Ron Chepesiuk - Gangsters of Miami: True Tales of Mobsters, Gamblers, Hit Men, Con Men and Gang Bangers from the Magic City

O NCE AGAIN, MANY individuals stepped forward and generously provided their time, resources, and sage advice to make this project doable. First, I would like to thank all the knowledgeable sources I interviewed. Those who agreed to talk on the record are included in the bibliography. Many individuals also provided valuable assistance in identifying sources, helping to arrange interviews, and finding photographs and documents. They include Juan Almeida, Charles Blau, Billy Corben, Tom Crawford, Richie Fiano, Michelle Fonticiella, Pat Healey, Gerry Hochman, Lloyd Huff, Laura Kallus, Chuck Lutz, Lew Rice, Al Singleton, Greg Smith, Jack Toal, and Alicia Valle. Thank you, too, to the following individuals for providing photos for the book: Charles Blau, Billy Corben, Tom Crawford, Scott Deitche, Brent Eaton, Richie Fiano, Jimmy Harris, Pat Healey, Bill Handoga, Laura Kallus, Chuck Lutz, Arnold Palmer, Bob Palombo, Bob Platshorn, Lew Rice, Cherie Rohn, Jodi Schuster, Al Singleton, Greg Smith, and Alicia Valle.

My friends Chuck Lutz, Davie Weeks, and Larry and Stephanie Vezina took the time to proofread the manuscript and to offer valuable suggestions on how to make the writing tighter and clearer. Their input certainly helped make a better book, given the tight deadline, and I look forward to their expert assistance with future projects. Also, Chuck Lutz was especially helpful in making sure I got the history right. Dave Weeks also helped get the photos together. Thanks to Larry and Stephanie, as well as Ivo Delorenzi, for their hospitality while I began this book in my hometown of Thunder Bay, Canada. Thank you to my friend Willie Hryb, in Thunder Bay, Canada, who allowed the use of his office resources to finish the book.

Carrie Volk and Ann Thomas of the Winthrop University Library Reference Department helped with interlibrary loan, and Patricia Stafford of the Winthrop University Library Government Documents Department assisted me in using microfilm and finding rare materials.

Alicia Valle in the U.S. Department of Justice Office in Miami, Elle Michaud of IRSs Miami Public Relations Office, Sergeant Dorothy Diaz of the Miami Dade Police Department Administration, and Betsy Glick and Judith Orihuela of the FBI Public Relations and Rusty Payne of the DEAs Public Relations Office were all helpful with arranging interviews and/or pointing me in the right direction. Alicia Valle also helped with providing photos. The staffs of the Miami Public Library (MPL) and the Research Center at the Historical Museum of South Florida, an excellent research center, who were very helpful during my research trips to Miami. Thanks to Carole Stuart for the opportunity to write this book and to her staff for their help in putting it together. I look forward to working with Barricade in the future.

Finally, thanks to my lovely wife, Magdalena, for her support and love and for reassuring me over the years that the blood, sweat, and tears I spend in crafting my books and articles are worth it.

B Y THE EARLY twenty-first century, Miamis era of the Cocaine Cowboy was a distant memory and a part of the folklore of the citys remarkable gangster history. Miami, moreover, was no longer the cocaine central of the drug trade. Much of the drug traffic had shifted to Mexico, which, because of the endemic violence and enormous corruption, was looking more and more like the Colombia of the 1980s. In Colombia the cartelitos (baby cartels), had replaced the mammoth Medellin and Cali cartels and were trying to keep a low profile, content with allowing the Mexican drug traffickers to handle much of the drug distribution. When many Colombian drug traffickers now came to Miami, it was more often because of extradition or a visit to Disney World and not necessarily because they were making a drug deal.

Those of us who worked drugs in Miami in the 1980s and 1990s were on the front lines of the war on drugs, part of an era in drug law enforcement that, hopefully, we will never see the likes of again, said Chuck Lutz, who served with the DEA in Miami in the late 1980s. Miami was sinking under the weight of the cocaine that was landing there, but we managed to keep it afloat.

By the early 2000s people who remembered or had heard of Griselda Blanco, the so-called Black Widow and Godmother of the Medellin Cartel who had terrorized South Florida in the early 1980s, probably assumed she was either dead or locked away for the rest of her natural life. So in 2004 it came as quite a surprise for many to learn that not only was Griselda Blanco alive and well, she was being released from jail.

It was a startling development, given Blancos criminal record. She was largely responsible for the violence that made Miami the most dangerous city in America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In smuggling millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the United States, she fueled the countrys drug epidemic. She brought a gruesome style to murder and mayhem, and authorities linked her to more than 200 murders that included women and children. She is credited with inventing the motorcycle assassin, a hitman or woman who rode by victims and sprayed them with machine gun fire.

No one, it seemed, was spared from the Black Widows venom. She had her hitmen seek out a drug dealers mother-in-law, who had gone to a hospital to see her newborn grandchild. They caught up with her in the hospital parking lot, shot her in the head, and left her for dead. She miraculously survived, only to be murdered in Colombia a few months later.

Blanco had been in prison since her arrest on February 17, 1985, the result of a conviction in a cocaine trafficking case out of New York City. A conviction in that case and a guilty plea in another one in Miami kept her in federal prison until the end of 1998.

The Godmother could easily have ended up frying in Old Sparky (the nickname for Floridas electric chair). In the early 1990s the state of Florida charged Blanco with committing three contract killings in 1982. Two of them involved arranging the killings of drug dealers Alfredo and Grizel Lorenzo in their South Florida home as their three children watched television in another room. The other murder was an accident. Blanco wanted Jesus Chucho Castro, a former enforcer in her organization, dead, but machine gun fire struck Chuchos toddler in the head as he rode in the car with his father.

The star witness for the prosecution in their new case against Blanco was Jorge Ayala, a charismatic but ruthless psychopath in the mold of Griselda Blanco, whom authorities said was responsible for at least thirty murders. Ayala was one of the hitmen in the three murders that Blanco was charged with masterminding. In a sworn statement, Ayala claimed that Blanco wanted Chucho dead because he had kicked her son in the ass. At first she was real mad cause we missed the father, Ayala told the prosecutors. But when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad that we were even.

BORN IN CALI, Colombia, Ayala went from being a car thief to enforcer to hitman in Blancos criminal organization, earning from $20,000 to $200,000 per contract killing. In recounting how he murdered drug dealer Grizel Lorenzo, he told prosecutors: Shed been shot in the chest several times and shes moaning. She is not dead; shes dying. But shes moaning real loud. I mean, real loud. I shot her two or three times in the back of the head. Right away she stopped moaning.

Ayala was a remarkably persuasive gangster, so persuasive, in fact, that he could talk his way out of jail. In early 1988 he was awaiting sentencing in Chicago on a Fort Lauderdale bank robbery and machine gun possession charge when he convinced the FBI and the Chicago Police Department to let him out of jail so he could help them set up drug stings. Ayala managed to do this several times before he just walked away from prison. He was captured a month later in a small motel outside Chicago.