If you're a fan of firsthand accounts, Michael O. Munday is something of a local treasure. Almost every one of his colleagues is dead, in prison, or underground. But 65-year-old Mickey Munday — as the served-his-time cocaine megasmuggler is known — just won't shut up.
Now the gregarious native Miamian with the floppy cowboy hat and mom hair, who achieved cult fame when he was featured in the documentary Cocaine Cowboys, is joining a forum usually reserved for shower-eschewing Oberlin students named Skyler.
Mickey is doing spoken word.
"It sort of sounds like a 1930s radio show," Mickey had told us. But Riptide wasn't sure what to expect when we stopped by a North Miami music studio for an exclusive — suck that, TMZ! — listen of his latest project. Called Tall Tales (even though he swears they're true), Mickey teamed up with music producer Carlos Alvarez — not the crappy ex-mayor — to record a CD of memories from his smuggling days.
Like Mickey himself, the stories are strange, extremely detail-oriented, and completely against expectations. These aren't rote boasts of buying 12 Benzes on a Thursday afternoon. Instead, Mickey remembers the time when, flying over the Bahamas with a few tons of coke, his Cessna's propellers were lit with the glowing phenomenon St. Elmo's fire. The next day, local news reports swore it had been a UFO.
And he brags that the real reason the vast majority of dollar bills test positive for cocaine residue isn't because people are rolling them up to snort with. Nope, it's because of Mickey's maniacal plan to thwart drug-sniffing dogs everywhere by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars over the floor of airplane hangars, donning garbage bags on his legs and plastic gloves, and spraying the bills with a solution of cocaine and alcohol before transporting the cash to Colombia, expecting it to eventually end up in South Florida.
"As I would walk through it, I would kick it up so I would get the cocaine and alcohol on both sides," he cheerily recalls over sound effects and spare music. "Now, the alcohol immediately evaporates, leaving a cocaine residue... And all the money that I've sprayed, most of it's still in circulation, so even today, it is still bumping up against other dollar bills... and making all your money test positive for cocaine."
The opus of the CD is a 28-minute tale about the time he spotted a pair of rapists attacking an innocent couple while he was hiding in the Everglades, waiting for a coke drop. The criminal has to decide whether to become a vigilante. It's engrossing enough that it doesn't matter if it's true — like a bedtime story for adults.
