After Griselda Blanco's Death, Mickey Munday Is Last Cocaine Cowboy Standing

C. Stiles

Mickey Munday

Read: "Michael Corleone Blanco lives in the shadow of his cocaine-queen mother"
"Jon Roberts, Smuggler in Cocaine Cowboys, Dies"
"Griselda Blanco, Miami's Cocaine Queen, Assassinated In Medellin Butcher Shop"
"Cocaine king Max Mermelstein came out of hiding for a screenwriter"

The golden years hasn't turned out so good for most of the retired drug traffickers featured in Rakontur's trail-blazing documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Max Mermelstein, the Medellin Cartel drug smuggler who later testified against the organization, succumbed to cancer at age 65 in 2008. Last year, cancer also claimed the life of Mermelstein's ex-pal Jon Roberts, who was 63 when he died. On Sunday, 69-year-old ex-cocaine queenpin Griselda Blanco joined Mermelstein and Roberts in the afterlife. She was gunned down by a motorcycle assassin in Medellin, Colombia.

That leaves Miami native son Mickey Munday as the last ex-doper featured in the documentary who is still alive and not behind bars. (Jorge "Rivi" Ayala, Blanco's ex-hitman, is serving consecutive life sentences in state prison).

"They're either all dead or in jail forever," Munday says. "I am the last one standing, really."

Munday never fit the profile of your average cold-blooded drug smuggler. A North Miami High alum, he studied architecture and drafting in college. He didn't get into the game until he was 33-years-old, which he did out of boredom. He organized the sale of 2,000 pounds of pot for a friend.

After meeting Mermelstein, Munday joined a crew that spent the 1980s importing $2 billion worth of yeyo into Miami. In Cocaine Cowboys, Roberts described Munday as "MacGyver" because of the ingenious ways he would come up with to surreptitiously evade law enforcement.