T.J. English: Making Bad Choices Makes for Great Drama

T. J. English is a noted journalist and author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne, Paddy Whacked, The Savage City, and Where the Bodies Were Buried. He also authored The Westies, a national bestseller; Born to Kill, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and The Corporation. His journalism has appeared in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Playboy, and New York magazine, among other publications. He lives in New York City. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

In this interview, T.J. discusses how he needed to know more about the subject before agreeing to write his new true-crime book, The Last Kilo, his hope for readers, and more.

Name: T.J. English
Literary agent: Nat Sobel of SobelWeber Assoc.
Book title: The Last Kilo
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: December 3, 2024
Genre/category: Nonfiction crime history (true crime)
Previous titles: The Westies, Born to Kill, Paddy Whacked, Havana Nocturne, The Savage City, Whitey’s Payback, Where the Bodies Were Buried, The Corporation, Dangerous Rhythms
Elevator pitch: The story of Willy Falcon and the creation of cocaine distribution in the United States, fueling an unprecedented cocaine era from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Led by Falcon and a gang of cohorts known as Los Muchachos, this syndicate had a transformative impact not only on Miami, the city where they were based, but on all of American culture in the 1980s.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I was contacted by the daughter of Willy Falcon, who was in the latter stages of a 27-year prison sentence. She told me he had read a couple of my books while incarcerated and felt that I was the right person to write his story. I initially said no. I needed to know more about Falcon as a person before I could agree to anything like that. I needed to know: How was his memory? How thoughtful and reflective could he be? Could I trust what he was saying? After communicating with the man on zoom and getting to know him a bit, I saw the importance of his story. Especially his story set against the expansive history of the cocaine era, which he and his group were at the center of for more than a decade.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took close to four years. The concept didn’t change so much as expand. I realized that this book would be about far more than just Falcon and Los Muchachos, it would be the story of the entire era, including the U.S. government’s War on Drugs, and the long effort by federal prosecutors to bring down Falcon and his group.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The entire process was a “learning moment” chock full of surprises. Though I had read most everything there was to read about the business of cocaine, many of the minute details as revealed by Falcon were new to me.

A major issue was getting to Falcon so I could interview him face to face. He had been deported from the U.S. as soon as he was released from prison. At the time, he didn’t want anyone to know where he was, so traveling there involved much skullduggery and mystery. And it was in the middle the COVID nightmare, which made travel to and from a foreign country a nightmare.

The more I learned from Falcon, I realized I had other interviews to do with many people: other members of Los Muchachos, criminal defense lawyers who handled their cases, and the law enforcement people—cops, agents, and prosecutors—who doggedly pursued the gang to the end. Most of these interviews were conducted in Miami (I live in NYC). It was exhaustive and took many months. And all of this was before I even began to tackle the challenge of getting it all down on the page as a coherent and compelling story.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

As with all my books, my goal was to humanize the story, to show readers that the world of organized crime is inhabited by human beings. Obviously, in the criminal world, people often make crazy choices that lead to destruction, death, and imprisonment. Human beings making bad choices makes for great drama, we’ve known this since the dawn of dramaturgy (just ask Shakespeare). I am not interested in good v. evil. That is a false moralistic construct created by people in positions of authority who want to promote the idea that they are superior beings to the criminals. I believe what it says in the U.S. constitution: We are all created equal. Some people cross over to the wrong side of the law and commit crimes that necessitate prosecution and incarceration. Society reserves the right to punish people for their crimes. But that doesn’t make those people any less human.

As I interviewed Falcon, his brother Tavy, who was also a leader of the gang, and many other rank-and-file members of Los Muchachos, I was startled by how different they were from most gangsters I have interviewed (I have interviewed many over the years.) In fact, these weren’t hardened criminals with extensive rap sheets and careers. None of these men had histories of violence. They were more like a family of Cuban exiles (both literally and figuratively) who stumbled on to cocaine as a business at a time when it was exploding in popularity all around the world.

I was startled—and even concerned—by the lack of violence. Who wants a cocaine story without violence? We’ve been conditioned by the images of mayhem and savagery. Scarface, with the crazy Cuban Tony Montana, “Miami Vice,” “Narcos”—we could go on and on. Deranged Latinos running around with Uzi submachine guns and chain saws. So much racial stereotyping. This story brought it all down to earth for me, made it real, less sensationalized. This is the real story of the cocaine business in the U.S., without all that bullshit. And yes, in many instances, it was a violent universe. Los Muchachos were getting their product from Pablo Escobar (among others), who was a bonafide criminal lunatic who used mass violence as a tactic. The fact that Falcon and his group operated within this universe mostly without resorting to violence and mayhem is, to me, far more interesting than the buckets of blood that are tossed around in those silly fictional recreations.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

A major reassessment of the entire “Cocaine Cowboys” era. Many of our misconceptions are a consequence of the so-called War on Drugs, which has been as much a propaganda war as an operational conflict. The U.S. government spent billions of dollars seeking to depict the drug war in the media as a case of good v. evil. Cocaine was demonized as the work of the devil—a plant that predates human civilization, used as a sacrament by indigenous tribal cultures, was now inherently evil. The U.S. Drug Czar at the time, William Bennet, was a fundamentalist Christian who saw drugs—even marijuana—as the work of the devil. He believed that if you used drugs, you were a traitor to your country, and if you sold cocaine, he was in favor of decapitation as a punishment. He actually said that to talk-show host Larry King on live television.

The main thing is that I hope readers will come to realize that violence was not the only or even primary feature of the cocaine business. The primary feature was corruption. Cops, federal agents, lawyers, judges, politicians, enablers of every variety who were in it for the money. It wasn’t the devil. It was human beings failing at upholding the principles they claimed to represent. This is largely what made the cocaine era possible. And it is a fascinating story.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Keep writing.