The Most Horrific Murders and Crimes from Miami's Cocaine Cowboy Era

One of the most violent eras of American history was that of the Cocaine Cowboys - a drug-laden, dangerous time during the late '70s and '80s in South Florida. The Miami drug trade was wrought with graphic violence, horrific crime, and vast riches. 

If you’ve seen Scarface you only know a slice of the terror that took place in Dade County in the '80s. No one was safe from the cartel war that raged through the city - not even women and children. That era was full of men who were dubbed Cocaine Cowboys, marauding bands of mercenaries who worked for the cartels to kill anyone who got in the way of making piles of money.

It's not just the backdrop for popular movies and shows: stories of the Cocaine Cowboys in Miami were real, true crime. A lot of innocent people lost their lives in the bloodbath the cartels created in Miami, and for nothing more than the crass pursuit of money and getting high. 

In 1984, Barry Seal - a pilot who helped move product from Colombia to Louisiana - had turned into an FBI informant in order to reduce a lengthy sentence in federal prison. While he was working as an informant Seal was also living in a halfway house in Louisiana, and it was there where one of Griselda Blanco's men, Cumbaba, was waiting for him along with a hit squad. When Seal pulled into the parking lot the gang filled his head with 12 bullets from a silenced MAC-10. Maybe no one told them that one would do the trick. 

After Blanco and her crew started drawing major heat for trying murder everyone in Miami they made their way to California. Along with them came Marta Ochoa, the niece of Fabio Ochoa who was Blanco's hook up for her cocaine. At some point around 1984, Blanco stopped paying for her coke and hatched a scheme to kill Marta in order to make it look like Ochoa had run off with the money. According to Rivi in Cocaine Cowboys, "As soon as [Marta] walked in [and saw the Godmother] she shit on herself." Homicide Detective Al Singleton says that Marta was later kidnapped, murdered, and her body "found on the side of the road."

Jorge "Rivi" Ayala was an enforcer for Griselda Blanco, a major cocaine boss in Miami often referred to as Miami's Cocaine Queen. When Rivi first arrived in Miami, he was simply shaking people down. But one night he accidentally tipped off two brothers who were about to be executed that the hammer was coming down. In order to save himself from execution, it was up to him to finish the job. He worked out a plan where he would kidnap one of the brothers and use him to lure the second one. He was only able to grab one of he brothers at a Ramada Inn parking lot, but Blanco didn't mind. Rivi was ordered to kill the man, chopping him up up and stuffing his body in a cardboard box. 

In a last ditch attempt to kill Papo Mejia, after failing to kill him once in New York City, and again when Rivi murdered his father in Miami, the top enforcer of Griselda Blanco decided to simply blow up Mejia's Miami home. According to the Cocaine Cowboys doc, when Griselda asked Rivi, "You're not going to miss this time are you?" Rivi says that he answered, "No, I'm going to blow the whole house up." And while he definitely kept good on his word, it turns out that no one was actually home during the explosion, so all Rivi did was cause a lot of structural damage and put even more eyes on the Columbian drug war. Telling the story from prison, Rivi said that he used "200 sticks of dynamite," and that the explosion was "so god damn loud." 

In 1982, Griselda Blanco ordered her enforcer Rivi to take out Jesus “Chucho” Castro, a former cartel enforcer whom Blanco had marked for death after he kicked her son out of his house. Rivi pulled up along side of Chucho's car while he was trying to get on the highway in south Miami and fired an M-16 into the car. Rivi missed Chucho but he managed to take out Chucho's two-year-old son - an unintended target. After he was arrested Rivi told the police: “At first [Blanco] was real mad ’cause we missed the father. But when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even.” According to the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, Chucho had to drop the boy's body off with a note for the police rather than report the crime because he was wanted on trafficking charges at the time. 

One Griselda Blanco's ex-enforcers Papo Mejia supposedly ripped the Godmother off in the early days of the coke game and lit out to start his own thing in New York City. It turns out that was a bad move. As was her modus operandi, she sent Rivi up to New York to kill everyone who was working for Mejia and as Rivi says in Cocaine Cowboys: "From the stashers to the hitmen - 11 people, they all got killed. In less than 24 hours. It supposed to be 12 but I let one go." 

After Rivi returned from New York City where he killed 11 members of Papo Meija's gang, he wanted to finish off the Meija bloodline so he followed him to the then Pan-American Mall in Miami. When Mejia left the mall he was ambushed by Rivi and his men, and he was shot by multiple gunmen. Rivi notes in the documentary about the murders that many people in the Columbian drug community were "pissed [at Griselda] because [Octavio] wasn't a part of the war," but that she "didn't give a sh*t."

After allegedly failing to pay cash to Griselda Blanco for some cocaine they had taken out on consignment, Alfredo Lorenzo and his wife had to pay the ultimate price: their lives. One night in 1982, three of Blanco's enforcers went to the Lorenzo household during dinner and murdered the husband and wife in front of their three children. Although Blanco had ordered the murder of everyone in the house, according to her main enforcer Rivi, he made sure the children lived. Rivi's only other thoughts of note on the murder was Alfredo's wife "was making this weird noise with blood coming out of her mouth" before she died. According to Miami-Dade homicide detective Al Singleton, the son and one of the daughters of the Lorenzo family were found playing with the bloody dead body of their mother. 

Many of the most gruesome murders from the Cocaine Cowboy era were never solved, either because there was little evidence to go off of, or because there were simply too many murders happening for them all to be solved. Nelson Andreu, Captain of the West Miami Police Department spoke of one such murder to the Miami New Times. "It was four guys - bound, gagged, and shot to death. It was drugs. There were empty grocery bags with coke residue in them, and somebody got sloppy and accidentally left a kilo under the bed. They were all Colombians." The murders was committed in August 1982, they were never solved and no information about the victims or assailants ever surfaced. Andreu continued: "I never heard a word about that quadruple murder. We never got a tip or a fingerprint hit, and I believe we got good fingerprints from the scene. It hasn't bothered me...."

The first shots fired in the long string of cocaine related murders in Miami took place at the Crown Liquor Store at the Dadeland Mall in 1979. The massacre began as a simple hit on Jiménez Panesso, a drug trafficker who was stopping by the store to pick up a bottle of Scotch. Panesso was followed into the store by two men carrying submachine guns who unloaded on him, a friend, and two men working the counter. The two men who killed Panesso wounded multiple victims and destroyed an untold amount of property. They then rolled up to the mall in a van made up to look like a delivery truck from a party supply store. It was actually what police called a bullet proof "war wagon." Officers interviewed at the time noted that the scene "looked like an old western shoot out" and that "the level of violence was unprecedented."