Nicholas Griffin
Subject: Cocaine, Race Riots, and the Cuban Boat Lift in Miami in 1980
Bio: Author
Reading: The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Cocaine, Race Riots, and the Cuban Boat Lift in Miami in 1980.
Our speaker is Nicholas Griffin who is the author of a Year of Dangerous Days. Miami was not the beautiful and successful metropolitan city that it is now 45 years ago. I want to find out from Nick why the Columbians used Miami as their US entry point for distributing cocaine and why that resulted in so much violence. I want to learn about what caused a massive race riot in Miami that led to the burning of over 200 buildings.
In 1980, Fidel Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to be picked up by boat and resettled in Miami. I want to hear about how this massive influx co-existed in this time of racial strife.
Nick, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Nicholas Griffin:
This is a story about the history of Miami in the year 1980. Miami was built to be a tourist city rather than a port or an industrial city. It had roughly the same demographics as the rest of the South. It was a majority white, minority Black city with a 5% group of Latins up until the Cuban Revolution. And then everything begins to change. I picked 1980 because it has three momentous events in six weeks that changed the city, which was a vastly different place between December 1979 and January 1981.
Larry Bernstein:
When I moved to Miami in COVID in November 2020, I did not know its history. You opened by saying that prior to the Cuban revolution that Miami was a typical southern city, and it isn't now. What happened?
Nicholas Griffin:
The initial transition comes after the Cuban Revolution when you get this sudden large influx of Latinos. The Miami mayor in the mid-70s was Maurice Ferre who had a vision. The powerful Miami elites were looking to imitate northern cities. But Ferre’s idea was to position Miami to look to its Southern neighbors. He wanted Miami to be a bridge city for Central America, South America, and the Iberian Peninsula. And if you look at the map, Miami's in the center that bridges continents and can grow to be a bicultural bilingual city.
Larry Bernstein:
Your book recounts three major events. One is a race riot, second is the development of the Miami cocaine trade all its attendant violence and money laundering. And third, the Cuban boat lift, which dramatically increases the number of Cubans who live in Miami.
You mentioned that Miami was a typical southern city, supermajority white with a substantial Black minority and a small Latin community at that time. It faced similar issues that you would see in other southern city where white rule creates an acrimonious situation with its Black citizens that can explode at any time. The spark for the Miami fire was the police murder of a black man named McDuffie. What happened?
Nicholas Griffin:
In mid-December 1979, Arthur McDuffie a 33-year-old Black man, father of three kids, an ex-marine, who was a successful insurance agent. He is trying to get back together with his wife, but that fateful night he spent with his girlfriend. He is coming home from his rendezvous on his motorbike late at night. He either runs a stop sign or pops a wheelie and that starts a police chase that goes on for eight minutes that crosses city and county lines. By the time he is pulled over, there are more than a dozen police cars behind him.
The first cop pulls him off the back of his motorcycle and the beating starts here. As more cops arrive, the fighting escalates and at one-point McDuffie is being beaten up by 15 police officers.
After the beating is finished, he is barely alive and his head had swollen to the size of a basketball. The cops decide to fix the scene to make it look like a traffic accident. McDuffie is taken to the Jackson Hospital and three days later he dies of his injuries.
There is no eruption of violence or rioting at that point of his death. Janet Reno, who is the State of Florida Attorney General decides that this would be the perfect case to prosecute. And the trial is held in Tampa where there had never been previous in the history of Tampa where a police officer was convicted in a race related matter.
Larry Bernstein:
This is not a premeditated murder. This is a police matter that got way out of hand. McDuffie is guilty of a crime, but he does not deserve to be beaten or murdered.
He rode his bike at over a hundred miles an hour. The police officer that began the chase had no idea that he was black. McDuffie refused to pull over. It is like that scene from The Blues Brothers with a 15-car chase that goes on for eight minutes which must have seemed like forever, because at a hundred miles an hour you can cover much of Miami.
And then when the fighting started it was like that disaster in Harlem where police officers shot 50 bullets at an unarmed guy when their adrenaline was flying high. In this situation, the coverup of the assault was a big part of the crime.
Nicholas Griffin:
What McDuffie did was foolish. It should have stopped was when the sergeant arrived. McDuffie was beaten by 15 cops who already had him under control. He was handcuffed, they removed his helmet, and they beat him with heavy metal flashlights. McDuffie was murdered with 15 cops on the scene. But the point and the contention of the trial is that a group of police officers does not murder a man, it must be a specific individual police officer that commits the crime. But the question in the trial was which police officer struck the killing blow?
And that is central to the defense because there were no witnesses other than the police officers. Janet Reno's attorneys convinced three officers to flip who give evidence against the other 12 defendants. But the question the jury needed to decide was whether the police officers who flipped were the police officers who were guilty> And that is what the trial came down to. Which police officers do you believe?
The public perception of the trial was that an all-white jury, a white judge, all white lawyers were biased against a black victim and this why they found the police innocent. And the idea that is just the way things go down in the South. That said, the defense was expertly conducted, and they did an extraordinary job redirecting the blame towards those very officers who had been given a free pass.
Larry Bernstein:
Back to the murder investigation. One of the heroes of your story is Edna Buchanan who is the Miami Herald murder investigator. She gets a tip that police officers had murdered McDuffie. She goes to the City Pound and finds the motorcycle scraped up on both sides of the vehicle, which is inconsistent with the supposed crash. The motorcycle is in shatters.
The original police report concludes that McDuffie has been thrown off the bike in a traffic accident, and he hit something that caused head trauma, but there is nothing for him to hit at the crash location. Edna called the Miami Police Department’s senior officers, and they were unaware of the situation, and asked her help in the investigation. They were successful in flipping three police officers. Tell us about the role of Edna Buchanan, the importance of investigative journalism in this event and how that results in the indictments.
Nicholas Griffin:
She refused to reveal for 40 years who gave her the tip. It turned out the call came from one of the most decorated officers in the department, a real-life Dirty Harry who had killed three law breakers. He had interrupted robberies; he chased down a murder suspect; he was an aggressive cop. But what he saw with McDuffie disturbed him, and that is why he made that call.
Edna Buchanan weighed 110 pounds soaking wet. She wore high heels and pants suits to crime scenes. In her career, she covered over 5,000 murders, which as she said to me, made her less of a journalist and more of a war reporter.
When she started covering crime in the late seventies about 120 deaths a year in the county. At the peak in the early eighties, it jumps to 600 murders.
Larry Bernstein:
The cops lied in their police reports about what happened. The senior guys in the Miami Police Force work with Janet Reno's prosecutorial team to take down these bad cops. There is a reticence to turn on fellow cops, but three do.
The police officers recognize that they will not be able to get a fair trial in Miami and that's probably right, and they transfer the case to a Tampa court. I watched some documentaries on this case, and the assumption was that there was no way that they were going to convict these guys. But I'm not sure that's true. 1980s Tampa seems quite different from Alabama in the 1960s. This case was complicated by the confusion at the murder scene, and you can’t look at this solely through the lens of race.
One of the officers who is on the docket is Latino. Tell us about the prosecutor's strategy and why it ultimately failed.
Nicholas Griffin:
Six cops go on trial. They centered it around was Alex Marrero who was Cuban American. His lawyer felt that he'd been picked on because he was Cuban. He had been accused by most of his fellow officers of striking the killing blow. But he felt that he could prove that he had not brought his metal flashlight that evening, which was the murder weapon. This is all taking place at 1:30 in the morning.
Larry Bernstein:
It's a melee.
Nicholas Griffin:
It's a total melee. One officer describes it as looking like a Loony Tunes fight, where all you can see is legs poking out of a body and people shouting, “one at a time.” There are some disturbing things that happened. For instance, once McDuffie's was unconscious and lying there on the ground, two officers were openly discussing the best way to break the legs of an unconscious suspect.
The midnight shift for Miami police were cops that the Miami Brass didn't want to see during the day. The more infractions you had as an officer, the likelier that you were going to be out there at the time of night. They weren't the best officers. And that is why things got out of control.
The Miami Herald selected their number one journalist, Gene Miller who won two Pulitzer Prizes to cover the McDuffie trial in Tampa. In his columns, Miller describes the trial as a slam dunk from beginning to end as an upcoming conviction.
The Miami Herald is the big paper in town. Everyone reads the Herald. It had a circulation in 1980 of over half a million on Sundays. The city was unprepared for anything other than conviction. The smaller papers had a much better take on this. And one paper says that this case was like watching a house collapse during a hurricane and about to be swept out to sea, so prepare yourselves Miami.
The problem is no one read that paper. So, when we the verdict is announced on May 17th, 1980, Miami is unprepared for the violence that is about to break out.
Larry Bernstein:
The Tampa jury takes 90 minutes to vacate the indictments against all the police officers. No one was convicted of any crime. Rioting erupts immediately in Miami. The police force was unprepared. Many innocents were killed who happen to be driving down a major road in Miami. Kids were pulled over, beaten, and killed. That is followed by arson, and then the fires burn down a substantial portion of Overtown and Liberty City.
The largest employer of the African American community is a tire manufacturer that facility burns down as well as residential and retail establishments. Even the Miami Herald offices and police stations are attacked. The National Guard must be called in. Tell us about the lack of preparation, the violence, and the response by law enforcement.
Nicholas Griffin:
Edna Buchanan rang the chief of police and asked him what his plans were if the city reacted. Everyone thought the verdict was going to come through on Monday morning. Instead, it comes through on Saturday morning. So, no one's at work, no one's at school. And everyone is by their radios listening when the verdict happens.
The chief of police on the phone with Buchanan says, “don't worry, we've got this in hand.” She's asked, “what's the plan?” He says, “I've decided to put one more patrol car out there tonight.” And that was it. And the violence starts almost immediately. The first people who were killed by early afternoon.
This goes on for 48 hours. And the violence is extreme. It's brutal and totally random. For instance, there was a car full of kids coming home from fishing who were white Alabama kids cruising through Miami listening to music. They come to a stop sign, they find a crowd of well over a thousand people surrounding their car; they are dragged out of the car and beaten to death with everything from bricks to spears.
Everyone who dies their first day is white. On day two, once the National Guard are there, everyone who dies on the second day is Black. Their deaths are different. Everyone is shot. And again, it's totally random. People with guns got through the police lines that second day and managed to shoot nine black civilians. As a law enforcement response goes it was an extraordinary failure.
The police lost control of the city. There were well over 200 fires set that night. Every time the fire department tried to get close to them, they were shot at. So, they ended up backing away and not putting out fires. So huge chunks of Overtown and Liberty City burned down. It took rains to get everyone back home.
When it came time to put together a rebuilding program, no one wanted to do it. Miami was referred to as the race riot capital of America. Why would you want to build a new building in that neighborhood if it might be burned down again a year later?
Larry Bernstein:
The next story is the Cuban boat lift that is coterminous with the race riot. Thousands of Cubans were landing that same week in Miami. The episode starts when a Havana bus driver crashes his bus into the local Peruvian Embassy who seeks asylum in the embassy.
Fidel Castro demands his return. The Peruvians refuse. And Fidel says, in that case, I am not going to send allow police officers to defend your embassy. And immediately, 10,000 Cubans are on the property seeking asylum. Tell us about how this fit together.
Nicholas Griffin:
At first, this looks like an extraordinary misstep by Fidel Castro, and he has not made many mistakes in the first 20 years of the revolution. It's the first public declaration on the failure of the revolution. When Fidel left the gates of the Peruvian embassy open and said, anyone who does not want to be part of my revolution can leave. He was absolutely stunned when it turned out that there were tens of thousands trying to get to the Peruvian embassy.
The real question is, how does the embarrassment of Fidel Castro turn into the utter embarrassment of Jimmy Carter? And the answer there is Castro makes an extraordinarily bold and subtle diplomatic maneuver that pulled the rug out from under Carter, and that is to get rid of these 10,000 people, he doesn't contact the U.S. State Department.
He calls the exile community in Miami. He offers family reunification. He says, if you come down here to the Port of Marielle, I will not only hand you the 10,000 people in the Peruvian embassy, but I will give you family members who you've been yearning to get out of here for the last 20 years.
Overnight, every boat in Miami goes to Marielle. It's a short boat ride. Within a few days you've got more boats in the port of Marielle than aided the British army leaving Dunkirk during World War II.
The U.S. government does not even know what is happening. You have got people arriving to go to Miami about 125,000 people. Miami only had around 300,000 people in the actual city then. It was just overwhelming. And this is happening at a time of extraordinary racial tension.
Larry Bernstein:
The demographics of Miami, I looked up the Wikipedia, there was like a hundred thousand blacks in Miami in the city at the time, and today there is only 50,000. So, there is this massive emigration out. One of the reasons they may have left is low skilled labor is a competitive market. And you’ve got a hundred thousand Cubans coming in. I got to go. There was white flight too, and Broward County becomes a new area to move to. Whites and Blacks are fleeing, and Miami becomes an incredibly successful Latin city.
Nicholas Griffin:
You get this equal balance between white, Blacks and Latin. And then with that new arrival of 125,000 Cubans, you have a majority minority city. The first big city to be so in America. With all the horrors going on between the boat lift and the race riots and the arrival of the cocaine industry, Miami's a scary place and that certainly encourages white flight. But while domestic tourism is affected, international tourism from Latin America isn't.
It means that the people you want to employ is much better if they are bilingual. To deal with a hotel full of Argentinians, Venezuelans, and Colombians, you want the guys' poolside to be speaking both languages.
Larry Bernstein:
In 1980 Miami is the cocaine capital of the United States. The Colombians need to get the drugs into the United States, and Miami is the place. Tell us about money, violence, and the Colombian cocaine trade.
Nicholas Griffin:
A Colombian-German national Carlos Lehder led the way. He knew about smuggling marijuana by flying in bales of pot. He realized that 400 pounds of cocaine weighs the same as 400 pounds of marijuana. Why don't I just fill the plane up with that higher margin drugs? He made so much money from one cocaine shipment that he used the profits to buy an island in the Bahamas called Norman's Key. Within months, he has 20 planes touching down from Columbia refueling and then heading to different spots across South Florida, whether it is dirt roads in the Everglades or abandoned highways. There is an explosion in cocaine and cash coming into the city. The Feds figure out that something is wrong. They send a team from Customs and IRS it what was called Operation Greenback to find out who is laundering more than a million dollars a year in cash.
Within two months, the agents are given new directives. Forget about the guys laundering $1 million in cash, focus on the guys laundering more than a $100 million dollars.
The 12 biggest money launderers living in Miami in 1980 are each laundering about $350 million and charging 6%. They are making a multiple more than the best paid businessmen in America.
One of the guys I focus on in my book has six houses around Miami that is stacked with cash. He fills his Chevy Nova every day and drives to one of his friendly banks who hire five extra tellers to count money throughout the night, a million bucks a day.
Occasionally when the money launderer gets nervous, he uses backup banks. He's responsible for those dollars until the moment the drug dealer gets paid in Columbia.
That's the game between the different cartels and money launderers. Who can get us into the finest banks in America? How can we move the money?
Larry Bernstein:
My favorite television program during COVID was Ozark and it was about money laundering, and it seemed that Ozark relied on more sophisticated methods than what you're talking about. In Ozark, the banks are not willing to take anything more than $10,000 without good reason. So, they acquire cash businesses like a strip club to disguise money coming into the system. But here in Miami 1980, you show up with suitcases full of millions of dollars in cash and hand it to a teller. Everyone is involved from the head of the bank on down.
Nicholas Griffin:
Operation Greenback was set up on January 1, 1980. It's supposed to be Customs, IRS, FBI, and DEA. You get this first year where different agencies doing their own thing down here.
There is a total distrust of local law enforcement. Miami homicide department was corrupted. There are 26 homicide agents at the beginning of 1980, 23 of them after an FBI operation are fired or convicted. That leaves three guys with more than one year of experience in charge of solving all the cocaine crimes. Not one of them spoke a word of Spanish.
Larry Bernstein:
In the book, you tell the story of one of the money launderers, a Colombian who brings a suitcase of cash into a Miami bank and outside are two federal agents with binoculars looking at him.
Nicholas Griffin:
Isaac Kattan, who I concentrate on in my book, beginning of 1980 these agencies were working in tandem ended up following the same guy. You can ruin someone else's surveillance accidentally and lose your guy. Isaac Kattan was a $350 million a year launderer, and he's the guy who explained to the Feds how it works so that new laws will be effective.
Larry Bernstein:
He walked into the bank without a bodyguard. How was that possible? We have a money launder carrying a million dollars in cash who is not carrying a weapon. Why wasn’t he robbed carrying a million dollars multiple times a day? I saw Ocean 11. Why was he safe to conduct business this way?
Nicholas Griffin:
There were gangs that started up called the little birds who would go and intercept guys who were carrying substantial amounts of cash. But no one touched the super big guys, I presume, because Isaac Kattan was laundering money for Calle and Medellin.
Drug murders start to pile up quickly. No one could believe the ways in which the murders were being conducted. They were taking place at noon in prominent malls. There was a guy in a wheelchair who was assassinated in the arrivals lounge at the Miami International Airport. There were people killed in hotels. These assassins would be brought in from Columbia for two days and then flown back out again. Law enforcement had no idea who they were.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the murders that you described in the book was when a Medellin cocaine dealer breaks up with his mistress. She says, “I'm out of here. I'm going to go catch a plane, goodbye.”
He gets off the phone, calls one of his local assassins and tells him to go kill her on the way to the airport. She's heading towards the airport, and the assassin catches up with her and fires a gun into the vehicle. She abandons the car, jumps the median, flags down an incoming car and jumps in. The assassin follows her, shoots the driver of the car, the passenger, and ultimately the mistress. These murders shocked the local Miami population.
Nicholas Griffin:
In July 1979 on US Highway 1, a machine gun chase ensues between two cars in the middle of the day. The police were outgunned. Suddenly you got violence from two countries. Don't forget that the Marielle Boatlift included most of the Cuban prison system in it, and they were recruited by the Colombian drug dealers.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's go back to Fidel's anger and frustration with the boat lift. It's embarrassing. He believed in the revolution, and this is personal. 10,000 people covered the entire grounds of the Peruvian Embassy lawn. Fidel unescorted walks over to see with his own eyes what is going on. There is a hush in the crowd. He talks to people, and they told Fidel, we are out of here. I have been here 20 years; I believe in the revolution. I want to try something else for my family. And that is when he says, you don't believe in the revolution. Goodbye. And he also wants to hurt the United States. You want these people? I'll give you the good and the bad. And he empties the jails and the mental institutions.
Nicholas Griffin:
The 4% of the criminal element embedded in that 125,000 doubled the number of criminals in Miami overnight. And it smears and tarnishes the other 96%. There were a lot of bad guys wandering around and the crime rate in Miami Beach goes up 300% overnight. It is a terrifying place to live.
Larry Bernstein:
Miami Vice becomes a popular television program.
Nicholas Griffin:
In Miami in those years this triple disaster, the excessive migration, cocaine, and race riots scare away a lot of people. There is a famous story in Time Magazine, Paradise Lost, the end of Miami. Oliver Stone wrote the Scarface script. It goes off into hyperbole, but some of that is accurate. This glamorization of cocaine and police with Miami Vice have little basis. You can ask any cop who worked in Miami.
Larry Bernstein:
No one drove a Ferrari.
Nicholas Griffin:
No one was in an Armani suit or driving a Ferrari. Miami gets a reputation as an edgy and cool place.
Larry Bernstein:
In 2025, it is a gloriously successful metropolitan area.
Nicholas Griffin:
It took a business-friendly mayor who knew that the three most important things in Miami were geography, geography, and geography.
We already had flights to every big city in Latin America and to every second city in Latin America. And no matter how bad things got in Miami, we still look good to international visitors from Latin America.
The vision came from one guy, Maurice Ferre. Someone should at least rename the airport after him because he was central to the progress of this city.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Nick for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, the topic was American Glasnost. Our speakers were Eugene Kontorovich who is a Professor of Law at George Mason and his father Vladimir Kontorovich who is a Professor of Economics at Haverford. Eugene and Vladimir observed that topics which were previously forbidden to be discussed particularly in the old media can now be debated openly, and that these reversal parallels the Gorbachev-era in the Soviet Union.
I would like to make a plug for our next podcast with Christine Rosen who will discuss her new book The Extinction of Experience. I want to learn from Christine about the consequences of the smartphone on our interaction with the world.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, American Glasnost, here.
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