Cocaine Cowboys

In an excerpt from Miami Babylon, Gerald Posner recalls 1980s South Beach, when it was a Wild West of drug cartels and sex parties that made Scarface look tame. Plus, view our gallery of Miami vices.

The preservation battle for Miami Beach’s Art Deco District was knocked off the news on a blistering summer day: July 11, 1979. A white Ford Econoline van rolled through the parking lot of Miami’s largest mall, Dadeland, in Kendall, a bedroom community 10 minutes south of downtown. If anyone had bothered to look carefully, they would have noticed that the crudely stenciled red signs on each side did not match. The right read: “Happy Time Complete Supply Party,” the left: “Happy Time Complete Party Supply.” There was a telephone number, but the line was disconnected.

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The driver drove slowly around the outskirts of the 50-acre mall and pulled up in front of Crown’s Liquors, squeezed between a beauty salon and a deli. A few minutes later, a white Mercedes sedan with black-tinted bulletproof windows parked near the liquor store. The passenger was one of Miami’s top cocaine dealers, 37-year-old Jimenez Panesso, and the driver was Panesso’s 22-year-old bodyguard, Juan Carlos Hernandez. An unwritten code for a drug kingpin is never to have a set schedule, but this was Panesso’s weekly visit to Crown’s Liquors. His success and power had made him overconfident. When the two men went in to place their usual order for several thousand dollars’ worth of Chivas Regal and rare cognacs, Hernandez felt so comfortable that he’d left his 9mm Browning in the car.

They’d been in the store for less than a minute when two men from the Ford van walked in. Without a word, the taller one walked up to Panesso, whipped out a .380 Beretta handgun with a silencer, and shot the Colombian drug lord four times in the face. Hernandez and the store clerk began running. The other gunman sprayed the store with a .45 caliber MAC-10 machine pistol, emptying the 30-round clip in a few seconds. The two gunmen calmly walked back to the idling van and jumped in back. An accomplice slammed the accelerator. As the Ford careened out of the mall, the two men fired indiscriminately out the van’s rear doors, smashing store windows, tearing up cars, and sending shoppers fleeing in terror.

Dadeland did not just represent the year’s 37th and 38th drug homicides. The brazen assassination, at midday, in a mall packed with families and ordinary Miamians, was a worrisome escalation. Miami’s police chief told a friend that he feared the Colombians were turning Miami into Medellín. The shootings also introduced “cocaine cowboys” to millions of Americans and almost overnight gave South Florida a Wild West reputation. A prominent Miami executive, Arthur Patten, told Time: “I’ve been through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”

Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth, and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach. By Gerald Posner. 464 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27. A recent flood of cocaine into South Florida was at the root of a spike in violence and murders. Colombian drug dealers had been dying in interesting ways: One was delivered DOA in a white convertible Cadillac, its engine left running and the car abandoned in front of a hospital emergency room; another was machine-gunned to death while sitting at a traffic light at noontime in upscale Coral Gables; three bodies that had been subjected to horrific torture were discovered in a car’s trunk after children playing nearby noticed a terrible stench; a drug distributor was shot to death in front of his family while on a tour boat on Biscayne Bay; and a killer wearing a motorcycle helmet shot a man waiting for his luggage at Miami International Airport, at point-blank range, then jumped on his motorcycle and sped away. “Shootout at the Cocaine Corral,” was a Miami Herald headline about a restaurant shooting just weeks before the Dadeland chaos.

In New York, the Colombians executed a nonviolent takeover of the cocaine trade. Instead of waging war, Italian mobsters worked out an agreement with them on distribution and protection in return for a small cut of the profits. But in Miami, the Colombian invasion ignited the cocaine wars. The few pre-Marielito Cuban traffickers did not want to give up their turf, but the Colombians swiftly and brutally carried the day. They did not subscribe to the unwritten Mafia rule that families were off-limits. Anyone remotely related to a target was fair game. When their wives and parents were killed, the Cubans lost their nerve and the battle over territory was over. The ascent of Colombian rivals, mainly the Cali cartel, soon broke the Medellín monopoly and Colombians began to fight among themselves for control of the dope business. Bolivian drug lords controlled whatever cocaine production was left.