Crime, Vice & the Underground

Rumrunners, smugglers, mob ties, cocaine cowboys, offshore money, and the systems that learned how to move things before they learned how to brand paradise.

Aerial view overlooking a section of Ft. Lauderdale Beach near SE 5th Street 1983

The Cocaine Cowboys Who Built (and Bled) South Florida

Smugglers Coast

By: John Payne

On: March 27, 2026

Before the luxury towers. Before the rooftop bars. Before the influencers and the Art Basel crowds and the $22 cocktails on Las Olas, South Florida ran on cocaine. Not metaphorically. Literally. In the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, South Florida became the primary port of entry forContinue Reading

Rumrunners & River Kings: How Prohibition Put Broward on the Map

Foundations & FolkloreSmugglers Coast

By: John Payne

On: February 1, 2026

Prohibition didn’t make Americans stop drinking.It made them better planners. When the Volstead Act went into effect in 1920, Washington imagined a country sobering up out of respect for the law. South Florida imagined supply chains. You don’t ban a habit. You reroute it. And Broward County, quietly, was alreadyContinue Reading