[salsa music playing]
[man] As of 1987, Sal Magluta was wanted in the state of Florida
by virtue of his plea and conviction
in the operation Video Canary case ten years earlier.
Once the Supreme Court had rejected his various appeals,
he was then wanted, expected to surrender, along with his partner, Willy Falcon
to serve his 14-month sentence.
That he did not.
So he's a fugitive.
[man 2] Sal's renting a place in Miami Beach for 5,800 dollars a month.
[woman] Hiding in plain sight.
[man 2] Willy's up in Fort Lauderdale renting a 9,000-dollar-a-month mansion.
[woman] Willy was hiding out with Alina, his wife.
I used to go to La Gorce at least once a week to see Sal,
spend two or three days 'cause he was lonely over there.
I was, like, taking care of him, bringing him food.
He said, "Well, I could go to Cuba and live like a king."
Well, go to Cuba and live like a king.
"I have an emerald that I could live the rest of my life off of."
Well, take that emerald, put it in your pocket, take off to Colombia.
Do something. What are you waiting for?
You're waiting for them to catch you, and it will all be over?
But Sal was more like,
"Oh, I could still go and maybe eat and have dinner at Joe's Stone Crab
and they'll hide me in the back."
He enjoyed living on the edge and being like cat and mouse.
"See if you can find me," you know?
Willy didn't have that mentality. Willy's like, "I don't wanna go to jail."
I knew it was a matter of time.
Sal and Willy were going to be caught.
["Blood Sport" by Pitbull plays]
♪ Woo! Sniff, co- ♪
♪ Snort, -caine ♪
♪ Deal, cow- ♪
♪ Snort, -boys ♪
♪ Will, will, kill, kill ♪
♪ For the love of the blood sport ♪
♪ They'll do 25 to life For the love of the blood sport ♪
See this cute little vial here?
It's crack, rock cocaine, the most addictive form.
You think it's the glamour drug of the 80s?
Well, that's the point of this friendly little reminder.
The drug dealers need to know that we want them out of our schools,
neighborhoods, and our lives.
What would I do if someone offered me these drugs?
I'd tell them to take a hike.
Say no to drugs.
[man] I mean, they had all this "Say no to drugs!"
I was thinking, "This is gonna get tough. There's not gonna be any work for me."
It was the other way around.
We had more coke coming into the United States than ever before.
[somber music playing]
I had come back to Miami from L.A.
I was with my friend,
and we stopped at Latin American to eat something.
And there's this blonde girl sitting with this older man.
My friend's like, "Hey, look at that blonde girl. She's really pretty."
I'm like, "Bro, stop looking over there. She's with her husband, you know?"
"You wanna get us into a fight or whatever?"
I was at lunch with my dad,
when I saw Peter and his friend for the first time at Latin American.
He just, like, caught my attention.
[Pegy] That was on a Wednesday.
["Rhythm is Gonna Get You" by Gloria Estefan playing]
-I go to Club Nu on a Friday night. -I went to Club Nu.
And Peter's friend goes, "Oh my God! You're the girl from Latin American."
[Pegy] He comes running, "Hey!"
"Remember that pretty blonde girl at Latin American?"
I go, "Yeah." "She's here!" I'm like, "Go get her."
♪ At night We can turn off all the lights ♪
[Alexia] I think he was in the VIP.
And I saw, like, all these girls around him. I was like, "Oh my God."
♪ The rhythm is gonna get you ♪
When she gets there, I'm like, [speaks Spanish]
"Find me the priest. I'm getting married." [laughs]
♪ Throw the covers on your head ♪
[Alexia] But it was funny, 'cause Jose Canseco was there too.
So, it was kinda like, "Okay, now you got competition."
Jose was, like, trying to talk to me.
When he saw that, he was like, "Okay, I'm gonna, like, step forward."
And I'm like, "Okay, I really like this guy."
♪ The rhythm is gonna get you Tonight ♪
That next day, we went to the beach, we hung out,
and then something really interesting happened.
While we were at his apartment, it was like one in the morning.
He gets a phone call, and he's like,
"I gotta go." "What do you mean, you gotta go?"
He's like, "Yeah, but you can stay." And I'm like, "I'm not staying."
He left so quickly.
That, at that moment I said, "This guy has a girlfriend or he's married."
So I picked up my things, my beach stuff, and I left.
Little did I know, that it was, like, some shipment that was coming in,
and he had to go pick up the merchandise.
♪ Tonight ♪
[man] In 1989, a grand jury was investigating Falcon and Magluta.
But the investigators at that time really didn't have, uh, any sources,
like undercover agents into them.
They didn't have any informants into them.
This was a kind of a family organization. Everybody was related to somebody
that worked for Willy and Sal.
They knew each other for years from little kids on Little Havana.
So they had a lot of loyalty to each other.
So that makes it difficult to penetrate and get somebody
to cooperate against them.
[ominous music playing]
[reporter] Miami lawyer Juan Acosta was bumped off by a Colombian hit man
just days before he was due to testify before a grand jury.
One of the probably biggest breaks for us,
not such a good break for an attorney named Juan Acosta,
was when he got murdered.
He'd been subpoenaed to turn over records to a grand jury
that was investigating Falcon and Magluta.
[Marilyn] Juan Acosta was an attorney that Sal had
to oversee his offshore accounts.
He was gonna cooperate.
He knew where the money was coming from.
[Pat] When he got murdered, all those records
that they could have destroyed or hidden fell into the hands of law enforcement.
They were all in cabinets in his office.
And all these records in his files
showed all this money going to and from Panamanian banks.
So local law enforcement, Metro Dade Homicide, got a search warrant,
seized those records out of his cabinet, and we brought them to the grand jury.
The killers are still on the loose.
They say at this point, they have no suspects.
In the very, very beginning, I never suspected anything of him.
Peter did not look like a drug dealer to me.
I didn't know what a drug dealer was supposed to look like,
except maybe Scarface.
Nobody, not any of his friends, not none of my friends,
nobody that I knew ever came to me and said,
"Be careful with him."
Everybody spoke so nicely of him.
And I would ask him, "Where do you work?"
He's like, "I run my father's business and my mom's business."
So he would leave in the morning to go to the gym and to supposedly go work.
But I didn't know what work was.
[salsa music playing]
[Pegy] Justo Jay took care of the loads that came in at the stash houses.
He's the one that showed me everything in the drug business.
Jay had gotten arrested.
He did not cooperate, and uh, the judge goes to him,
"I think you love Willy and Sal more than you love your family."
So they gave him life.
Jay goes away
and I take over.
[music builds]
To me, I didn't see, like, I was hurting anybody or doing anything wrong.
I used to have two apartments, two or three houses.
My rent was like 30,000 dollars a month.
I'm making close to 250 on a monthly basis.
I'm 21 years old.
I provided my family with whatever they needed.
"You guys don't work anymore. From now on, you know, I take care of everything here."
I started thinking about all these different things that were like signs,
the cash, the different boats, the different cars.
I mean, nothing was ever his, but it was the family.
I'm not gonna lie. He wasn't the first drug dealer I went out with.
[Pegy] Drug dealing was something that was, like, natural to me.
You tell me, "Go in that store and steal a candy bar," I can't do it.
I'll start sweating, I'll get nervous. You put me in a van with 3,000 keys,
I'm like, "This is my world," you know?
[Alexia] I always liked those kinda guys that were cute
with a good car, with the boat, with that kind of, that bad boy.
You know, I guess like unconsciously, I wanted to make 'em good boys.
[Pegy] It took about a year and a half for me to start dating Alexia seriously.
'Cause of the lifestyle I lived, you don't wanna, like,
get tied up to anybody, you know? I mean, you're in the drug business.
You're a drug dealer, you know?
That's the last thing you wanna do is get married and have somebody involved
in a world that's crazy.
[man] For the last 75 years, the finest expressions of love have come…
I love you.
… from Mayor's.
We went to Mayor's, and I picked out my ring.
[salsa music playing]
We paid 42,000 dollars for the ring. He did pay cash.
We're engaged, and I'm already making plans
to get married at the InterContinental Hotel.
Willy Chirino was gonna sing at our wedding.
[singing in Spanish]
Yoly Muñoz did my wedding dress.
["Wedding March" plays]
And he's living the perfect fake life
when all this stuff is gonna happen in the next few months.
[dramatic music playing]
[Chris] In April of 1991, based on documentary evidence
and testimony from several cooperating witnesses,
gathered over a two-year period of time,
the grand jury returned a sealed indictment.
[dramatic music playing]
In that indictment, Falcon, Magluta, and eight of their colleagues,
co-defendants, family members, were charged with conspiracy to import
and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute
thousands of kilograms of cocaine.
[reporter] 75 tons, they were accused of smuggling.
[Christopher] 2.1 billion dollars worth of narcotics.
The U.S. Marshals now had an active case for Falcon and Magluta.
They were all in the wind, hiding out everywhere.
[Pegy] Sal goes to me, "Hey, you are in the indictment."
I was indicted under Louis Mendez.
That was my fake name, Louis Mendez.
Sal goes to me, "What do you wanna do? You wanna turn yourself in
or stay fugitive?" I go, "I ain't turning myself in."
"It's just not gonna happen."
We weren't gonna stop.
[Alexia] Peter's sister showed up, Gina, at the house, which was very unusual.
She's the one married to Taby, Willy Falcon's brother.
It was really late at night.
She's like, "I know you guys are getting married."
"Cut off the wedding 'cause they're gonna catch you."
"Be careful, my brother."
I looked at him, and you can see that he was afraid.
[Pegy] I heard that they were waiting for me to get married,
that they were gonna go arrest me the day of my wedding.
That's something you'd see in a movie.
Like, that they'd arrest you while you're walking down the aisle.
[Pegy] I had to call the whole thing off.
I mean, it broke my heart to tell her, "Hey, listen. We can't do it."
-[sirens] -["Bad Boys" by Inner Circle playing]
♪ What you want, what you wanna do ♪
It's funny, 'cause me and Alexia, we used to watch the show, Cops.
You know that song that's so catchy? That's like "Bad boys, bad boys."
♪ What you gonna do ♪
♪ What you gonna do When they come for you ♪
Alexia would look at me and say "Bad boy, what you gonna do
when they come for you?"
And they did come for me. They came for me, bro. [laughs]
[Alexia] We woke up that day. We were having breakfast.
[Pegy] And I'm getting in my car. All these cops surround me.
[sirens]
They come out of everywhere.
Cars, they were all hiding here.
Guns, everything.
And I got busted.
They showed me pictures of Willy and Sal. "Do you know these guys?"
"Do you work for these guys?" I'm like, "I don't know who they are."
They're going through that gate.
They knock on the door. I'm standing here. I'm handcuffed.
They knock on the door, and then I hear him say, "Don't open the door."
I go, "Don't let 'em in! Don't let 'em in!"
And she saw the commotion. They started fighting with her.
[man] Sheriff's office! Search warrant!
I don't know how she did it. She locked them out of the house.
She starts burning the Ferrari pictures, the Apache pictures.
[Alexia] They were like, "Oh, you know, we're the DEA."
"We're the U.S. Marshals. You need to let me in."
So I open the door a little bit, and then, they're like, "What's his name?"
I'm like, "I don't know his name."
They're like "You live here with him?" I'm like, "You don't know I live here."
"So, what do you call him?" I'm like, "Oh, babe."
U.S. Marshals and DEA,
they were doing surveillance from the house right in front of it.
And the people let them do the surveillance.
They should've come knock on my door or throw a little note or something.
"Hey! Get out. Run!"
[man] Stop or I'll shoot you in the back!
[Pegy] But they didn't.
If you were in Little Havana, I would have never gotten caught.
I should have stayed living in Little Havana. [laughs]
And then everybody started getting arrested after that.
I got arrested first and then another guy.
[man] I thought I had escaped. [laughs]
I thought I escaped until I heard the knock at the door.
The DEA says "Ralph, you're going down. You're all going down."
"You got a chance right now to make a deal for yourself
before the shit hits the fan."
And of course, you know, I kept saying,
[repeating] "No."
[dramatic music builds]
They get Peter. The sister, Gina, and Taby, disappear.
[Pegy] My sister didn't have to leave. You know, he wasn't in the indictment.
But I mean, I guess she was really, really loyal to her husband, to Taby.
They were hanging out since they were like 14, 15 years old.
They took their kids with 'em.
My parents thought that, "This will go on for four, five years."
"They'll come back."
It's been almost 25 years.
You know when your kid leaves to go out
and you sit home waiting for your kid to come back home?
That's my parents for the past, like, 25 years.
[Alexia] We go to court two or three days later to get bond.
For the first time, I'm hearing all the charges
that this person that I'm marrying is being charged with.
I just remember the "75 tons of cocaine."
I remember "conspiracy," and I remember "25 years, minimum."
Chris Clark, the U.S. attorney, I just remember him being an asshole,
like they all are, and he was just like, "Okay, he's not getting bond."
"He belongs to this, like, horrific organization."
"He's, like, a threat to society."
And I was like, "They have to have the wrong person."
My tears were just, like, coming out, and like,
"I'm never gonna be able to be with this person again."
My family thought,
"Okay, this is the perfect opportunity for you to say, you know, 'I'm walking.'"
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it. I just couldn't.
I'm like, "This is when he needs me the most."
"This is when I'm gonna fight for him," and, you know, I had to do it.
I don't wanna talk about it, because I'm gonna start crying right now.
So, um, anyways…
[Pegy] Chris Clark.
He told me, "If you don't wanna spend the rest of your life in jail,
you just do the right thing."
They tried to convince Pegy to turn in Sal.
I don't think it took too much convincing 'cause Pegy doesn't have much backbone.
[Pegy] I had no choice.
I mean, it was either cooperate or spend the rest of my life in prison.
So, I mean, I gave 'em Sal.
[somber music playing]
Louis Mendez agreed to cooperate with the government.
[Pegy] I drew, like, a map.
That's how they found La Gorce.
[Chris] The Marshals then conducted their own surveillance.
Sal Magluta was the person who was renting that property.
[music intensifies]
[Marilyn] They started throwing tear gas and doing whatever it is they do,
because nobody wanted to come out of the house.
Sal slips out the back.
And then the rest of them come out, and they get arrested.
They didn't know he was on the property 'til they went to his office,
and then they saw that his wallet was there
with his 50 passports and his 20 driver's licenses,
so they said, "We know he's here." So they set the dogs out.
[dogs barking]
And the dogs dragged him out, and he got arrested also.
[reporter] Agents found boxes with stacks of cash there,
sophisticated equipment smugglers use, and documents the government claims
were drug ledgers, account books, agents said, for a vast smuggling ring.
[Marilyn] One of the people in the house doesn't wanna go to jail.
He started crying, "No, I don't wanna go to jail."
I'll tell you where Willy Falcon is."
"This is like a gold mine now. We're getting Willy too."
[Chris] I obtained a second search warrant
authorizing federal authorities to search that residence.
And Willy gets arrested.
[Jim] They were here the whole time!
[Chris] As of that point, with the exception of Taby Falcon,
the wanted fugitives in the indictment were apprehended.
[Pegy] It just stopped. It just stopped.
It all came to an end, and, you know…
[repeating] I mean, it was over.
[dramatic music fades out]
[Alexia] Peter was out on bond for a year, and I get pregnant and have little Peter.
Within a year, he had to turn himself in.
He was gonna start serving the five-year sentence.
I just remember holding him
and just hugging him
and just crying and crying.
And, like, it's different, like, a mom, a woman cries, and it's…
you know, it's meaningful, but when a dad cries, it's a different…
A different kind of crying.
[reporter] The Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center
houses some of the nation's best-known drug traffickers.
[Chris] After Falcon and Magluta had been arrested,
their next task was to hire counsel.
And befitting their reputation as the kings of cocaine,
the biggest drug traffickers in the United States,
they needed to have representation commensurate with their image.
Defendants are not permitted to use their illegal proceeds,
in this case, drug proceeds, to pay for their representation.
According to the law, that money does not belong to a defendant.
It was ill-gotten.
Therefore, the government is entitled to that money, and I sincerely believed
that the public defender would have to represent Falcon and Magluta.
That thought was quickly dissipated.
[funky music playing]
[Pat] Albert Krieger…
[Chris] Perhaps the most renowned attorney in the country.
[Pat] …who gets retained to help on Willy and Sal's case,
while he's representing John Gotti up in New York.
[reporter] A jury in New York City convicted alleged mob boss John Gotti.
This very unhappy day exemplified Mr. Gotti's strength of character.
One of the major reasons for getting out of New York
was that I wanted to go to a place
where I could keep my boat in the water 12 months a year.
[cash register]
Roy Black is one of the most well-respected criminal defense lawyers
in America.
He represented Griselda Blanco.
[reporter] Griselda Blanco, La Madrina,
or "godmother" headed a large cocaine organization,
killing her way to the top.
[Alex] He represented one of the Miami River cops.
The largest police corruption case in the history of the United States.
He represented William Kennedy Smith.
[reporter] The issue is whether William Kennedy Smith raped a young woman
at the Kennedy family compound on Palm Beach Easter weekend.
[reporter 2] Do you think all this media coverage is hampering your ability
to get a fair trial?
[William] No, it's hampering my way of going to lunch.
[Jim] Roy Black not only won the William Kennedy Smith trial,
he also married one of the jurors.
[Marilyn] We had Frank Rubino, who we all love.
[Jim] Frank Rubino's on the case, and his other client is Manuel Noriega.
[reporter] Former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is scheduled
to be sentenced for drug trafficking and racketeering convictions.
We do not believe that it's a valid drug case, we never have, we never will.
They called us the white powder bar,
because at that time, it was almost exclusively cocaine cases.
I never found it to be a favorable term.
I actually disliked it.
An intelligent defendant wants to be represented by a lawyer
who has not only apparent integrity, but real integrity.
You may think I'm jesting, but one of the important standards
was to make sure I was going to get paid.
[cash register]
Within a couple of weeks of their arrest,
I had my first meeting with them.
Certainly gave me the impression at that time that,
shall we say, they understood the rules.
[Frank] Willy and Sal, the government seized those assets
they knew about, but to add another layer, if you will,
there was a protective order basically saying,
"Any assets that we haven't seized, you can't have those either."
You have to be able to have an explanation
for where the funds came.
There was an explanation given to me that was satisfactory to me.
They paid me, I accepted their funds,
and I filed the appropriate 8500 forms with the Internal Revenue Service,
reported everything as required by law.
[Jim] The feds thought that when they captured Willy and Sal,
they were gonna put Willy and Sal in a box and that'd be the end of them.
And then eventually, you sort of work it out in trial, but once you catch them
that's really the end of the story.
No. Catching them was just the beginning of the story.
And catching them didn't stop Willy and Sal from being Willy and Sal.
[salsa music playing]
[Chris] There was an incident in which a cell phone was seized
from a fellow inmate, who was holding it on behalf of Magluta.
Falcon and Magluta, they were put in solitary confinement.
[Jim] You can keep 'em in isolation
unless they needed to help in their defense.
All you need to do is say, "This is a legal visit.
We're sending over a paralegal to go and review documents with Willy and Sal."
Sal called me, and he said to me, "I need you now."
"Go fill out a form and become a paralegal."
Not become a para-- "Make believe you're a paralegal,
and that way you can come into the jail every day."
Everybody became a paralegal.
Everybody became a private investigator.
Well, I guess I got to tell you about the A Team and the B Team.
The A Team were the lawyers who were going to try the case.
Very little of our time was taken up with the jail problems.
There were other lawyers who handled that.
They should have been in solitary 23 hours a day.
They maybe were in solitary two or three hours a day.
Sal was not spending his day in jail. He was spending it in the visiting room.
When I would go in, instead of just putting Sal and Willy to pull 'em out,
I would pull out five other prisoners that Sal wanted to talk to.
He would actually have six babysitters, me and then five more,
so each one could take a room.
And Sal would go from room to room.
Let's say Krieger was in one room, Roy Black was in another.
As long as there's an attorney present in the room,
you can bring anybody into the room.
Of course, since it's attorney-client material,
you can't look in on 'em.
You can't listen in on 'em. They have to have privacy.
Well, they had privacy all right.
[Marilyn] I was bringing in food. I was bringing in Xanax.
There was one time I came, and they wanted lobster.
And it smelled, and I put in a bunch of perfume, and I could still smell it.
There were a lot of reports of, well, let's just say that sometimes
the paralegals came out a little bit more disheveled than when they went in.
Did we have sex in jail? Yes.
Yes, there were guards that were paid off to kind of look the other way.
And then, there were those visiting rooms.
And there was a spot where the camera couldn't hit.
You couldn't see what was going on. It was right up against the wall.
The whole thing lasted less than 30 seconds. [laughs]
[Pegy] Were they paralegals? Uh…
I don't wanna say hookers. [laughs]
[Marilyn] Sal said, "You know, Marilyn, while I was out,
I would give money to the missionaries and the charities and the churches,
and I want you to do it for me, because I can't do it from jail."
So Sal said, "Go pick up money from one of the stash houses,
get some ledger paper, and I'll show you how to do it."
He gave me two pages of ministries and names,
and he put the amount. He said, "Do this monthly."
I said, "Okay, you know, it's not a big deal. I can do that."
The next thing was, "Well, could you pay my commissary and Willy's commissary?"
I said, "That's not a problem." "And while you're at it, pay this one."
And all the prisoners' names, he would give me a list
and how much to put in their commissary.
And then other things started being added to the ledger book.
Willy paid one guy to make his bed, 'cause he was too lazy to make his bed.
There were four guards that I paid,
I just gave 'em an envelope, and it had 25,000 dollars.
And I just gave it to him. Nobody knew what I was giving him.
From the small people all the way up to the attorneys and everybody
who was involved in the case, their family had to be supported.
I didn't think I was doing anything illegal.
[Jim] Marilyn Bonachea paid at least 7.7 million dollars in cash
to co-conspirators, prison guards, inmates from 1991 to 1996,
even though a federal judge had ordered all of Willy and Sal's assets frozen.
[Marilyn] A lot of people would say, "Sal's crazy doing this."
You know? "This girl's gonna take him for every penny that he's got!" [laughs]
I took some, but I didn't leave him broke. I just took a few million. [laughs]
But that was through the years.
It was never my idea to keep track of anybody's money
or where anything was going. It was all Sal's idea.
The only idea I had was to make the attorney-client stamp.
I told Sal that way they can't go through it, so I had one made.
[laughs] And everything was stamped, even my briefcase was stamped,
I stamped everything, so they wouldn't be able to.
And if they did get it, they wouldn't be able to use it.
[Jim] Marilyn Bonachea was the paymaster for all the inmates that they had hired,
the movement of money to support the organization
while they were incarcerated. She knew it all.
[Marilyn] The business never stopped running.
It was being run just like if they were outside.
There's a breaking story we're hearing about now,
another very public shooting in Coral Gables.
[reporter] A woman is murdered in broad daylight.
The woman was coming out of a beauty parlor
when two men tried to rob her.
And she died, police say, because she simply wouldn't give up her purse.
[Marilyn] I was watching the news…
when I saw Alina Falcon on the stretcher.
[reporter] The victim, Alina Rossique-Falcon,
is alleged drug dealer Willy Falcon's wife.
[Marilyn] Willy, he was watching TV, and he saw it just like I did on the TV.
[reporter 2] 1913 Ponce de Leon in a beauty shop, a woman walked outside,
got into the car, and at that point was approached by three men.
She had, like, 80,000 dollars in the car.
A struggle ensued, one of the subjects
pulled out a weapon and shot the victim.
[audio recording playing]
[Jim] You know, right away, every pager went off
for every law enforcement officer in South Florida.
What the hell is going on here?
Was Alina about to cooperate? Was she about to flip against her husband?
Is that what was happening here?
[reporter] Metro Dade Police emphasized they have no reason
to believe Alina Falcon's murder was in any way connected
to her husband's alleged drug dealing.
They say she was simply a victim of a senseless street crime.
[Jim] The cops put the word out on the street
that Willy had a one-million-dollar bounty for whoever killed his wife.
And that if they didn't wanna die at Willy's hand,
they better turn themselves in to the police as soon as possible.
And somehow, shortly after that word got out, the case was solved.
[reporter] Today, 20-year-old Raymond Smith,
a laborer from Albany, Georgia,
who was down visiting friends, remains behind bars, charged with murder.
According to police reports, he told a friend he was the one who shot Falcon.
I--I--I couldn't believe it. I mean, I was…
She was one hell of a woman. I loved her very, very much.
And what hurt me the most was
that everybody thought that Willy put a hit on her.
That's what really-- I had a lot of fights and a lot of argument over that.
But that was so far from the truth.
[Jim] After Willy's wife was killed, Willy went dark.
I mean, all of the light that people used to talk about that surrounded Willy,
his gregarious nature, he became sullen. He became embittered.
He became obsessed with exercise,
trying to work through the pain of losing his wife.
It fell to Sal to sorta pick up the pieces
and keep the organization running, to keep Willy and Sal, Inc. moving.
[dramatic music plays]
[Jim] One of the things defense attorneys never wanted to talk about
or prosecutors ever wanna admit to was the behind-the-scenes negotiations.
Sal and Willy, they recognized fighting the government
was probably not going to be the best outcome for them.
I was hired by Sal
to be in charge of negotiating a resolution before the trial.
Neil Taylor? Sal never, ever wanted anybody in the room. Not even me.
He really didn't want anybody to know
that he was considering some type of plea negotiation.
We didn't wanna demoralize the trial team.
I don't think the other lawyers were aware of it in the beginning.
If I would have heard that there were a plea negotiation of that sort,
I think it would have taken about a month for me to stop
shouting, screaming, cursing,
having a temper tantrum beyond all temper tantrums.
[Neil] Under the terms of our offer,
they would have had Sal and Willy in prison
for a substantial period of time.
[music intensifies]
[Jim] The early version of the deal was plead guilty,
get sentenced to 40 years in prison, cooperate,
and Willy and Sal could knock that time down to 20 years.
Also, as a sweetener,
Willy and Sal would agree agree to turn over 40 million dollars in cash
and 4,000 kilos of cocaine they were sitting on in Miami somewhere
that they could point them to, right now,
if you accept the deal, 4,000 kilos of cocaine.
[Ralph] For Willy and Sal, that was nothing.
Sal was only gonna give up a little bit of what he had.
He was gonna give up a few stash houses, a little bit of money,
and he was gonna blame it on Pegy.
[laughs]
[Marilyn] Pegy was gonna take the heat for what was about to happen.
I handled what we referred to as a proffer.
A 30-something page typed document.
I had their secrets, all of them.
I don't think there was anything that was held back.
A portion of this proffer contained individuals who were culpable.
There was a substantial number of people, private individuals, public individuals,
and law enforcement individuals.
People who were bought.
[dramatic music builds]
We paid off, literally, at the state level, pretty much everybody
that had any position of authority
in anything that was related or important to us.
All the detectives, vice squad, homicide, everybody.
This went all the way up to the head of the homicide department in Miami.
Judges were paid for.
High people all the way in the United States government.
In our budget, a million dollars a month, that's what we would pay off.
As a federal prosecutor, when I would have opened that proffer
and seen those names, I would have been impressed.
[Marilyn] Willy always wanted to plea out from the very beginning.
But he didn't wanna plea out that way.
Willy didn't wanna be a snitch.
There was one copy and one copy only,
and it was handled like a top secret document.
The government thumbed through the proffer,
perhaps because of their confidence in their case,
it was very casually dismissed.
[dramatic music fades out]
[Jim] The justice department said no to the deal.
[Neil] Their fixation on these two individuals
was precluding them from making the smart decision.
"We're not making that deal.
We're not letting them buy their way out of their prison sentence."
It really should have been resolved.
'Til this day, it's extremely distressing to me that we did not succeed.
[Ralph] We had a meeting at the FDC in downtown Miami.
Me, Willy, and Sal with all the attorneys.
They were going to plead not guilty.
But I said, "You're really gonna go in there
and say 'We didn't do this'"? [laughs]
And they look at me like, "Yeah."
So, "Okay, I'm out." [laughs]
"I'm going to plead guilty."
And they said, "That's fine."
Willy and Sal and the whole muchachos, we were like, brothers,
and we really loved each other.
And I'm a man. And I was not going to, uh,
say, after everything that we've done, I'm not gonna turn against them.
So I took responsibility for what I did.
I pleaded guilty. It was for 15 years, and we brought it down to 12.
And I took it like a man.
Conspiracies inherently have informers.
Have somebody who has rolled over, as the common phrase is.
Is no longer a friend, but is now really quite an enemy.
[Pegy] Willy's mom, she told my dad, may God protect me.
"Be careful, 'cause you know, you might get killed."
I mean, that's how I took it, you know?
I was waiting for Sal or Willy to call me, and it came from their mom, you know?
Which is cool, you know? I mean, it's a family business, you know?
[clock ticking]
By all accounts, the government's drug case
against Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta is one of the biggest in U.S. history.
It's also one of the most interesting.
The story involves two billion dollars' worth of cocaine,
two champion powerboat racers,
and a magazine ad that has touched off an ethical debate
at the highest levels of the legal community.
[Jim] In preparation for the trial,
the government had turned over a possible witness list of more than 80 individuals
who were gonna be cooperating witnesses against Falcon and Magluta, Willy and Sal.
Most of 'em were currently in prison
or had been recently convicted on other crimes,
and they were testifying against Willy and Sal
as a way of knocking off some time from their own sentences.
[salsa version of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" playing]
Now, what happened was the defense team created,
I guess, for lack of a better term, an advertisement.
[reporter] Willy and Sal's lawyers took out an ad in a national publication.
[Jim] The defense team placed an ad in Champion magazine,
which is a magazine for defense attorneys across the country,
listing the names of all these individuals.
[reporter] "Information wanted," it read, and listed the names of 31 people
who were expected to testify against Willy and Sal.
When we put an advertisement in the Champion seeking information,
we're asking our 25,000 members and associate members around the country
to please share information if you have it.
What's wrong with that?
[reporter] Well, you didn't just run the ad in the Champion?
Correct.
[Jim] They placed the exact same ad in Prison Life magazine,
which is distributed to federal and state prisons across the country.
[reporter] Prison Life is just what it sounds like,
a magazine for inmates.
The ad in Prison Life was meant to be circulated in prison
where many of the potential witnesses are being held.
It was almost like a bounty poster.
According to the government, the minute those names were published,
-the witnesses were in danger. -[music intensifies]
[reporter 2] After the ad first appeared, one of the people on the list,
the witness in the case, was gunned down in his driveway.
[Jim] Were you trying to get the witnesses killed?
The defense attorneys, of course, said, "No, no."
"We're just trying to look for information."
I have a right to make my inquiries,
and I don't have to explain why I'm making the inquiry to anybody.
I don't have to justify it.
-Would you run this ad again? -Sure.
Police say it appears to be reminiscent of "cocaine cowboy" days.
That's when the drug gangs shot it out all over South Florida.
[reporter] One of the men who is wounded may have a tie-in with drug traffickers
Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta.
Unbelievable. Four of the people planning to testify against Falcon are gunned down.
A well-financed plot to destroy the government's case
against the drug group or just a simple string of bad luck for those guys.
[music rises dramatically]
[reporter] This is is one of the biggest drug cases in U.S. history
and federal officials say they can make the case
against Falcon and Magluta using other witnesses.
The problem is keeping them alive until the October trial.
[dramatic music ends]
["Blood Sport" by Pitbull playing]
-♪ Cow- ♪ -♪ Everybody sold a little yay ♪
-♪ Co-, -caine ♪ -♪ But now I shall become the cocaine ♪
♪ Woo! ♪
♪ I've been processed, packaged, Delivered in bricks ♪
♪ I've been cut, cooked, chopped And whipped ♪
♪ I've been called all types of names ♪
♪ Like Perico, Yeyo, Snow, Blow And Cane ♪
♪ I'm the reason That the Cubans took over Miami ♪
♪ I’m the reason they extorted Escobar By extraditing his family ♪
♪ I’m protected by killers, I’m handled by dealers ♪
♪ Well-connected with greed, I'm all white, but I produce green ♪
♪ Woo! Sniff, co- ♪
♪ Snort, -caine ♪
♪ Deal, cow- ♪
♪ Extort, -boys ♪
♪ Will, will, kill, kill ♪
♪ For the love of the blood sport ♪
♪ Sniff, co- Snort, -caine ♪
♪ Deal, cow- Extort, -boys ♪
♪ Will, will, kill, kill ♪
♪ For the love of the blood sport ♪
♪ They'll do 25 to life For the love of the blood sport ♪
♪ All in the name of that white ♪
♪ For the love of the blood sport ♪
[music fades out]