Miami Cocaine Cowboy of the ’80s to breathe free — for a few minutes

MIAMI — Willie Falcon, whohelped turn Miami into the country’s cocaine capital in the 1970s and ’80s, is scheduled to be released from prison on Saturday. He will immediately be detained by immigration authorities while they decide whether to deport him to his native Cuba.

The government run by the late Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, would have to agree to take him back.

Falcon, 61, served most of a 20-year prison sentence for money laundering. He will leave a Kentucky federal prison and then be transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana or Alabama.

Falcon, a Miami Senior High School dropout, became infamous as a Cocaine Cowboy with high school pal Sal Magluta.

Now he has a problem that he could have resolved long ago but just didn’t get around to: He’s a Cuban immigrant who adjusted his immigration status to become a lawful permanent

resident— but never took the final step of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. As a convicted felon, that makes him deportable.

Falcon, who unlike Magluta cut a plea deal to avoid a life sentence, plans to fight his detention and possible removal to Cuba.

“I am certain that immigration is going to aggressively seek to deport him,” said Miami criminal defense attorney Rick Diaz, who represented Falcon along with lawyer Jeffrey Weiner. “But he paid his debt to society. We’re even.”

Thomas Byrd, the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans, could not say whether the agency plans to seek a so-called final order of removal, the technical term for deportation.

If ICE tries to deport Falcon, the decision would be up to an immigration judge.

Since January — when President Barack Obama suddenly ended America’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy allowing Cubans who reach U.S. soil to qualify for residency and citizenship — the prospect of deporting thousands of convicted Cubanfelons to the island has become a possibility.

On Friday, President Donald Trump is expected to make a major announcement on U.S.-Cuba policy during his planned visit to Miami, but it’s not known whether hewould address this issue.

The U.S. government counts 28,400 convicted Cuban felons — all free after serving prison time in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The issue is controversial because among the Cuban felons now facing deportation are those convicted of committing more than 2,000 murders in the United States.

For decades, all of the released felons have been allowed to live under the supervision of immigration authorities because the federal government had no diplomatic relations with Cuba to deport them since the early 1960s. Of the total facing deportation, about 18,000 live in Florida.

After maintaining a hard line to never take them back, Cuban officials now say they would consider the proposition on a case-by-case basis — one of the topics in negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba since diplomatic relations were restored in 2015.

For Falcon, the changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba could not have come at a worse time.

Diaz said he has spoken with his family members and they are gearing up to hire an immigration lawyer.

“The government has no evidence that he’s a danger to the community,” Diaz said. “He was not convicted of a violent crime. He’s not Magluta.”

In 1991, Falcon and Magluta were indicted along with about a dozen associates on charges of conspiring to import and distribute 75 tons of cocaine worth $2 billion dating to1978.

Willie and Sal, who also dropped out of Miami Senior High School, were recognized as kingpins among the legendary Cocaine Cowboys who turned South Florida into a deadly hub of drug trafficking in the 1980s. The partners, who grew up in Miami’s

Cuban-American community, used their ocean-racing speedboats to haul Colombian cocaine from the Caribbean to South Florida.

The feds’ “criminal enterprise” case against Willie and Sal, who were accused not only of drug trafficking but also of hiring Colombian hit men to kill former associates who snitched on them, seemed solid on all fronts. But in 1996, the high-profile Miami trial ended with implausible acquittals for Falcon and Magluta. After the trial, the U.S. attorney’s office and FBI soon discovered that Falcon and Magluta had bought off three jury members, including the foreman, to win their case.

Prosecutors stepped up the investigation, targeting not only “TheBoys” but even more of the associates in their network, including family members and lawyers.

Magluta, always recognized as the mastermind of the organization, was retried and convicted of drug-related money-laundering charges in 2002. Magluta, 62, was sentenced to 205 years in prison by a federal judge who concluded he used drug money to hire assassins to kill government witnesses. On appeal, Magluta’s sentence was reduced to195 years.

Instead of going to trial with his partner, Falcon struck a plea deal in 2003 on a single charge of conspiring to commit money laundering. Hewas sentenced to the maximum20 years.

But the Miami Vice saga did not there. Falcon’s brother, Gustavo, was arrested in Orlando by the U.S. marshals in April after being on the lam for 26 years. Last week, Gustavo Falcon, 55, pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges and is awaiting trial.