Augusto Guillermo "Willy" Falcon (1 September 1955-) was a Cuban-American drug kingpin and, alongside Sal Magluta, the co-leader of the Los Muchachos cartel in South Florida during the 1980s and 1990s.
Biography[]
Augusto Guillermo Falcon was born in Cuba in 1955, the brother of Gustavo Falcon, and his family later emigrated to South Florida, settling in Miami. Falcon befriended Sal Magluta at school, where they frequently skipped class and instead sold marijuana, leading to their expulsion. With Falcon was the muscle and Magluta as the brains, the two formed a lucrative partnership and helped Jorge Valdes smuggle cocaine between Colombia and Florida with the help of a network of speedboat drivers and pilots. After Valdes' 1980 arrest, he handed control of his operations to "Los Muchachos", who came to dominate Miami's drug trade throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The non-violence of the operation enabled their business to thrive as the FBI cracked down on the more violent Colombian cartels, but the War on Drugs intensified under President George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s. Falcon's brother-in-law Pedro Rosello was arrested in 1991 and persuaded to hand over Magluta, who, in turn, agreed to inform the police of Falcon's location. Magluta and Falcon were imprisoned, running their operations from prison while making several of their associates paralegals to help them run their empire, and hiring an excellent criminal defense team. Magluta also hired a Colombian hit squad to eliminate a list of potential witnesses compiled by the Muchachos' defense lawyers; this coincided with the murder of Falcon's wife Alina in a 1992 robbery in Coral Gables. The duo was acquitted of a plethora of drug trafficking crimes after bribing the jury, but the FBI was able to gather evidence that the duo had both bribed the jury and ordered the murder of witnesses. Ultimately, the only charge that stuck against the Muchachos would be Magluta's improper payments to his lawyers and Falcon's weapons charges, and, while Magluta was sentenced to life in prison in 2002, Falcon pled guilty to money laundering in 2003 in exchange for a reduced 20-year sentence. He was released in 2017 and deported to the Dominican Republic rather than Cuba, where he feared that he would be killed, and he later fled the Dominican Republic and vanished from the public eye.