MIAMI _ For 26 years, federal authorities in Miami suspected the fugitive brother of notorious Cocaine Cowboy Augusto "Willie" Falcon was hiding in Mexico or Colombia.
"Nobody thought he was in the United States," said Barry Golden, a deputy and spokesman with the U.S. Marshals Service.
All these years _ or at least since the late 1990s _ it turns out Gustavo Falcon was living with his family about 200 miles from Miami near the state's theme park capital, Disney World.
Deputy U.S. marshals had been watching Gustavo Falcon's rental home in Kissimmee, just south of Orlando, in recent months. And on Wednesday, they followed him and his wife as they went on a 40-mile bike ride _ sometimes losing the couple, then finding them again. Eventually, the deputies nabbed him at an intersection in Kissimmee in the afternoon. Falcon told the deputies that he and his family had been living in the Orlando area for almost two decades.
Falcon _ who had been charged with his older brother, Willie, infamous partner Salvador "Sal" Magluta and several others in 1991 with smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States _ was booked into the Orlando County jail at 6:24 p.m. Falcon, also known as "Taby," was scheduled to have his first appearance Thursday in Orlando federal court, before his expected transfer to Miami.
Jim DeFede of CBS4, the Herald's news partner, first reported Gustavo Falcon's arrest on Twitter.
The U.S. marshals caught a break in 2013 when Gustavo Falcon got into a car accident in the Orlando area while using a fake ID with a Miami address. That led the marshals to trace him back to his South Florida history.
Falcon had obtained fake driver's licenses for himself, his wife, Amelia, and their two grown children, Golden said. The parents went by the names of Luis Reiss and Maria Reiss, he added.
Falcon and his family were renting a Kissimmee home, which the marshals recently had under surveillance. "We figured this all out a month ago," Golden said. "We pulled his driver's license and saw it was the same Gustavo Falcon."
Gustavo Falcon was last seen in South Florida shortly before he was indicted on charges of conspiring to import and distribute 75 tons of cocaine with his older brother, Willie Falcon, partner Sal Magluta and about a dozen other defendants between 1978 and 1991.
Willie and Sal, known as "The Boys" since dropping 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. The partners, who grew up in Miami's Cuban-American community, used their ocean-racing speedboats to haul Colombian cocaine from the Caribbean to the shores of Miami.
The feds' "criminal enterprise" case against Willie and Sal, who were accused not only of drug trafficking but also hiring Colombian hit men to kill former associates who snitched on them, seemed solid on all fronts. But the high-profile Miami trial went terribly awry.
In 1996, Falcon and Magluta were acquitted of all drug-trafficking charges _ but there was a sinister explanation for the shocking outcome that would soon surface after the trial. The U.S. attorney's office and FBI would discover that Falcon and Magluta had bought off witnesses and at least one jury member to win their case.
Prosecutors stepped up the investigation, targeting not only The Boys 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, which was reduced to 195 years in 2006.
After his partner's retrial, Willie Falcon struck a plea deal in 2003 on similar money laundering charges with Miami federal prosecutors Pat Sullivan and Michael Davis. Falcon, 61, sentenced to 20 years in prison, is scheduled to be released in June.
Gustavo Falcon's arrest on Wednesday closes the final chapter on the Miami Vice era. "He's the last of the Cocaine Cowboys," Golden said.
