Will ‘Cocaine Cowboy’ get deported to Cuba?
MIAMI — Willie Falcon, who, together with high school pal Sal Magluta, helped turn Miami into the country’s cocaine capital in the 1970s and ’80s, is scheduled to be released from prison Saturday after serving most of a 20-year prison sentence for money laundering.
But Falcon, 61, won’t become a free man and won’t be coming home to Miami. As soon as he leaves the custody of a Kentucky federal prison, Falcon will be detained by immigration authorities and transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana or Alabama.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detainer on the infamous “Cocaine Cowboy” will keep him behind bars while authorities decide whether to deport him to his native country: Cuba. Of course, for that to happen, the government run by the late Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl, would have to agree to take him back.
Falcon, a Miami Senior High School dropout, 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 in the United States, but he never took the final step of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. As a convicted felon in the United States, 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 it’s one thing to say you’re going to send him back; Cuba would still have to take him. ... He did his time. He paid his debt to society. We’re even.”
“He lived the majority of his life here,” Diaz added. “He has nobody there.”
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans could not provide information on where Falcon would be transferred after his prison terms ends Saturday, but he will be detained in that jurisdiction. Thomas Byrd, the spokesman, also could not say whether the agency plans to seek a so-called final order of removal, the technical term for deportation.
Ultimately, 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 stay and qualify for residency and citizenship — the prospect of deporting thousands of convicted Cuban felons back to the island has become a possibility.
The U.S. government counts 28,400 of them — all free after serving prison time for their felony convictions in the U.S.