Willy Falcon and Sal Muglata grew up in Florida after their families fled Fidel Castro’s communist regime in Cuba. The two friends then built one of America’s biggest cocaine empires, importing and distributing endless mountains of the drug from the late 1970s, raking in riches as the nation grew increasingly hooked on it. Muglata is in prison for life but Falcon was released and deported in 2017 and now lives in an undisclosed country.
T.J. English found Falcon and did extensive interviews with him as well as numerous compatriots and the law enforcement officials who chased and caught the trafficker.
English’s new book, “The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America,” tells Falcon’s story and captures his operations and partying lifestyle in detail.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Falcon and Muglata got into dealing cocaine via anti-Castro exiles in Florida. Did they consider the morality of selling drugs to their fellow Cubans and other Latinos as a way to support the cause?
In the late ‘70s, cocaine had not washed over the culture yet, it had not been demonized. It was basically a recreational drug for rich people – Hollywood people, rock stars, professional athletes. Nobody thought, ‘I’m dealing drugs that are killing people.’
And morality tends to be subjective. And we look at that situation and think they were engaged in immoral activity. They didn’t think of it that way. The anti-Castro movement was, to them, a holy crusade and totally justified. So Willy was down for everything they could come up with, even if it involved illegal activity. That’s the nature of an underground movement – it involves smuggling weapons, explosives – it involves all kinds of illegal activity. So bringing in cocaine and selling it to raise money was just a new wrinkle. It probably seemed ingenious.
Q. They soon became standard profit-seeking drug kingpins who, during the Reagan and Bush era, were portrayed as evil. Drug czar William Bennett said he could argue that it was morally plausible to behead drug kingpins. What impact did that attitude have on the escalating cocaine and crack addiction crises?
This was important to me in many ways. This is my book on the War on Drugs. I always felt that the attitudes of political leaders, and the amount of money and attention that was lavished on the War on Drugs was a misguided policy, and it’s still playing out. Once you declare something a war it dictates policies and operations and the use of law enforcement. The military was used in the War on Drugs in a way that it had never been used before against US citizens.
It established a mandate that drove the government’s approach to narcotics that I think really drove things off the rails. This was even more dramatic than the way illegal booze was addressed during the years of prohibition.
And they kept doubling down, asking for more money, pressuring to pass new laws like mandatory sentencing laws and putting pressure on the media. So cocaine becomes the devil, it becomes like Communism, the biggest possible threat. You’re not only going against your country, you’re going against God. This was unprecedented.
I think it drove the narcos to believe that they were caught up in an existential threat to their being and so it escalated the tension and the violence.
We just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and cocaine is still flowing into the United States. It’s insane.
Q. You tried to remain non-judgmental in your writing. Was it difficult to stay neutral in telling the story?
I try to be non-judgmental and non-ideological because I’m trying to tell the story through the eyes and the point of view of the people who lived the story. And I often do that in the face of an ideology or politics I don’t necessarily agree with. I was never going to be able to understand what was happening in the lives of these people if I was to impose my point of view or my politics.
I’m not writing the book as a journalist. I’m writing the book as an author. It’s a slightly different mandate. I’m writing narrative nonfiction. I’m not objectively presenting the facts. I want to present what’s going on in their heads and hearts, as a character in the story. I’m trying to see it the way they saw it and to make it possible for the reader to see that
We’re all adults. You can draw your own interpretation and make your own moral conclusions about how you feel about what they were doing, but I don’t want that to be based on me over-engineering how it’s presented to you.
I’ve already gotten some of that kind of feedback online from people who feel that I’m overly empathetic. I’m just trying to humanize the people in the story – we can say that they made horrible life choices that we can’t condone but they’re not demons or devils. I’m trying to create a context for you to understand why and how these people made these bad choices
Nothing makes better drama than human beings making bad choices. That goes back to Shakespeare. But I am conscious of not glorifying them – that’s one of my gripes with the way the criminal world is presented in movies and on TV, where it creates an aesthetic that makes it seem glamorous and cool without an understanding of the human consequences. I don’t want to glorify what they did but it’s important for me to convey how cool they thought it was.
Related Articles
How photographing women playing baseball together turned into a book and film
Author Dagoberto Gilb says it’s ‘nuts’ that he published two books on the same day
Things to do in the San Fernando Valley, LA area, Dec. 19-26
This week’s bestsellers at Southern California’s independent bookstores
See inside The Last Bookstore Studio City’s massive, just-opened bookstore