The Last Kilo, Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America
By TJ English
William Morrow Publishers, 2024
512pp
Augusto Guillermo “Willy” Falcon, in Fidel Castro’s estimation, was a gusano (worm) who deserted his homeland of Cuba and the socialist revolution there to pursue an uncertain future in the “enemy empire” of the United States.
That judgement may seem harsh, given that Willy had little choice in leaving Cuba because his parents took him to Miami when he was only 11 years old. But Castro knew that from little eggs big chickens grow. Certainly, Willy Falcon grew up to become one of the biggest roosters strutting around his own bloody barnyard.
With his comrade-in-crime Salvador “Sal” Magluta and a choice bunch of “allies” including murderous psycho-thugs like Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega and many corrupted cops and politicians, Falcon grew his Florida-based gang Los Muchachos (The Boys) into a major international drug-smuggling operation netting profits in the billions.
Masking their vicious antisocial greed behind a façade of political righteousness, via the CIA-sanctioned “anti-communist” reactionary cause, these murderous pusher-men got rich and infamous. They were the inspiration for romanticised entertainments like Scarface and Miami Vice, and were portrayed in a shoddy but widely-viewed TV documentary series called Cocaine Cowboys. But those mythical takes on the story were as untrue as Al Pacino’s ludicrous “Cuban” accent.
In this wickedly well-written and most readable true-crime narrative, The Last Kilo, veteran journalist and best-selling author TJ English gives us the far truer and more complete version of this epic gangster version of an “American Dream” capitalistic success-tale. It’s an epic but also a tragedy, as the success of Falcon and his pals is time-limited and they all eventually end up in prison or, as in the case of Falcon’s pathetic wife, in an early grave. And, of course, there are the tragic victims of Falcon’s successful marketing of his “product” — addicted, compromised, ultimately destroyed.
Make no mistake. Falcon and Magluta and their colleagues are pigs. Immoral, ruthless, greedy swine who ran around in fancy speedboats and fast-cars enjoying nightclubs, prostitutes and celebrity status while their thousands of victims suffered and died. That is the reality, and English does not hide it. Nor does he preach about it. He simply gives us the actual story. And one hell of a fascinating, dirty tale it is.
To this reader’s amazement, English succeeds in humanising these inhumanly selfish brutes, Falcon and Magluta, and their nefarious crew. He’s a master storyteller who has made it his life's work to get inside the minds of his subjects, (most of whom are creeps you would not want to meet in a dark alley or in a dank jail cell). English actually helps us understand how someone like Falcon could self-deceive and “con” himself into thinking he deserved wealth, pleasure and fame, that he had earned it all! (Not unlike a certain self-delusional conman-politician we all now know of.)
As English recounts in his introduction and epilogue to this book, Falcon, now a lonely old man hiding anonymously in some Latin American country after his eventual release from prison, approached English via intermediaries with a request to have his life story written, knowing that English had done fine work writing about “Whitey” Bulger and many other gangsters and was trusted as a non-judgemental straight-shooter.
In researching the intricate details of this story, English traveled from his NYC and Albuquerque home-bases to Columbia and other far-off places, including to clandestine meetings with Falcon himself. As always in his thorough research, English has displayed remarkable courage and diligence.
We don’t know if Falcon likes this book. I don’t care of he does, because the only thing he should feel about his misspent life is shame, not pride. However, The Last Kilo is an important and in many ways shocking narrative of how in the US immoral, reactionary men can do very evil “work” and yet gain money, power and diabolical “glory”.
It is well worth reading in this time when, as they say, “the scum is rising”, and it is the enabling system itself that is primarily to blame.