One of the infamous Cocaine Cowboys gang who flooded Miami with billions of dollars of the drug in the Seventies and Eighties has been deported.
Augusto ‘Willy’ Falcon, now 61, was sent to the Dominican Republic on November 2 after serving most of a 20-year sentence for money laundering.
Falcon had fought deportation to his native Cuba on the grounds that he would be killed for helping to secretly finance a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro in the 1990s.
Augusto ‘Willy’ Falcon (pictured right in the 1980s, alongside fellow gangster Sal Magulta) has been deported to the Dominican Republic after serving a 20 years for cocaine smuggling
Falcon, his brother Gustavo and Magulta – who were known as the Cocaine Cowboys – used powerboats to transport cocaine from Colombia to Miami starting in 1978
A judge refused his appeal back in March, the Miami Herald reports, but he escaped that fate after the Dominican Republic agreed to accept him as a resident.
Falcon was a high school dropout who became one of America’s richest and most notorious drug dealers alongside classmate Salvador ‘Sal’ Magluta and younger brother Gustavo.
The Cocaine Cowboys – or simply ‘the Boys’, as they were known – imported an estimated 75 tons of the drug into the US starting in 1978.
They were the go-to middle men linking Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel and the Cali Colombian cartel to the black market in America.
Using ocean-racing speed boats, they transported the drug from South America to south Florida, where it was sold on to the streets.
Willy Falcon and Magluta were arrested in 1991 while Gustavo Falcon vanished.
The elder Falcon and Magulta were slapped with dozens of charges linked to importing and distributing the drug, as well as hiring hitmen to kill snitches.
Willy Falcon and Magulta were arrested in 1991 and tried for various crimes including drug smuggling and hiring hitmen, but were acquitted in 96 after buying off the jury (pictured, police seize a haul of cocaine)
Magulta was sentenced to 205 years in jail at a retrial in 2002, while Willy Falcon was sentenced to 20 years in 2003 after taking a plea deal (pictured, police seize cocaine)
However, following a lengthy trial the pair were acquitted in 1996. It later emerged that they paid off the jury and the foreman to secure the verdict.
Magluta, who was fingered as the head of the operation, was retried in 2002 and sentenced to 205 years in jail, reduced on appeal to 195 years.
Falcon struck a plea deal in 2003 in which he pleaded guilty to a simple charge of money laundering in return for 20 years in jail.
His sentence technically elapsed last year but instead of being freed he was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana pending deportation.
While Falcon was a settled permanent resident he never passed the final stage of his citizenship test, so was eligible to be kicked out of the country.
Gustavo Falcon remained on the run until April 2017 when he was arrested in Florida. He was sentenced to 11 years in jail
During deportation hearings, his lawyers revealed for the first time that he and Magulta had donated substantial parts of their drug smuggling profits to Cuban exile paramilitary groups with the aim of killing then-Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Their efforts were unsuccessful, and Castro died of natural causes in 2016.
Willy’s younger brother Gustavo remained on the run until April last year when he was finally arrested during a bike ride with his wife in Kissimmee, Florida.
Federal officials said Gustavo had fake driver’s licenses dating back to 1997 and that used fake addresses in Miami to hide himself.
He also had fake licenses for his wife, Amelia, and children, who are now aged in their 30s, authorities said.
Authorities said the couple went by the name of Luis Reiss and Maria Reiss.
The break in the case came in 2013 when Gustavo was involved in a car accident and he used his fake identification with the Miami address, police said.
Authorities say Gustavo and his family had been renting a home in the Kissimmee area, as it was under surveillance by the Marshals Office for some time before his arrest Wednesday.
Since 1999, Gustavo and his family had been living in the Orlando area which surprised authorities as it had long been thought he fled the country to Cuba, Mexico or Colombia.
‘We figured this all out a month ago,’ Golden said. ‘We pulled their drivers’ licenses and saw it was the same Gustavo Falcon.’
Gustavo did not resist at all during his arrest and even confessed to his real identity, authorities said.
In April this year, Gustavo was jailed for 11 years after pleading guilty to a single cocaine distribution conspiracy charge.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Clark said Falcon was the ‘right-hand man’ to his older brother.
His jobs included keeping transaction ledgers, collecting millions of dollars in cocaine profits, finding stash houses for drugs and organizing tractor-trailer loads of drugs to be shipped from Southern California to Florida.
It was probably the most prolific smuggling operation we have found here in South Florida,’ Clark said. ‘Obviously, this case has had a long and winding road.’