Cocaine Cowboy Mickey Munday, who ran drugs into Miami during 1980s, indicted in $1.6 million car theft ring
BY
TERENCE CULLEN
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Updated: Friday, May 5, 2017, 11:26 AM
A former “Cocaine Cowboy” convicted of smuggling an estimated 10 tons of cocaine into Miami during the 1980s has been indicted.
This time Mickey Munday — who ran drugs for Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel — is one of eight men charged in a stolen car ring that netted the group $1.67 million, prosecutors said Thursday.
The eight are due before a federal judge on Friday and face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Between 2008 and 2015, Munday and the seven others bought cars through straw buyers, purchased other vehicles from owners struggling to pay the loans on them and stole other ones, according to the indictment.
How Cocaine Cowboys built an empire that inspired 'Miami Vice'
The group is also accused of shipping cars from Missouri to Miami, hid them from being repossessed and sold them off for below market values, prosecutors said.
One of the accused, David Wheat, wrote phony applications for new car titles for vehicles that they’d stolen, the indictment alleges.
Prosecutors said Munday and three others stored lifted cars throughout Miami and Broward counties.
Munday, 71, spent most of the 1990s in prison after being arrested for smuggling cocaine from Colombia to Florida.
Mickey Munday, interviewed in the 2006 "Cocaine Cowboys" documentary, has frequently discussed his experience running drugs into Florida.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Munday had an attorney.
He’s believed to be one of the last surviving Cocaine Cowboys — a notorious group of smugglers who shipped coke into the United States during the 1980s.
Munday, who appeared in a 2006 documentary about the drug runners, made $2.5 million running about $38 million of the powdery substance over six years, he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2013.
He told the newspaper his suppliers called him “MacGyver” after the popular 1980s TV show because he was able to work his way around U.S. agents for so long.
Munday claims to have told Escobar he was “stupid” for how Colombian airstrips were maintained.
"Immediately three or four guys got up and left the room, as if 'Uh-oh, let's get out of here.' This of course was a guy who, if he didn't like someone, would just order them killed. But to me he was just a businessman," Munday told The Sunday Telegraph. "My impression of the man actually wasn't that he was stupid. He was very intelligent, and he was polite enough to sit there and listen."
