Patrick Anderson Jr. Explores Miami's Cocaine Cowboy Days in His Debut Novel

Author Patrick Anderson Jr. and his mother had a Saturday ritual when he was growing up. After he did his chores, his mother would drop him off at the Coral Reef Public Library while she ran errands. The library became a home away from home. He was there so often the librarians started to hold new books for him by his favorite author, R.L. Stine.

A committed lover of the horror genre, it's no surprise that Anderson's first book, Riders in Disguise, is a realistic look at a scary time in Miami's history. In this thriller, four characters are caught up in cocaine trafficking, with a middle school boy at the story's center. Anderson launches his book at Books & Books in Coral Gables on Friday, September 15.

Anderson is a creative writing teacher at Miami Dade College who also produces music under the stage name Autonomous Entity. He earned his masters in creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Though Anderson wanted to write thrillers or horror novels, he started to gravitate toward more realistic books in graduate school. That's when he saw the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys, which sparked his desire to write this novel.

"I couldn't believe the story was true," he says. "I didn't even know a lot of this stuff happened in my hometown. I felt like I didn't know my hometown." The son of Jamaican immigrants who raised him in a suburban home in Perrine, he grew up far from the cocaine-induced chaos.

He started working on his first draft ten years ago. He ended up with almost 700 pages that his mom, his loyal editor, reviewed. Set in 1979, the book has four main characters: a photojournalist who works for the book's version of the Miami Herald; a homicide detective; a cocaine trafficker loosely based on the real-life informant Max Mermelstein; and the focus of the book, Rig Lopez-Campbell, a young boy growing up in Liberty City.

"I wanted to tell the story of this little boy and show how he becomes a drug dealer and how the whole system pushes him in that direction," he says. The character Rig is half Nicaraguan and half Jamaican, raised in Goulds until his father is arrested for possession of marijuana. The family moves to Liberty City, where Rig is the new kid on the block. He's big and assertive. When his dad gets arrested again, Rig's life heads into a downward spiral.

To research the book, Anderson first explored sources he gleaned from Cocaine Cowboys and branched out from there. His book was also informed by conversations with friends whose experiences were more reflective of the characters in his story.

Key to Rig's development and many details in the storyline were the autobiographies of two Miami natives: famed rapper Trick Daddy's Magic City: Trials of a Native Son and the 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell's The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City.

His writing style was more shaped by Don Winslow's The Border trilogy about the Los Angeles drug trade and the 2016 Miami-based film Moonlight, which tells the story of a young boy who is taken under the wing of a drug dealer. After watching Moonlight, Anderson says something clicked. "I knew what I wanted to do with my character when I saw that movie," he adds.

"What I loved about Moonlight was it was the first time I saw a movie about a character growing up in the ghetto that was handled with so much sympathy and empathy for the protagonist," Anderson says. He especially appreciated how the cinematography focused on small details and wanted to do the same in his writing.

"I wanted it to feel like you were watching a movie in your head," he explains. "I'm trying to paint a really vivid picture of what Miami was like for a native at that time, and also how much Miami's circumstances could derail someone's life [who is] living in Liberty City and doesn't have the same resources as the rest of the city."

Riders in Disguise was released by Miami-based publishing company Jitney Books, led by publisher JJ Colagrande. Colagrande is Anderson's colleague at Miami Dade College and was sold on the book after his first read.

"As a noir fan and history buff, I loved how he gave a tour of 1980 Miami without you even realizing it," says David Rolland, editor at Jitney Books and New Times contributor. "It works as a crime novel, but you also get a history lesson from the Dadeland shooting to the Mariel boatlift of what made our city what it is today."

Riders in Disguise is only the beginning for Anderson. It's the first in a planned trilogy that spans one of the bloodiest decades in the Magic City.

Riders in Disguise. By Patrick Anderson Jr. Jitney Books. 2023. 314 pages. Paperback, $16.99.

An Evening with Patrick Anderson Jr.. 7 p.m., Friday, September 15, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 305-442-4408; booksandbooks.com. Admission is free with RSVP via eventbrite.com.