cocaine cowboys gang

The Cocaine Cowboys I is one of the most interesting crime documentaries ever filmed. And the main reason for this relays on real story behind the scenes and their real protagonists. This is the story of how cocaine first entered the United States in huge amounts, substituted the widely spread consume of pot and became what it is today, a multibillion dollar business, a large scale industry to satisfy the needs of greedy traffickers at both sides of the border and the lust of the consumers. How it eventually became a blood thirsty business, on how this industry kept relocating itself once the heat was too much to handle in some centers, on how smoking guns were the ones settling the terms in this business, on how technology was an organic part of smuggling the substance into USA and on how the traffickers on all parts saw their lives changed at first to become millionaires in months and latter on to see themselves staring the 2 by 2 square meters of a federal penitentiary if they were lucky enough to make it that far and negotiate with the state a deal.

In this documentary review I will go over art and reality, on the film itself and add some critics on my own as well, while mentioning as well other sources that add more information into the facts. I sometimes wonder is www.whentheshipcomesin.com is more of a documentaries blog or a movies blog, for more and more I get my hicks from the real thing, that happens to be more creative and more drastic than the invented stuff in some movies.

The set of all this heat was Miami, Florida. A quiet and peaceful community for the elderly in the sixties, where marihuana was already accepted as the drug of the people, but it reached to the point where there was so much of it that the dealer couldn’t sell it all. This city, filled with people from Spanish speaking countries, became the capital of cocaine in the United States.

Jon Roberts

Small gangsters, traffickers and couriers witnessed how cocaine could transform your life in a matter of months; these new cocaine lords will make much more amounts of cash in a much shorter time than the Italian mafia. Teamed with the best lawyers, accountants, technology, they will reach rich and famous and average consumers alike and serve them with the white powder to a point where selling 100 weekly kilos wouldn’t satisfy the local demand.

In Colombia everyone had a cut into it, so the Americans coming to Medellin to get the drugs on planes were never troubled, never had a problem. The favorite way back would be from the east side of Cuba, for the patrolling activity was around the Bahamas. So the plane would head North through Georgia and make a turn to the South into Miami, and thus, nobody would suspect from a plane coming from the North.

Another tactic implemented by traffickers, according to this documentary, was to through the cargo into the sea so speedy boats would take it. It took several attempts until it run smoothly for the Colombians wouldn’t rap the cocaine in a water proof fashion. The boat would make it into the Miami harbor through the “front door”, from there into the cars under surveillance of another team member, the spotter, up in a tall building, supervising no coast guards or cops were in the area at the time of the disembark of the substance.

Rivi Ayala - Main Enforcer

The trafficker would use working men looking for extra cash as transporter and rent numerous numbers of houses where to store the large amounts of cocaine. From there to the whole sellers, who would break into smaller packages as per retailer’s request. They could make $40-50 k of a single kilo in the street; the transport from Medellin to Miami was paid at a fee of $3500/kilo. The tactic was “keep everybody away from everybody”, this way there is no tracing back.

Money was kept in different locations away from the cocaine houses. Once the sell completed, the same us citizens that carried the drug into USA, would carry back Ochoa, Rafa and Escobar their money (no less than 10 million dollars per plane).The planes won’t fly back straight to Colombia, but into the money laundry paradise of Panama. The Panamanian army would take the money into a bank in the country where they have their accounts. The delivery guys were making 1 million dollar each per trip.

Everybody was doing cocaine back in the Miami of the 80’s, at every party, clubs, restaurants; it was everywhere, at the hand of regular middle class hand, as coca cola or pop corn, it was the cool thing to do. At every bathroom there were lines and people pushing shit up their nose.

Persuasive tools

The authorities and law enforcement, used to catch here and there 500 grams, 1 kilo packages, found it hard to cope with the more common tone of powder. District attorney was hitting new records case by case with the amounts of coke apprehended.
Colombia-Miami cocaine industry (Cocaine Inc.), represented 80% of the cocaine activities in the US, and were hitting figures of up to 7 billion dollars a year only in Miami, meaning each householder was expending $12,000/year. So much was the use of cocaine that the chances to find cocaine leftovers in a random dollar bill were pretty high.

Cocaine overdose increased into 88%, two a week casualties was the rate. People started smoking it.

Main cocaine traffickers in Miami could make 50 grants a week while the country wide recession, unemployment was huge, but in Miami there were not enough gold Rolex watches stores to supply the local market, likewise with fancy cars, real estate and boats. No sign of recession in Miami. Millions of dollars from the cocaine industry were pouring into Miami’s economy. Retailers, as anyone else, closed their eyes as per where was the money pouring from: “Don’t ask, don’t tell, take the money and run”. Dozens of night clubs opened, were fed by the powder money. Horse races became a fashionable sport, having a private “heli” was not something reserved to the high society anymore. The guys moving the cables of this business had so much cash, they didn’t know where to put it.

Everybody had a price, from Noriega, to city managers, police departments. If stopped by a cop and found 50 kilos of cocaine in the trunk, a settlement was establish so both the cop and the trafficker would get away with it.

Four Miami mayors indicted, most of them convicted of corruption, contributions were made to the politicians through their parties, no questions asked.

The city was painted with new banks, when all knew Miami had no such volume of business or industry. These banks were reported to take in 6 billion dollars in extra cash from depositors a certain year, this made law enforcement suspicious.

Michael Munday, pilot

Banks invested in huge counting machines. Numbers coming from authorities, expected a mid size Miami bank to send the Federal Reserve 12 million dollars in cash, while in one year this bank sent $600 million to the reserve. The Miami Federal Reserve Bank was entering more money than the whole of the country Federal Reserve banks combined.

Miami flourished with construction sites, new cranes building new skyscrapers, new condos, etc,..
But this happy Eden garden had a turning point of never return at the Dadeland Mall on july 11th, 1979 at 14:28 hrs: two Latin males entered a liquor store in the mall and started to spit fire from the barrels of 14 different weapons (shotguns, carbines, Uzis, mag 10, assorted hand guns,etc,…) into other 4 Latin guys. We all hear in movies that violence is bad for “business”, and this was it, the powder was now becoming responsible for dead bodies and for an unprecedented level of violence. All Colombian murders would result in an open/pending (not resolved case).

Cocaine Formula

This first midday assault would become a frequent thing in Miami. It was the beginning of the war between Colombians and Cuban drug dealers. The Colombians trying to push the Cubans out and gain a higher share of the market. These now violent hit-men became to be known as the cocaine cowboys. Most of them from Medellin, living in South Florida, around 100,000 illegal immigrants of them. And these guys would do the job, Colombian style, killing all living members of a family, kids, cat and dog included. The trade mark of the cocaine cowboys was machine gun fire spraying in the streets.

It became so common to turn on your tv set and news opening with dead bodies due to cocaine dealers violence that only 4 or 5 dead bodies would drive your attention, like in the Chicago of the 20’s.

Tip of the iceberg apprehended

Miami became in the early 80’s the most dangerous place on earth. Only 1976 created 104 murders, during 1979 the rate escalated into 379 dead bodies and 500 in 1980, 621 in 1981.
Then in the 80’s high numbers of Cubans were authorized to flee their country, mostly the ones with police records, and people who could not produce any profit for Castro, all were sent to Miami, doubling the homicide rate. All of a sudden everybody in Florida would carry guns to defend themselves. The Police department acknowledged their lack of man power and resources, so they went on a blind hiring frenzy: from a standard of accepting you only if you had you not used drugs in the last 10 years into the hiring you on the condition of not to be high at the time of signing the contract.

Max, second from the left

This resulted in the largest corruption crises in the Miami Police Department: the entire academy recruit literally went to jail or died. People wouldn’t trust the law officers until new anti narcotics units were formed.

All this was explained in a Time magazine article of the year 1981 called “Miami, paradise lost” that literally crushed the city with delinquency records and stats, saying bottom line that the criminals were wining and the law abiding citizen was losing this battle for Miami.

Cocaine Cowboys posters

New “enforcers” like Jorge Ayala, would make a name of their own by killing for a pay by one of the cartel families; he confessed involvement in 29 murders and suspected of another 12 during the cocaine wars. He started as a delivery boy passing cocaine for $1,000 a day. One faithful day he would meet the most important profile in the industry: Griselda Blanco.

Ayala happened to spoil a murder Griselda requested, so she met Ayala, explained to him the harm he have caused to her and that she expected from him to kill two brother she had targeted, and with this, she would call it even. Ayala was told that he had just had a chat with the godmother, and if he wouldn’t deliver, she would put a hit on him.

The main real character behind The Cocaine Cowboys was (and is?) Griselda Blanco. She was called the “madrina” or godmother. Born in Colombia at a single mother family, Griselda was frequently beated by her mother, who had to prostitute herself for a living. It was told that Griselda at her teenage years was the mastermind of the kidnapping of a wealthy family kid at Medellin and ultimately, after the negation of paying a ransom, she would murder the kid. A certain night, Griselda was so badly beaten than, bleeding and naked, left her house to never return. It was then than she will meet her first husband, and lately her second, with whom she will have three kids. She moved to New York and from there to Miami where she was known to police as a multikilo dealer and a serious threat to US. Griselda had no fear and was feared by all, and she liked it that way, she suffered so much during her childhood that she could share some of this with others.

Cocaine arriving by sea

She had to prove herself to the other male latino drug lords and show them she was the meanest you can get. She collected wealth around her. She had 3 older sons: Dixon, Uber and Osvaldo. Her last son was named Michael Corleone.
Griselda’s crew was responsible for the first Miami bloody strike related to the cocaine industry at the liquor store at the mall in ‘79. Right there she started the cocaine wars and homicides multiplied by the numbers, she killed many colombians and cubans, becoming responsible for the majority of homicides in South Florida during 1979, 1980 and 1981.

There was always a reason for her to put a hit on someone and have him hit the ground. For this she employed a wide crew of hitmen: Chucho Castro, Jaime Bravo,Oscar Bravo, Diego Escobar, Mantec, Cubamba, Velazquez, Hugo, Melanyo, Toto, Carlos Venegas,Diego Sepulveda, Paco Sepulveda,etc,…

One day Osvaldo, one of Griselda’s son, wanted to spend the night at Chucho’s house, the later would agree to it and had a small quarrel. Osvaldo told her mother and Chucho had his days numbered from then on. She assigned Chuchos murder to Jorge Ayala. Ready to kill Chucho, Jorge, together with a colleague, rampaged on the road into Chuchos runing car and pulled their trigger of the M-16s that spitted rounds into Chuchos car, with the bad luck, of deadly injuring his son,who, to all’s surprise, he was as well travelling in his father’s car. From this day on, kids were an accepted toll in the cocaine war in Florida.

Client delaying on pay day - Before

After

Chucho promised to retaliate and kill Jorge Ayala, but Jorge couldn’t care less. Jorge was the chief enforcer of Griselda, he controlled her team and during a period of years he was exclusively the only person who was making the killings.
Alfredo Lorenzo was one of Griselda’s customers, and he promised to Jorge that he will collect the money, in exchange of the 5 cocaine kilos he got from Jorge, in 2 weeks time. Griselda didn’t accepted any delays in her business and after the time that was agreed, she wouldn’t be interested in the money back to her anymore, she will take know your life, full stop.

As Jon Roberts (Coke trafficker of those days) put it: “The Italians, if you delay on payment day, they would try to figure out how to get their money back…the Colombians they act first and they think”.

CENTAC in action

Jorge Ayala says “this is not about the money, if someone rapes me of I will kill him”. He, Oscar and Miguel paid a visit to Alfredo’s house. After Alfredo opened the door Ayala placed a gun in his mouth and told him to be quiet. Alfredo’s wife together with their 3 sons were at the house aged 6, 4 and the baby son. Jorge confessed, being interviewed at the prison, that he was given orders to waste them all and that he thought only to do Alfredo, then, suddenly, while Jorge was talking with Alfredo’s wife, two shots where heard from one of the rooms: Miguel has shot Alfredo. Jorge approaches Miguel and while talking another spit of bullet were heard from an Uzi: Oscar shot 15 rounds in the wife’s body, allegedly while this tried to chop him. The wife was still dead alive with all the metal in her and Jorge took the silencer pistol and put her out of her misery with 2 rounds in the back of her head. Miguel was heading towards the children’s room for Griselda had promised him a bonus for the kids, when Jorge dissuaded him and they left the house.

Jorge’s next mission would be to kill all the crew of Paco Mejilla, who allegedly stole from Griselda, a full cargo of cocaine destined for Miami and finally reached New York. Jorge did 11 people. In less than 24 hours. He was supposed to have wasted a 12ve person,but he left him go.
Griselda was creating more and more enemies by the hours.

Griselda Blando - la madrina

Pablo Mejilla, Paco’s father, was in Miami, at the Mall of the Americas, when seven gunman fired at him and killed him. Papo, Pablo’s son was in the car waiting for him and he was now also a target, that this time Jorge will try to eliminate with the help of 200 sticks of dynamite. The explosives tore the roof, all the neighbors car windows were blasted, but, once again,Jorge missed: … the house was empty.

Two weeks later, Jorge’s team found out that Paco Mejilla was to arrive to Miami airport. They decided to kill him at the airport with a bayonet inside the airport in return, Jorge would get half million dollars. Jorge rejected for this was a suicide mission, for the whole building was filled with cops (he explained). Griselda then decided that Miguelito would do it.  Miguelito was the kind of person that would go on a mission to kill the president if the money was right.

As Paco Mejilla arrived, Miguelito approached him form behind and started to stab him with the bayonet 6 or 7 times, with no by standards reacting, Miguel dropped it and started to run. In moments the police had him surrounded and took him into custody.

Paco survived the stabbing, and that was the end of Mejilla-Griselda war.
A special police group was formed, the CENTAC, to fight cocaine violence while Reagan had just been elected. The president decided to flood the city streets with federal agents, customs officers, coast guards, policemen and not to save in resources.
Homestead military airport was at the service of fighting clandestine vessels and aircraft who tried to smuggler narcotics into Florida.

This represented the beginning of the end of the cocaine cowboys era. Murders decreased in 50% and Griselda was thinking on moving the whole thing to California. And she did, in 1984, she left Miami and started a new at California.In order to get the drugs, Griselda started to make friends with Marta Ochoa, a member of the Ochoa’s family. Her plan was to,after having requested drugs from Marta, kill her,so Griselda could accuse her of having taking her money. And so she did, and by that she put a price on her own head.

Cocaine Cowboys Poster

In the meantime, Max, a part of the local cocaine industry, felt that he had some heat, and next thing he sees is 40 guns were pointed in his head, that was the last time he was spotted. Jon Roberts had millions of dollars buried in his lawn, and after the Feds got Max, Jon wants to hide the greens, but nobody paid a visit to Jon.

On September the 28th, 1986, Jon, awaken, went to the house where they had the radio transmitter and the landing pad and saw one of their planes loaded with dope, landed in the field and though everything went on wheels as usual, and all of a sudden, from all directions, the Feds stormed, Jon thought he was back in Nam for a moment.

Mike and his plane

Later the agents would acknowledge that they didn’t expected to find also Jon in there and his made the job easier for them, to catch all the fish at one spot. But Micky won´t be an easy catch: he headed the swamp after he blowed one of the planes in flames.
Max, after being caught, rolled on all of his ex colleagues and started collaborating with the authorities. Without Max, the Feds would have never closed the case. The Feds and he DEA were not aware of anything during the 5 years of the gang trafficking with cocaine: they had no clue where the landing field was, or which high tech transmitters they were using, …

DEA storming

All the confiscating properties of the whole gang summed around 130 millions dollars.
Law enforcement dismantled the organization and as their members were being held in custody and prosecuted, all the businesses, night clubs that they frequented started to drying up, car dealerships as well, jewelry shops, real state values, etc,…Cocaine money actually built half the city of Miami.

"We are in the jailhouse now"

Miami was in the mouth of everybody those day, at Time magazine, “Paradise Lost”, and there were as well two movies that really placed Miami on the center: “Scarface” of Al Pacino and ¨Miami Vice¨ tv series, both movies focused totally on the drug industry that flourished in Miami.

Miami Vice

Scarface

Mike and Jon spent a decade in jail. Jon would return to Florida on 2000, as a condition for his parole and Mike was released in 1999, after he was a fugitive for 6 years and served 7 at jail.
Rafa Cardona Salazar got killed in Medellin on 1987.
Max entered after his arrest in 85, the Federal Witness Protection Program: to this day he remains hiding. He reportedly has a $3 million on his head.
Rivi avoided the death row by testifying against his own boss, Griselda Blanco, and plead guilty on three murders and gave details on another 14 murders by Griselda´s organization.

Griselda Blanco on the papers

So Griselda was in custody waiting for trial, when Rivi was involved in a phone sex scandal with secretaries at the State Attorney´s Office, that after humiliated, the state dropped Rivi as a witness against Griselda and offered her a plea bargain.

Griselda made a lot of enemies during this time, that resulted in the assassination of Uber and Osvaldo, her two sons, in Colombia. Griselda was released from jail on June 2004. The very same day she saw the outside world again, Rivi was stabbed in a Miami prison, he survived…coincidence?

Griselda was deported to Colombia…

“…3 guys will slide into your cell, wrap your ass into that blanket, and I don’t care how tough you think you are or how strong you might be, they are gonna kick your ass over the side of that bed and do bounty of your asshole by sticking a dick in it. So what do you do? I am gonna give you five options you can take: One, you go to the cop, you tell the officer three guys just ripped me off and you come back with the cop and say: that white guy, that black guy, that black guy…these three guys are going to the hole for 30-60 days and then the’ll be back in population, but the administration won’t let you into population for one of these guys associates will cut your ass from A to Z, so they gotta do something to protect you. Right up there on floor 2, there is a place called P.C., Protected Custody, we call it punk city, and there is were you are going to be all your time, and when you are in PC, you are locked 23 of the 24 hrs a day, you got 1 hr for exercise, and that’s it.But I can see a lot of tough guys right here, and when you are ripped off, the first thing you wanna do is to get even and after you cut one of them and you kill him, you are getting life in prison. Number three is deciding to shut up and keeping that to yourself, but these 3 guys have associates and these will also want to rip you off, and the associates of these associates also. Number four is the one that you all are gonna take, in the 10 years I’ve been here, I’ve seen it a thousand times: you are gonna walk around this joint or any joint you may be in, and you’re gonna find the guys that is real quite nobody bothers him and he don’t bothers nobody, he’s got all the respect in the world, you are gonna approach this guy and say hey my man, I got a very serious problem, Can you help me?

And after you …he is gonna tell you yeah, and you’ll see that five minutes after he said yeah,  after he said yeah, like somebody got in the P.A. system and told 1300 wild maniacs not to bother you. And now you’re telling you something, hey, this guy was alright, he got all this pressure off from you, and now he only did nothing, the only thing this guy did was to tell the whole population that you are his property, you are his kid, and when you become somebody’s kid in one of these joints, there are some things you will do: you gotta get up in the morning and get his coffee, you gotta clean his cell, you are gonna wash his drawers and sucks, and if he want some head, you are gonna give it to him, and if he wanna fuck you in your ass, you’ll let him, and if he wanna sell you to another prisoner, he’ll do that too…and he is here over a week, and became somebody’s kid, and did it for over a year,and the pressure of day to day living in one of these stinking joints crushed in it, makes him get into his cell, took his sheet and one around the pipe and another around his dumb mother fucker neck and he hangs himself, so now he is even, he ain’t gotta do that life beat, he ain’t gotta deal with this police and he ain’t gotta put up with his pimp…”

Scared Straight is a documentary from the seventies directed by A. Shapiro and narrated by Peter Falk.
This documentary takes place in the Rahway, New Jersey’s maximum security prison, a well known penitentiary establishment due to its dome on top of the building, visible from many places around.

The producers of Scared Straight gathered several youngsters from bad neighborhoods of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and took them to pay a visit to the well known prison. The purpose of the visit was to sit the juvenile delinquents in front of some of the most dangerous inmates and try to straighten them so they won’t end up in a cell block.

The youngsters were interviewed right before their visit to the penitentiary in order to tell a thing or two about themselves . They would introduced themselves and explain about their past felonies and what their expectations and plans for the future were. All of the teenagers seemed very amused with breaking the law and getting on with it, were self secure and had low expectations from the future.

The inmates to be, at the time they were conducted into the prison’s strolls and were placed for several seconds inside of a real cell, after they had been eyed raped and verbally molested (“gimme that one over there, I wanna do that one real nasty”) by the real inmates. Now you could tell they were not that comfortable with it, but this was just the beginning of their experience at Rahway.

The real lesson came when the young offenders were placed in a hall filled with high risk, high profile crime offenders: a drug dealer from Westchester County by the name of Mikie C., an arsonist and bomb builder from Bridgeport (Jon Shipiro), a gang member from Jersey City (Jerome Watts) and car thief from the Bronx (Jesus Rodriguez), among others, and life and death were the price they would pay for it. These inmates were the “lifers”, a group of hard core delinquents who made themselves into a program which goal was to deter potentially high risk youngsters to become themselves.

Once in the hall, the lifers would tell their horrific stories and their insides about hell in prison, waving their hands and shouting in order to scare the hell out of the kids, but this was nothing but the real thing, this was not acting, that was the scary part of it, these lifers were telling truths one again the other, no theater. The would explain about their stupid decisions who took them to dead roads and ultimately into the prison they are in, the real crime and hatred school were you don’t want to step. The real punishment are not the walls, the wardens or the conditions, the real hell is: the other humans, filled with depression, anger, hatred and in such high levels, that they need to share it with you, their victim.

After the visit the kids were really scared and were again asked about making that turn in life 180 degrees from that jail: all of them acknowledged to do so so they don’t have to see neither that dreaded place again nor their grotesque tenants.

At the second part of the documentary, after 20 years of lapse, again the cameras visit the once youngster in order to check on their whereabouts, whether the effect of the program was still vivid in their minds and more importantly, whether the program has preventing them from breaking the law. The results were still quite amazing: most of the youngsters then had no families of their own, were law abiding citizens and still kept a solid residue of the first part of the shooting. And I said most, for some were to become long term prison visitors and even find there his old “lifer”. Both teacher and student had failed.

This doc was released in 1978 uncensored, causing a big impact in viewers, the academy (this piece got its ward from the academy in 1979 for best documentary and 1 Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement – Informational Program to the film editor, Bob Niemack and another one for Outstanding Informational Program to the producer A. Shapiro) and even the law enforcement community, for many states introduced the scared straight program to many other high risk areas.

Scared Straight was only one of the many juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency and it was hardly criticized by A. Petrosino by gathering data in his study to prove that Scared Straight’s effects on youngsters were just the opposite of what it intended to be: it was in fact attracting the teenagers to commit more crimes.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2687405

I tried to recollect any Harvey Keitel’s movie where he didn’t act in a fantastic fashion. This film is no exception. In this movie, Harvey plays a corrupted lieutenant of the NYC Police Department. The character is so destroyed inside that killing himself a little more wont take him lower from where he stands now. Crack, heroine and cocaine, alcohol and pills are in the daily menu  of this cop, for which the boundaries between legal and not, moral and not, law enforcement officers and criminals, these boundaries are almost nonexistent, by osmosis.

His bookmaker pursues him in order to be paid for the cops debt, his co workers don’t seem to really care about him and the ones that really show him respect and caress are the criminal and junkies. He lives in a world of being a cop only for the sub world of simple street criminals, while he behaves exactly like one of them.
He got himself so deep into trouble with black market betting that he knows the bullet with his name on it has already left the smoking barrel.

The punch line arrives when he actually finds out the moment crime perpetrators and handcuff them and takes them to where all of us expects him to, the police station, so he can get a special reward of 50 k that could partially help him to cover his debt, but instead of it, and as a kind of redemption quest, he does the only good deed in the picture, and offers a new life to the crime rapists, and put them into a bus to somewhere where they can start from scratch. The end is foreseeable as it was supposed to end in the real life.

http://www.mininova.org/get/1574536

Though the setting Steve’s Buscemi (also acting in the movie) chose for Animal Factory is Holmesburg Prison, this location depicts the well known Californian prison San Quentin. This movie is an adaptation of Edward Bunker’s novel on life in San Quentin, the same actor who played Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs.

A young suburban fish that goes by the name of Ron Decker (Edward Furlong), has just been caught and judged for some drugs charges. As his entrance in the animal factory penitentiary, he will have to choose, as any other movie would describe it, between putting someone down or being someone’s bitch, for he is just a young good looking 21 old youngster from a good neighborhood, son of a wealthy businessman.

Fortunately for Ron, he gets acquaintance with almost the owner of the place, Earl Copen (Willem Dafoe), a log term inmate who almost rules the penitentiary. For whatever reason, Earl will choose to take the boy under him and protect him against the psycho rapers always waiting for a chance to get hard on the kid. This is usually a side, most of the prison movies won’t show as it is in this film, the sensitivity, altruist feelings that father figure Earl will display for Ron, with nothing in exchange.

Earl’s inner circle is formed by almost unrecognizable Mickie Rourke playing the place’s queen, hill-billy played by Jake La Botz, Vito (Danny Trejo) and  In one of the hot moments of the picture, Ron would be attacked by a sex-starved gorilla (Tom Arnold) and the two plan to retaliate on the attacker, before the last makes his move first. The two would attack the violent inmate but wont kill him. After this, the boy will get another 5 years in the joint, for he is still consider a danger to society. Good critics for this movie at he Sundance Film Festival of the same year.

http://www.mininova.org/get/2505547

Based on the real story of Ted Bundy, the first modern serial killer who was active during the seventies in the US. Though the actual number of victims that met his rage is still unknown, it is  estimated that they range from 35 to 100.

He used to strangle his victims after bludgeoning them, also raping and practicing necrophilia with them.

It’s amazing how casual the guy seemed and how easy it was for him to accomplish what he had set out for himself, i.e – the commission of murders. The movie is not as bloody as expected though and the results are already historically known to all – he got the chair, a special, electrifying one, which made him feel 3000 volts run through his spine. Score: 5.5

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2435600

On the same year, and right after finishing “The Wrestler”, Mickey Rourke went and did this action movie. Here he plays a native American hitman, working for the local mafia. Under strange circumstances, he associates with a troublemaker punk who will get him several degrees deeper into trouble, hunting down a couple who is left behind, after seeing their faces. With the beautiful Rosario Dawson and Diane Lane.

Score: 5.5

No known actors,but a nice story, based on the Swedish novel called “Den Osynlige” by Mats Wahl. The set is an average high school in the states, the storyline includes a wealthy “golden boy” from a respected single-mother family, a low-class troublemaker girl, and the commission of a crime that went wrong – from the robbery of a jewelry shop, to murder. The bad-ass girl, Annie (Margarita Levieva), was out to steal a fancy car with her boyfriend at night, when she suddenly felt like destroying a street shop window, and taking some fancy necklaces that she will later hide in her school locker. Cops track her trail and find these necklaces as well as some other stolen goods, thanks to an anonymous call made by a snitch, to the police station. Annie thinks she knows who the “snitch” is : golden boy Nick. So the bad-ass slums girl, gathers some of her bullies, captures Nick and prepares to teach him a lesson that he won’t forget: they beat him up badly until he faints, and they leave him for dead, with no apparent heartbeat. For some reason, Nick leaves his body and finds out that he can continue to witness what goes on with his mom, friends and the killers, until he understands he is still alive, and tries to drive Annie to the place where they had hidden his body. Annie, aiming a gun to her ex-boyfriend, finds out that he had relocated the body, catches some of the fire herself, but eventually brings the police to the place of the body, which rushes Nick to the hospital, where they try to save his life. Eventually, Annie makes it to Nick’s deathbed, she watches him recover and fulfills her mission, to save the life that she had taken. Score: 4.5

Flawless, aside from having Michael Caine and Demi Moore star in it, depicts, among others, a creative and intelligent plot, that tells of the diamond business, and the people behind it. Demi Moore is a young and successful executive, with 15 years of experience in selling diamonds at the London Diamond Corporation. Just when Moore’s character is supposed to be promoted, as the most qualified person to fill in the vacant position – her chauvinistic boss decides to prefer someone else, making her feel defeated and betrayed. The company avid janitor (Mr. Hobbs) profits from this course of events, as Moore, a senior manager, gets involved in his master plan to rob the company vault from its contents – several tons of diamonds. The janitor had done his homework and knows who is watching, when, and how as well as when the cameras are not recording. But there is one thing that he is missing, and that is secret code that allows to open the vault – this is where Laura (Moore) steps in. At the beginning, Laura hesitates and thinks the whole thing over and over. However, at a company party, when the company is close to closing a huge deal with the Russian diamond society – she cautiously makes it into her boss’s security case and find out the company’s vault code. After the deed is done, Laura the code on to Hobbs, and both agree to rob only a couple of million pounds worth of diamonds for the both of them. Mr. Hobbs then goes into the vault and just when things seemed to have worked as planned, Laura is called into the vault by the security officer and discovers that the only thing left there are the walls, i.e. – that the janitor has cleaned the whole place out. The question remains, how he has done it, an old man carrying several tons of stones alone? Score: 5

Don’t you dare and trespass the invisible boundary (Alameda Blv.) between the good and bad neighborhoods in south LA or you would get yourself in gang land, where you will find people who had nothing better to hope for than to die for their family gang: this is the zone of the crips and the bloods, two rival African American gangs who distinguish themselves by the blue bandana (crips) and the red one. This hot area in LA was were 92 riots started, after Rodney King got beaten. Most of this gang members come from single mother houses, most of which are drug abusers and traffickers, with no role model to follow and find in the gangs a secure place of belonging and identity to survive in the ghetto.

Some of these youngsters have never seen the Pacific ocean even though they live 10 min. from the sea, for if they are caught in enemy territory or in white neighborhoods, they will have to pay the price. Most of the males in this deprived areas are either in jail doing time or under 6 feet.

And then, right after they are out of the pen, their gangs will welcome them open armed and take them back into the crime circle of the streets where the siren plays its tune night and day and the police chopper pays its nightly visits.

anger and hatred are not scarce by products of the hoods of L.A. and right by the side of these no man land, the products we have ben served time and again by the movies, the nice Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, China Town, the beach,…

Gang  members have to show no humanity whatsoever or this can be understood as weakness. Only brutal force is to be released, animal instincts if you want to eat tomorrow: kill or get killed. For this you will have to get feared, your deeds will be your visit card for the others to “digg” you have to watch out and don’t mess with me.

Gang members go for the big automatic weapons, a low caliber short in rounds pistol wont be enough for your next encounter where a rain of bullets can fly upon you. Some will carry full arsenals for there is always the time and place to let them smoke and do the talking, there is always who to protect, upon whom retaliate, upon whom to revenge;

If there is an educational and informative documentary work, Zeitgeist is its name. A deep research into our current monetary system based on enslave, scarce and above all profit for the benefit of CORPORATIONS. Names like Exxon, Texaco, WalMart, Merrill Lynch, CityGroupInc, Morgan Stanley, CNN, CBS, FOX, MacDonalds, AT&T, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc,… All  these nice entities are the real owners of our global world and won’t think twice to send their economic hitmen and try to brive heads of state in order to let them into his country and exploit his resources.  Once the specific foreign leader bribed, the companies get into the country, exploit its resources by a small fraction paid of the real cost of it. Thus, the profit is all for the corporations and the targeted country is left as before but this time with no natural resources and a bunch of corrupted new rich men leaders.

If the leaders refuse to be bribed… accidents happen, CIA fashion. If the CIA cannot do it, the Army will, and then you will find that what it was supposed to protect and defend its citizens is now fighting for corporation interests instead of values. Just to exemplify this: Before 1980’s Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium, after the US/CIA backed Mujahideen won the Soviet/Afghan war, by 1986 they were producing 4-% of the world’ heroin supply. By 1999, they were producing 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened, the Taliban came to power and by 000 they had destroyed most of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3000+ tons to 185, a 94% reduction. . On Sept. 9th 2001, the full Afghan invasion plans were on G. Bush’s desk. . Today, after the US invasion, US controlled Afghanistan provides 90% of the world’s demand breaking records nearly every other year*.

These same corporations are the ones that killed the electric car, which by the way, it is a known solution since the beginning of last century just because it doesn’t go on petrol, thus we have no profit there, so they banned the use of the batteries (that are also under their control) in these cars. These are the people that wont blink while deforesting the amazons or as Bayer, who wouldn’t have remorse after selling in Europa what was previously banned in the US, a medicine that had been proved cause of aids in many patients. This people aren’t neither interested in well being and environment, but in proliferating, keeping people watching American gladiator and made them think that technology put them on the unemployment.

And here is where it comes www.thevenusproject.com: a new way of thinking and acting for today’s generation. On an era where technology success surrounding us in our daily chores there is no excuse to make the change the corrupt system where we think our politicians will take care of us in this democracy and push forward our interests. Reality is much different: those leader have pending bills with those people that actually placed them on the top, yes, you guessed right again, the corporations, those entities that pay for Obama’s election campaign and right after he won, will pay a visit to his office. And this is how the current system works.

This same corporations control the media, so they can keep you with their news, right where they want you to think. And here is the way we can improve our situation in order to make things change: do not support this corporations by buying their news, by consuming their products, electricity or water, try to be as much self dependent as possible, for in this materialist world we all know what happens when an article/idea is not consumed: they stop producing/exploiting it, it dies and they will have to come up with something the people wants. That is what happened when they started boycotting the city bus companies in southern US for the where were part of the racist system against African Americans. And what are the options? As mentioned, planet friendly technology together with environment protecting energies like tides, helical, waves, solar and thermo, all of them long knocking on our doors.

I found this piece of investigation not only a must-see, but a must follow. There are some grey areas where I may object, such as simplifying all religions and make one from all of them, saying that we are all the same. Score: 9

* Source: Washington Post, “Afghanistan Opium Crop sets record” and UNODC report “The Opium economy in Afghanistan”