by CabriniGreen » Fri Mar 13, 2020 3:56 am
Amershire_Ed wrote: ↑Sun Mar 08, 2020 3:41 pm
What’s funny is one of the main characters from Cocaine Cowboys—Jon Roberts (real name Jon Riccobono) was related to Joseph Riccobono, and also had other family members that were connected with the Gambinos.
The Medellin Cartel wanted to take out Barry Seal, so they tried to get Roberts to bring in some mob guys from NY to do the hit. But given the fact that Seal was under constant police protection, it would’ve been a suicide mission, and Roberts told the Cartel that “the spaghetti boys” wouldn’t be able to do the hit. So the Cartel had to send their own guys up to do the hit, and of course they got caught.
The coke wave just happened so fast it was almost like it was too big for the mob to be able to get their arms around it. It was literally an explosion.
The United States was the only developed nation that saw a reduction in cocaine use in the 21st century, but the Feds are worried it’s about to go back up. The Colombians are producing and shipping up more coke than they ever have before.
“THE COLOMBIANS also couldn’t stop. Their addiction wasn’t psychological. It was economic. The more successful we were in smuggling, the less money they made per kilo. That was the twist of it. We flooded the market with so much cocaine that by 1983 the wholesale price of a kilo kept dropping. It had gone from $50,000 in the late 1970s to as low as $6,000 a kilo at one point. That meant that to make the same amount of money in 1983 as they did in 1978, the Colombians had to move almost ten times as much coke.
( It's easy to see, at this point, that a distributor with a decent hold on the street, would actually have leverage here)
By combining the efforts of Mickey, Barry Seal, Roger, and the occasional guys I had running coke in boats that came in off the Cartel’s fishing trawlers, I had months where I moved ten thousand kilos. Some months it went down to a trickle, but we always got something through.
The Cartel made life more difficult for itself in some ways by their freewheeling way of distributing coke. They’d sell to anybody. They had their own distributors around the country, and they’d take on anybody else. My distributors—Bernie in San Francisco, Ron Tobachnik in Chicago, my rednecks in Delray, my uncle Jerry Chilli on Miami Beach, Albert and Bobby Erra in Miami as well as people in L.A.—were all together moving a thousand kilos a month just for me. I’d also cut one-off deals where a guy I knew would take five hundred or a thousand kilos in one bump. Now and then, I used to do this with John Gotti in New York and other wiseguys.
[quote=Amershire_Ed post_id=141908 time=1583707280 user_id=6179]
What’s funny is one of the main characters from Cocaine Cowboys—Jon Roberts (real name Jon Riccobono) was related to Joseph Riccobono, and also had other family members that were connected with the Gambinos.
The Medellin Cartel wanted to take out Barry Seal, so they tried to get Roberts to bring in some mob guys from NY to do the hit. But given the fact that Seal was under constant police protection, it would’ve been a suicide mission, and Roberts told the Cartel that “the spaghetti boys” wouldn’t be able to do the hit. So the Cartel had to send their own guys up to do the hit, and of course they got caught.
The coke wave just happened so fast it was almost like it was too big for the mob to be able to get their arms around it. It was literally an explosion.
The United States was the only developed nation that saw a reduction in cocaine use in the 21st century, but the Feds are worried it’s about to go back up. The Colombians are producing and shipping up more coke than they ever have before.
[/quote]
“THE COLOMBIANS also couldn’t stop. Their addiction wasn’t psychological. It was economic. The more successful we were in smuggling, the less money they made per kilo. That was the twist of it. We flooded the market with so much cocaine that by 1983 the wholesale price of a kilo kept dropping. It had gone from $50,000 in the late 1970s to as low as $6,000 a kilo at one point. That meant that to make the same amount of money in 1983 as they did in 1978, the Colombians had to move almost ten times as much coke.
( It's easy to see, at this point, that a distributor with a decent hold on the street, would actually have leverage here)
By combining the efforts of Mickey, Barry Seal, Roger, and the occasional guys I had running coke in boats that came in off the Cartel’s fishing trawlers, I had months where I moved ten thousand kilos. Some months it went down to a trickle, but we always got something through.
The Cartel made life more difficult for itself in some ways by their freewheeling way of distributing coke. They’d sell to anybody. They had their own distributors around the country, and they’d take on anybody else. My distributors—Bernie in San Francisco, Ron Tobachnik in Chicago, my rednecks in Delray, my uncle Jerry Chilli on Miami Beach, Albert and Bobby Erra in Miami as well as people in L.A.—were all together moving a thousand kilos a month just for me. I’d also cut one-off deals where a guy I knew would take five hundred or a thousand kilos in one bump. Now and then, I used to do this with John Gotti in New York and other wiseguys.