moves big time. And he and Alex relocated from Miami up to Queens, New York. We went from fucking rice and eggs to fucking back to Beverly Hills, right? big, fucking crib, brand new cars. The feds came knocking on our door with his parole officer. And they told my father, you can't be in Florida at all. My father, well, I have my parole here.

I did my time. What's the problem? He goes, you cut your charges here. If you're here, we're going to violate you. You got to leave out of here. So I had to been around my father all these years. So me and my father, we end up going back to New York. a crew and they started hustling.

And I remember I told my father, I want to be a gangster. I want to be a gangster, dad. And my father will look, son, I'm going to tell you something. There's only two ways that gangsters end. There's no gangster that retires on top of a hill. And I'm going to let you know, either you go to church or you're in this life. And I said, dad, I'm in it.

But it wasn't like the old days. The era of the mega cartels by the early 2000s was finished. But not a crew how we had. had in Colombia, like the cartels, it was more on the low end. This is not a ton or a hundred key. This is more like three, five, maybe ten. No more planes flying in thousands of kilos at a time. This was very much, you know, get five or ten bricks, break them down into ounces and give them out to street dealers. My father goes to give me the blueprint. He's like, look, we're going to start a crew. We want to start a crew. And we're going to take off. Not as big as how we did with

We're with Theo Rafa and your uncle Jorge, but we're going to get money. This is all I know how to do, and this is, to be honest with you, this is all I want to do. We're in the modern era of cocaine distribution. Everything has been fractured and kind of decentralized, so to speak. So we start a crew, which was my brother, it was all family, my older brother, my younger brother. So now that Alex and his brother are officially part of the family business, they see his father's dark side. We started going a war that we were hitting people with bats. They were, we were catching them.

They were catching us. One time they were having a beef with another drug crew in Queens. They shot my brother, my brother's house out. You know what I mean? And we caught the second leader of the gang one time slipping out of payphone. And Alex witnessed his father commit violence for the first time. My brother was like, I'm going to knock this motherfucker's teeth out, right? My father was like, nah, I got to do.

do this to show them who the fuck we are. My father gets out the car, my father pokes him, the guy turned around on the phone, and my father hits him right across the fucking face, knocked all his fucking teeth out. He knew what his father used to do. He'd heard stories about the hits and the Sicario's, but he actually witnessed with his own two eyes this violence. I'm like, yo, this is the first time he seen some real, real gangster shit, right? And I remember my father took his jacket off and put it on.

like a trophy, and grabbed a few of the teeth and put it in his pocket. And their crew did relatively well. I mean, moving 10 kilos a week is a lot of Coke by most people's standards. We started at that time, bro. When we started pushing work, we were pushing three to four keys. Who were you buying keys from? We're still getting it from people from Columbia. You know what I mean?

But compared to the old years, you know, Alex was now in the trenches doing dirt. I mean, he grew up with a very glamorized version of cocaine, He saw all the fun stuff, the parties meeting Pablo Escobar, the millions of dollars stashed in the Caletas where they grew up in Miami. But now he's on the frigid streets of New York moving ounces to crack dealers. It's just a different reality. I was selling ounces for $500 an ounce of raw, straight drop. But pretty soon, things just got too hot, and they felt another war was about to kick off

in Queens, so they move back to Miami. Well, my father said they're going to end up doing something to one of you all to prove a state back. So we move back to Miami. Now in Miami, Alex is running his own crew. His father has stepped back from the trenches and is essentially a fixer. He's semi-retired at this point. So a fixer in this case just means a middleman.

So Alex's father was using his old cocaine connections to supply Alex and was just taking a couple of points off of the kilos. The same strategy we had in New York, now we flipped it over here, right? We're getting money. And Alex was moving kilos. He had guys out there hustling for him. But just like the generation that raised him, he fell into his own addiction and cocaine abuse. To be honest with you, back then, I had a drug problem.

You know what I mean? So I always kept at least nine ounces, a quarter key in my nightstand. You know, personal use parties, whatever it was. That lifestyle is not glamorous. I do not envy Alex kicked up in his big house with his AK-47, you know, sniffing line after line. That is a real destructive, dark lifestyle. And it always ends the same way.

I used to watch the Scarface movie while I'm getting fucked up. And I wanted to be that, dude. I'm like, yo, fuck that. I was like, you know, I have my crew and this and that. He bought a big house in Kendall, just a few blocks actually from that small airport that he took us to, where his father used to meet the cocaine pilots flying in the blow from Colombia back in the 80s. The money was good, and this was the first thing that I did with illegal money was by this house.

This house was the best thing that ever had happened to me at the time, and it also was the worst, the gift and the curse. And at this time, his Coke habit is really getting away from him. He's just kicked up in that mansion, getting high, all day and he's paranoid. He's out of his mind. He thinks people are following him. One night I got fucked up and I had a bad feeling.

So one evening he decides to wrap up 50 grand, stuff it in a coffee can and he buries it out in his backyard. And I'm high out of my mind. I go to the backyard. I'm doing like a fucking Oak Island treasure chest thing. I'm like one step, two step. I'm counting the steps to where I went and I buried the money. I think back then,

I had buried the money maybe four feet. Well, it turns out he was right. People were following him, and the feds were starting to put a case on. That day, I had been driving around, and I had seen a minivan, a pickup truck, all with tinted windows, and I was going in a circle driving around. I'm like, yo, maybe it's the cocaine. I don't know. I'm bugging out.

I'm imagining shit. And then one day, he finally gets raided. When I made it right here that I busted a U-turn that I came around, they surrounded me. I had never seen cops with ski masks. Never in my life. I thought it was a robbery. And they took the kitchen sink from him, man. It was a Spanish Cuban cop.

Cool cop that I thought at the time. He comes down and he says, look, you know, the cops are going to be here within 10 to 50 minutes. What do you have here that you don't want to get arrested for? So I'm like, yo, shit, I got money in the closet and shoeboxes. I have an assault rifle. Shit, I'm like, I have cocaine in my drawer. Essentially, they got him to confess to everything that he was doing. They walk out of the house, man, with bags.

Well, my Louis Vuitton bags, my traveling bags, they walk out of the bags with all my shit, right? But of course, in typical Miami fashion, they seized a million dollars, but only about 100,000 made it into the discovery paperwork. They pocketed the rest. Allegedly, there was no money found in my home, but in my closet, they took almost a million dollars. It was $998,000. That is way more common than people think, especially in a corrupt ass place like Miami. Those were dirty fucking drug cops. He also had a chopper in the house that they seized in AK-47. Now, they didn't declare that either, and they really did him a favor, because if he had got charged with the drugs plus an automatic weapon, he'd be looking at a mandatory

fed time, probably 10 or 15 years. That's not all. Then the cops tell Alex, he's, hey, our backup's on its way. They're going to be here in about 10 or 15 minutes. Is there anything you don't want them to find? So I'm telling the cop I'm like, oh shit, I'm like, look, I have a gun in the car. And they say, okay, well, that's going to cost you. So the cop was like, nah, I got to take off your jewelry. So I'm like, man, fuck it.

It takes off my jewelry. They take off the handcuffs off of me. They take off my bracelet, my Rolex, my jewelry. None of that made the paperwork either. He never took the gun out of the fucking car. But that gun that he had in the car did. The cops betrayed him. And ultimately, that's what Alex went to prison for was that gun.

The feds didn't have any evidence to really bring him down on a drug case because none of the cocaine or the money got turned in. He got hit with the pistol charge, so he did state time. But of course, what this whole investigation was about was the feds trying to get to Alex's family. They knew Alex was small potatoes. I wasn't no cartel member. My family was. So when they grew up, grabbed me, they grabbed me with the sense that damn,

we know who his uncle is, who his godfather, you know his father. They figured Alex was weak, and if they leaned on him, he would give up everybody all the way back to the bosses in Medellin. So they bring him in, and they're threatening him with all sorts of time. And they show me a picture of me hugging my uncle,

or Jorge? I said, oh man, this shit's bigger than, this shit's bigger than me. This is the feds, they're breathing down his neck, and they tell him, we want Jorge. But everybody that knows about the cartel, that's Colombian, everybody knows the mastermind behind that was not Pablo. It was Jorge. Remember, Jorge Ochoa, the patriarch of the Medellín cartel, the co-founder with Pablo Escobar, the most successful drug trafficker, I would say, in the history of the world, of the drug business.

This is a guy who made billions right along with Pablo, but never got killed, is living to this day and only did. five and a half years in prison. So by this time, 2002, 2003, he's out, he's a free man, and the feds want him. They're getting me because of who my family was in Colombia, not in Miami. Fuck Miami. They're coming for the karma.

So now the feds have Alex jammed up. And then he gets a call from his father, and his father tells him, hey, it's your time. My father had a long talk with me, and my father said, listen, I told you this story a long time ago to you go to church and the family business. So he was like, you're going to prison, you're going to have to go sit down, but it was like a graduation, like I'm going to college.

You know, I'm going to Penn State. You know what I mean? So he was like, this is part of the game, and it's going to make you a better man, and it is what it is. And in fact, the bosses want to meet with you. So I'm like, I'm like, oh, for what? Like, what the fuck is that a point of a meeting? I haven't seen these people in years.

What we need to have a meeting for? So I was scared. So Alex gets summoned to a meeting with the old heads of the cartel, the last survivors in Miami. I remember my father was like, you got to go to the meeting. No matter what the fuck you do today, you got to go to the meeting.

And he doesn't know if he's going to walk out of this meeting alive, you see? It's kind of like when the mafia summons you down, right? You might go in alive and come out dead. And when I went to the meeting, I went with two guns on me loaded because that could have been a meeting like a sit down that I wouldn't make it back out of.

And at the same time, he gets a call from Columbia, and it's his godfather Jorge. You know, my uncle Jorge has always been very soft-spoken, man. Don't talk loud. Not a man of many words, but when he says the few things he says, you feel him. Jorge was like, what are you going to do? What do you want to do? This message from Jorge is subtle, but it's direct. He's saying, hey, are you going to sit down and do your time? Or are you going to get dealt with? And Alex decides, hey, you know what? I'm going to do neither one of those things.

I tell him that whatever happens happens that I'm gonna go on the run. He bails out and he flees to Columbia. I had a fake passport, fake social, the whole shabang. So he fucks around in Columbia for a couple of years. He's hiding out. He's getting in trouble. He's, you know, kind of being a bum.

Because in Columbia, I was living foul, man. I was on some whatever. My family's this. My uncle's this. And I was always doing some shit that I would always have to call and be like, hey, listen, you know, I did this shit with this guy's girl and this guy, he's a somebody.

so it's going to have to turn up bad in Colombia for me any fucking way because I was doing reckless shit. And back in America, his brother left Miami and moved to Chicago where he started an operation there. My father and me told him, come back home, come to Miami. Come back home. Chicago's different. And they ended up having a falling out over some drug money that Alex thought he was owed. About $50,000. 30 money.

Me and him were beefing about it, right? They didn't speak for six. Six months when Alex's brother got into some trouble in Chicago. One time they came to collect and my brother said, bro, listen, tell your boss that I said and he smacked him. Go tell your boss I said that. And unfortunately, this led to him being murdered. A week before my brother got killed, I called my brother.

I'm like, man, you know what, I'm going to squash this shit. Fuck it. My brother didn't pick up. His phone was off. And that shit always ate at me. that what a, like, six months got robbed that I could have been with my brother over some petty ass dirty money, right? This devastated Alex, and against his father's wishes, he returned to the U.S. to attend his

brother's funeral in Chicago. My father told me, if you come to the funeral, they're going to be waiting for you in the funeral. Just know that. Just know, this is something that you're going to have to pay. If you come to bury your brother, they're going to bury you. And it was after the funeral that he got picked. As I'm leaving, I hear the sirens.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, who. It was like six, seven cars. Fume, fume. There was somebody there that saw me there. Now it's the end of the line for Alex. He's in big trouble. He's facing 20 years. So he decides to get the most expensive cartel lawyer

that money can buy. He's got to auction his mom's house up just to pay for him. But it's worth it in the long run because his lawyer gets him a plea deal of only five years in the state from that original pistol charge from the raid on his house a couple of years before. My lawyer said, listen, kid,

I'm going to tell you some right now. We've had a good run. Take the five and run. You'll be home with good behavior. Two and a half years, give or take. Go sit your ass down and learn your lesson. Alex is four and a half years into his stretch. He's almost done when he loses good time.

Now, I was supposed to get out three months earlier, but I got into some shit in prison and a fight. And it fucked up my good behavior, my game time. Good time. Ficked on my good time, and it pushed it back. And sadly, in those three months that he had to stay in there, his father passed away. My father stopped drinking, stopped smoking, started going to church, would always talk the word. And three months before I get out of prison, my father dies.

That fight in prison cost him his final chance to be with his father in person. You know, I still can't look at my father's picture. without feeling pain. Until this day, I have a picture right next to my bed on the wall, and I have a picture of me and my father was mine, my birthday. I just feel, man, like God punched out the clock early on him, man. That's why he changed his life, man, and that's what happened with that. Now Alex is out, his father's dead, his brother's dead,

cartel is broken up. He's got to go out and get a job. But he's a rich kid at heart. He's never really worked a day in his life. life. I said, God, let it be what it's going to be. Let my faith, I put my faith in your hands, but I can't do this shit. And I walked off that sight. So quickly, he goes back to the streets, the only way that he's ever known. Living in my mother's house, I ain't got a pot to pissing or a window to throw it out of. He said, this is all I know. So he gave me two ounces of Coke

and a gun. He starts working the strip clubs in Miami and just peddling Coke stone for stone. Now, think about that fall from Grace. He was a kid carrying kilos of coke in his arms. He was part of the largest drug trafficking organization in the world. And now he's basically been reduced to a street dealer. It's a sad story. And one night, while he's leaving a strip club,

he's drunk and stoned. Three, four in the morning, I'm fucked up, I'm drunk, I'm coked up, and I left the strip club with a stripper. And I'm driving home, and I see the sirens. I get pulled over. And in that car, he's got an ounce bagged up, and he's got a gun, and he's a convicted felon.

He's in big trouble. I give him my license, my registration. He looks at me, he says, have you have anything to drink today, sir? So yeah, I drank about two beers about five, six hours ago. I'm drunk as fuck. High as fuck. Guy goes back to the police car. I go and I tell the guy, I said,

listen, if you told me to get out of the vehicle, I'm taking this motherfucker on a chase. I'm not going back to prison. And he starts praying. I said, God, if you get me out of this one, I know I don't pray to you a lot and I know I don't talk to you a lot but I promise you I will never sell a nickel.

I will never even get high. Get me out of this one, please. I remember praying. And I remember, bro, this shit seemed like hours, but it was minutes. I see a cop. I see the sirens flying, a police car flying. And I said, oh, shit, they're going for backup.

They know my probation. They know about my uncle. Know about my father. Fuck. And then I see another police car. They're flying. I said, oh, man. going down. But they pass me. Fume! The first cop, second cop, fume passes me. I see the cop run

out the fucking car. Run towards me. He runs towards me. He throws the license. It hits me in the face, the registration, and he says, slow the fuck down and have a good night. Gets back in his car, turned on his life, and takes off. And he kept his word. He never sold drugs after that. But he needed money to get him on his feet and get him going in the legitimate business world. And that's when he remembered the 50 Gs that he buried in the backyard of his old house that got seized in the raid. When the feds took this house away from me, a cop bought it. I talked myself up, it took me like 10 days, bro.

It took me a while, a few days. And I said, you know what, fuck, it's tonight. I remember one day I woke up, and I said, today's the day. I started at like three, four in the morning, started digging holes, mind you. I'm counting. I'm nervous, I'm scared. Did you have a shovel? I had a little shovel, little shovel.

So I'm fucking, I'm like, goddamn, mind you, the whole yard is full of holes down. We got maybe like 100 holes from four. It's like the sun comes up like around 6.30. So it's about 6 something. And I got literally like 20 holes. So now my adrenaline's kicking in. And I'm like, shit, well, if I leave now,

when they wake up, they're going to see all these holes and know that there's something here. They're going to dig and find the money. So, and if I stay here to daylight, the cop is going to come out. And shoot me. I'm already here and I'm pretty much hysterical. I'm over here digging out.

So I'm like, bro, it has to be. I'm counting the steps. I keep starting from the tree. The light turns on on the side of the house. That's the bathroom. The sun's about to come out. So I'm like, yo, this is the last time I'm going to hit, the last shovel. I started digging and I hit the can.

I hit the thing. I said, oh, shit. Now, mind you, I don't know if the money's going to be in good condition. I don't know nothing. I see the can. As soon as I grab the can, I hear, hey, what are you doing? I run. I don't grab the fence to jump over.

I literally jumped over that fence with no hands like a football. I grabbed it out. I left the shovel. Fuck the shovel. Got it in my hands. I grab and I run and I jumped. I hurtled over the fence. No hands.

Land on my feet. Run, jump in the car and take off. Today, Alex is a legitimate millionaire. first of his kind in the Montanez family. He used that 50 G's to open up his first mattress store, and now 10 years later, he owns a bunch of them all over Miami. I feel, man, that I broke the family curse, man, that I'm the first millionaire.

I don't have to sow coke and do all these things to become successful in life or to become a somebody. He also started Organic Food Kings, the vegan food truck that we've talked about on the previous episode. He's got five different locations, all over Miami, and it's bringing him millions of dollars a year. Almost as much money as he made selling Coke. He never knew that being a legitimate businessman could be so profitable.

He's been so successful with that business, in fact, that famous athletes and rappers and celebrities of all kinds come through to Miami just to go to organic food kicks. But every step of the way in all of his businesses, he has the kings, the crown that represents his father and what his father meant to him. He truly was the king of that family. He was the patriarch.

And now Alex is setting up his own children to make sure they never have to get involved in a life of crime. He gifted his daughter, his little 10-year-old daughter, a flower business. By the way, if you're in Miami, check out A&E special arrangements.

You know, the story of Alex Ochoa and Michael Corleone, these second generation, the kids of the cocaine cowboys, it's a success story. at the end of the day. It's an immigrants dream in many ways. Their parents came to this country just like any other immigrant group. They happen to be murderous drug traffickers. They're all gone. They sacrificed themselves to prison or death, but their kids are thriving. They're all out of the

game, making huge money legally. And it's all was laid on the foundation of the hustle mindset that the Colombians brought to Miami, which was get rich and escape poverty. I live the fucked up life growing up, man. I struggled. I had anger issues, abandonment issues, a lot of anger for no reason. And I'm there for my kids.

The little things that it might be as picking her up from after school or taking my son to soccer, the little things. that when I would play soccer as a kid, and I would see, like, I would score, like, one of the people on the team would score a goal, and they would run to their dad, and their dad would hug them. And that shit inside of me, I'm like, damn, well,

my father's not here to give me that hug, and I'm gonna be a better father than I am a businessman, right? So that, like, what I've learned, man, family is always got, bro. And I've learned, bro, that if you don't work for a hard, man, you're never gonna keep it. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. Thank you so much for the support. Make sure to check us out next week as we continue our Miami series.

We'll see you next time.