Billy Corben has mined the devastating days of the renegade drug import business in Miami in no less than three Cowboy Chronicles. I think I've seen them all now as I only now saw Reloaded. I take it's the middle one, but there's cross-pollination so I don't think it really matters. I will say this one doubles down on some key players and adds plenty of interspersed interviews as well as ample narration by these key players that were still alive at the time the film was made. I think by focusing on these people the film stands on it's own possibly being more laser focused. Miami was truly the perfect drug and crime storm in a time most of us felt the US had moved way beyond the "Wild West Days" where law and order existed only at the end of a gun. The film makes it clear that wasn't the case as the multiple law enforcement agencies were corrupt on a local level and asleep on the Federal one. The devastation really is all around constantly yet the film somehow fails to get the horrific gravity of it Maybe it's just because the key players talk almost casually when explaining their actions? There still is a lot here to digest and it is interesting in that "fact is stranger than fiction" department that this stuff all happened before justice began to clean it up. At the end of the day it was only because the drug money was lucrative in the "billions and billions" range. The intersection of so many things, even the Iran-Contra drugs for arms craziness, will hopefully never be repeated.

Okay, here's the story. I come from the gutter. I know that. I got no education but that's okay. I know the street, and I'm making all the right connections. With the right woman, there's no stopping me. I could go right to the top.

I not only saw the documentary, I lived it, I became a Metro Dade county police officer in Aug of 1980 and retired in 2002, I was on the scene of at least half the drug related killings pictured in the video, and a whole lot more that were not. As if that weren't enough, I also went to High school with the quintessential Cocaine Cowboy Mickey Munday, oddly enough I didn't make the connection till I watched this video 50 something years later, I recall him as a redheaded nerd who the girls wanted nothing to do with, if they had only known that one day he would be buying entire neighborhoods and burying trash bags full of 20s and hundreds.