Original subtitles

- During the cocaine cowboy era,

Miami was plagued with crime.

There was homicides after homicides all day long.

- Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon

ran the largest drug trafficking organization

in the history of South Florida.

- In the Latin community,

they were very famous for their speedboat racing

and everybody knew they were the hub

for cocaine trafficking in Miami.

- The DEA conducted a massive drug trafficking investigation

of Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon.

Everybody is expecting for them to be convicted at the trial,

but they were acquitted on all counts.

- Respects the system and respects that

a jury found us not guilty.

- The prosecutor suspects that there was some jury tampering.

Government witnesses had been murdered.

- Everybody talked about it.

Those are Willie and Sal's peoples getting killed

from his organization.

These are drug hits.

- This really was an attack on the whole justice system.

- We had to shut him down

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Hey! - Hey, how are you?

- How are you? Thanks for coming in.

- Raquel "Rocky" Cicini was a Hialeah PD homicide detective

before joining the FBI's Miami field office,

where she specialized in public corruption

and crisis negotiation.

- Hi there. Nice to meet you. - Good to see you.

- Yeah. - Nice to meet you as well.

- Mario Tariche is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

He investigated drug trafficking,

public corruption, money laundering, and war crimes.

- So you both worked on one of Miami's most famous cases.

How did you get involved?

- Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked organized crime, terrorism,

drug trafficking, and money laundering.

- My first day in the Miami office,

our supervisor, Mike Clemens, calls me into the office

and asks, would you be interested

in being the lead case agent on the Falcon and Magluta case?

The Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon

drug organization was one of the largest

drug trafficking organizations

probably in the history of South Florida.

Rocky, growing up in Miami, I'm sure had heard of,

uh, Los Muchachos, you know.

- The Boys. - The Boys.

- The Boys.

- Which was their nickname in the community.

- They're Cuban. They went to Miami High.

In the Latin community,

they were very famous for their speedboat racing.

- Seahawk. Sal Magluta, the driver.

- And they had million-dollar boats.

How could these guys afford these boats?

And everybody knew that they were the hub

for cocaine trafficking in Miami.

Cocaine was the drug of the '80s.

During the cocaine cowboy era,

Miami was plagued with crime.

There was homicides after homicides,

drug killings all day long.

- In the late '80s,

there was a massive drug trafficking investigation

of Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon

conducted by the DEA.

Conservative estimates were that

from the late '70s and into the early '90s,

the organization had trafficked more than 78 tons of cocaine

into South Florida and over $2 billion in sales of cocaine.

The DEA executed arrest and search warrants

at a mansion in Fort Lauderdale

for Willie Falcon and then a mansion on La Gorce Island

where Sal Magluta was living.

During the search of the mansion on La Gorce Island,

they find a treasure trove of evidence.

Ledger books, cocaine, cash.

They found fraudulent passports

and driver's licenses that Sal Magluta had.

At Willie's house,

they find that he has a gun in the house

and the gun has the serial number scratched out.

And so they end up getting arrested,

both Magluta and Falcon, in 1991 for drug trafficking.

So they actually don't go to trial until 1995.

Everybody's expecting for them to be convicted at the trial,

but to the shock of everybody in the community,

they were acquitted on all counts.

- Which is unbelievable. They--

- Unbelievable. - There's no way.

- Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta

have been acquitted on drug smuggling charges,

but that doesn't mean

the federal government is giving up.

- Justice system, respects the system,

and respects that a jury found us not guilty.

We went to trial.

We did it the way this country

and this Constitution was meant.

- After the acquittal, Willie Falcon is immediately

charged with a weapons violation.

He's convicted and he gets a nine-year sentence

for having that illegal firearm.

Sal is charged with the possession

of fraudulent passports,

but that's not enough to hold him on bond,

so he's released,

and the U.S. attorney's office is really taken aback.

It was a devastating defeat,

so they want the FBI to investigate this case.

We started to assemble a team of agents

in breaking up the case.

Mike Clemens said to me, well, we have a new agent,

and she's going to be joining the team.

And as you can imagine, initially,

I'm like, oh, a new agent?

That's probably not going to work.

Rocky turned out to be an invaluable member of the team,

but I was reluctant in the beginning.

I didn't know that, though.

- The prosecutors suspect that there was some jury tampering,

because there's absolutely no way

that 12 jurors are going to agree on a not guilty verdict.

In addition to the jury tampering,

leading up to the trial,

government witnesses had been murdered.

- The homicides happened between 1989 to 1993,

and it seemed to happen in conjunction to hearings.

- And then there was a massive money laundering operation

run by the organization

and we suspect that they were using all of this drug money

to pay for lawyers and obstruct the case.

And we came up with the code name Operation RECOIL,

which stood for Racketeering, Executions, Corruption,

Obstruction of Justice, Intimidation of witnesses,

and Laundering of drug money.

- So where did you start?

- The first part of the investigation

was the homicides and attempted homicides

of the government witnesses.

Rocky was in charge of that part of the case.

- The first homicide was the attorney, Juan Acosta.

He was supposed to testify before the grand jury

about all these offshore accounts

and a hit team came into his office and killed him.

And then they learned that Tony Posada

was going to be cooperating with the government.

- Right, right. - He was a drug trafficker.

He was a drug trafficker.

He worked for Willie and Sal

and they had put a car bomb in his vehicle.

It went off, but nobody got hurt in that.

- One of the other witnesses, Lazaro Cruz,

he saw the hit team as he was coming out of his house,

so he ran into his house and they shot up his door.

And then one of the other witnesses, Juan Barroso,

he was in the car, actually, with his son.

He went to get gas and as he was leaving the gas station,

they had done something to the tire of his car.

And he pulled over and as they came by to shoot him,

he slid under the car and Barroso and his son survived.

- Suzanne's was a nightclub in Coconut Grove,

and Luis Escobedo was murdered in the parking lot.

And then we had the Gonzalez brothers.

They were assassinated.

- Bernardo Gonzalez lay dead

in a pool of blood in that black Cherokee.

Tonight, sources say

the bloodbath was bought and paid for.

- Everybody was taken aback and surprised by this.

Like, maybe in mafia cases in New York City

you see witnesses getting killed or car bombs.

We hadn't seen something like that in Miami before.

- In Miami, everybody talked about it.

Those are Willie and Sal's peoples getting killed

from his organization.

So these are drug hits.

- Homicide detectives with the city of Miami and Miami-Dade

have done some arrests of hit team members

involved in these homicides

but we didn't have any evidence at that time

linking Sal and Willie to ordering any of these murders.

And that was going to be our job,

is to try and link these murders

to Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon.

- Our goal was to get cooperators,

so I went to interview the hitmen and said, we're the FBI.

We can protect you, we can protect your family,

if you cooperate with us.

One of the hitmen, Javier Cadena,

he had told us that he used a contact person named Eddie.

He didn't have his last name or anything.

And he had a 478 number for Eddie.

That 478 number was connected to a cell phone company

owned by Sal Magluta's brother-in-law, Eddie Lezcano.

We put Eddie Lezcano in a photo lineup

and Javier Cadena identified Lezcano

That was the first real piece of evidence

that tied Javier Cadena

to a family member of Sal Magluta.

- We learned from the hitmen that

there was one leader of both of these hit teams,

and we only knew him as Tocayo.

Tocayo was associated with the cartels in Colombia,

and he was the main person

in charge of eliminating these witnesses.

And the homicide detectives suspected that

Tocayo had met with Eddie Lezcano

and that's how they orchestrated

all of these homicides.

But by the time we identified Tocayo, obviously, he's gone.

He's back in Colombia,

so we start working with the Colombian authorities

to try and get him arrested in Colombia.

- So while you're trying to find out who orchestrated

all these homicides,

are you simultaneously working on the juries?

- Yes. So one of the jurors

had come to the U.S. attorney's office and he said

you really need to investigate the jury foreman, Miguel Moya,

because all he was doing was advocating for an acquittal.

- This juror just laid out

what was going on during jury deliberations

and Moya putting more and more pressure on everybody

for a not guilty verdict,

saying all the cooperators were liars,

the government didn't prove their case.

But a lot of the jurors, you know,

hung tough in the beginning

and they were like, absolutely not.

- Sure. Yeah. - These guys are guilty.

So then Moya comes up with another idea.

He's going to bring up to the judge

that he feels that the jury should be sequestered.

So now the jury gets sequestered,

and then his pressure intensifies

on the other jurors who are holding out.

Eventually, the jurors just give up.

That's what led to the not guilty verdict.

And this juror was very suspicious

because during the trial it appears that

Moya is spending money,

so he starts a financial investigation of Moya.

Follow the money.

- That's right. - Follow the money.

- During the financial investigation,

we see no more ATM withdrawals from his bank account.

We have Moya distributing money to family members

into their accounts

and he starts paying down all his debt.

He buys a new truck.

His parents, uh, buy a vacation home in the Keys.

They were able to trace around $350,000

in unexplained spending.

And meanwhile, Moya is an airport mechanic

at Miami International Airport.

This guy makes $30,000 a year.

We're at a point where we have all this unexplained spending.

How do we tie this-- - To Willie and Sal.

- Right. How do we tie this-- - How do you tie it back?

- First idea we have is to try and get Moya

to meet with an undercover agent

and maybe get some sort of admission to taking money.

So we knew that he was a basketball fan,

so the FBI sets up, like, a flyer.

It was like a sweepstakes where you can win free games

to a Los Angeles Lakers- Miami Heat game,

which we knew he would be interested in.

So we sent an agent to his house

with some form for the sweepstakes

and we gave him free tickets to the game.

And we have our undercover agent.

Rocky.

- There I went to sit next to him in the arena.

I got to talk to him.

Just small talk.

So after the game, we went to a bar in the Grove.

And we talked about South Florida

and he started, uh, bragging a little bit

about having a place in the Keys.

I noticed that Moya had a nice Rolex.

We had a few drinks and then we left.

So we set up another meeting.

I said, I'm going to bring a girlfriend.

And we went to Mango's.

The music at Mango's, it's hopping.

And the other agent is Puerto Rican like me,

and that salsa music came on and we just started dancing.

And Miguel started dancing with me,

and you know, he started getting a little loosey-goosey,

touchy, whatever.

- We started to get a little uncomfortable

that he was getting a little bit handsy and aggressive.

But Rocky tried to get him to talk a little bit

about his jury service, and he was not interested.

So we're like, you know, this is not working.

- And that's when Mario pulled the plug.

- Let's, uh-- - let's try a different approach.

And that's when I started thinking.

And you know,

I talk to my brother Ray a lot about FBI cases.

And he says, I got a guy on my squad.

He's absolutely the best. Talk to Jack Garcia.

So I said, Jack, let's come up with a scenario

to try and get an admission from Miguel Moya on tape,

you know, that he took a bribe.

So what we decided to do was as Moya was coming out of work,

we have Jack pose as he's a member of the organization

and that they have information that the FBI has

this detailed case against you.

We want to make sure you don't cooperate.

So that was the plan.

So we're in a van, you know,

about probably, like, ten cars down in the parking lot.

We see Moya come out, and you know, Jack's a large man.

And immediately Moya, you know, is like,

taken aback a little bit.

And Jack just hits him right away.

Who he is, you know, I'm from the organization,

I work with Willie and Sal.

- He goes, so I'm here to talk to you

about the money that we paid you.

- And then he's like, well,

I don't know what you're talking about.

So Jack said, listen,

you know, don't play dumb with me.

Don't waste my time.

We have a contact in the Department of Justice

that has given us all this information

about the way you've been spending the money we gave you.

- And he's like, well, you know,

I don't know what you're talking about.

And Jack keeps pressing him like,

we told you to be careful with the money.

- So finally, he's not admitting to anything

and Jack tells him, you know what?

I'm just going to tell Sal and Willie that I was here

and offered you help and you don't want our help.

And then Moya said, no, no, no, no, no.

And then Jack starts to get him to talk about the money.

- Jack says something to the effect that, you know,

you can go to jail for this

and you've got to stop spending and this and that.

And he goes, don't worry, man, don't worry.

I'll do the 20 years. Don't worry.

- So we get the admission that we're looking for.

And as you can imagine, we're all in the van

and we're like, oh, thank God. - Listening, yeah.

- God, yeah. Thank god. Now--now we got him.

So now we feel confident that now we go and arrest him.

Then we start to uncover some more links to the organization,

and they're able to link cell phone records

between Moya and the organization members.

So now we can show the jury, look, during the trial,

he's talking to people in the organization.

So he was convicted.

And during the sentencing,

Judge King said, well, you said during the tape,

you know, with undercover Agent Garcia--

- Yeah, yeah. - I'll do 20.

- That you would do 20 years.

- So now I'm going to sentence you to 20 years.

That was a big win for us.

So now the tide's starting to turn to us.

We suspected there were other jurors involved,

but the financial analysis of the other jurors

wasn't as easy as what we saw in the Moya case.

So later on in the case,

we had heard from other witnesses

that an individual called Raul Sarraff

made bribe payments to a female juror

and Raul Sarraff grew up with Sal Magluta.

- Before Sal and Willie's trial,

Raul Sarraff discovered that his neighbor, Gloria Alba,

had received one of the jury questionnaires.

- So he coached Gloria on what she needs to do

to get on the jury so she gets selected.

We approach Raul Sarraff.

We tell him, this is your one chance.

You either cooperate or you're going down,

and he agrees to cooperate for us.

But when we meet with Raul, originally the plan was

Gloria is going to get, like, $250,000.

- Right. - Uh, to hang the jury.

But if there's a not guilty verdict,

she's going to get $1 million.

But she gets, like, $260,000.

So the trial ends and she's like,

well, where's the rest of my money?

I was promised $1 million.

So Sal Magluta, according to other witnesses,

says, I'm not paying this lady.

What is she going to do, go to the police and say

oh, the organization didn't give me my extra bribe money?

But Raul says Gloria, she's super-greedy

and she's very aggressive

and I think if I call her and tell her

that I have more money for her, she'll talk to me.

When Raul Sarraff calls Gloria and says,

hey, listen, the money we owe you,

we're so sorry we didn't pay you.

I'd like to get together with you

and discuss some of the money that we owe you.

And immediately she goes into,

damn right, you guys owe me money.

Like, where is that money

that you guys are supposed to be paying me?

Raul says, listen, bring your husband to the meeting,

because we know her husband was involved

in receiving the bribe and spending the money.

So they meet at a restaurant.

Raul says, we're going to give you 50,000.

She's upset. She's pointing her fingers.

She's like, $50,000? $50,000 is ridiculous.

- So she wants the rest of her money,

but she, of course, is going to accept the $50,000.

And we're all waiting in the parking lot.

So as soon as her and her husband

come out to the parking lot, we arrest them.

So we explained the situation to Gloria, and we said, well,

do you have any information that could help your case?

So she said there was one other juror, Maria Penalver.

She definitely took a bribe.

We were able to trace maybe $20,000, $25,000 Maria spent,

and we knew her boyfriend, Gerald Rodriguez,

had also spent some money.

Miami-Dade PD and FBI agents had approached both of them

as they come out of work.

So Maria agreed to come to the FBI office,

and we finally get the confession.

Raul, Gloria, and Maria plead guilty

to obstruction of justice charges

and are each handed a five-year sentence.

Isael and Gerald are also charged and sentenced.

The third part of the case was a massive

money laundering operation run by the organization.

And to our astonishment, we get a call one day

from the U.S. attorney's office

about an informant named Orlando.

He wants to cooperate in the case.

And he told us that his girlfriend, Marilyn Bonachea,

had been distributing large amounts of cash

for the organization during the trial and after the trial.

- Marilyn and Sal were teenagers

when they met and became a girlfriend.

Sal eventually married, but they never broke ties.

- She was extremely loyal to him and he trusted her.

So we knew that Marilyn was a paralegal,

uh, that worked on the defense team.

- She became the bookkeeper.

And prior to us getting involved,

those books were confiscated

during a traffic stop by the DEA.

- We sent those ledger books up to FBI headquarters

to have them deciphered.

- They couldn't figure it out,

so we knew we needed to find a way

to get her to cooperate and decipher these books.

As we're trying to decode Marilyn's books,

Sal Magluta's passport trial is about to begin.

- So Sal decides at that point in the middle of the trial

to flee, and we don't know where he is.

And then the informant calls us and says,

they want Marilyn out of Miami as quickly as possible

because Sal Magluta is worried that the FBI is going to come

get her because of the seizure of these ledger books.

- We're all busy-- trials, working, what have you.

And we get a phone call that she's got to leave today,

and we have to do a surveillance from Miami

to wherever they lead us.

- Next time on FBI True.

- We had to scramble everybody.

All hands on deck.

We need to know, where is Willie and Sal?

Are they going to stash Marilyn?

The organization is going to send somebody

to take you to a safe house.

So this individual from the organization finally shows up.

He's delivering illegal drug money for Willie and Sal.

We suspected they were using all this drug money

to pay for lawyers to obstruct the case.

- They would write these fake checks

with letters for the attorneys to make it look legit.

- So we convinced the FBI,

OK, we're going to let this money walk

because we want to identify everybody.

- Our system cannot be allowed

to get corrupted like this by criminals.