Conspiracy theories and the CIA: ‘Snowfall’ reignites conversations about Miami’s crack era

Outside Barbara’s BBQ in Liberty City, few questions elicit a near universal agreement like the following:

Was the government involved in putting cocaine and/or crack in Black communities?

More than 40 years since crack first hit the streets of Miami, the answer is usually a yes.

“Yes to a certain extent,” Terrence Smith, the 59-year-old owner of Barbara’s BBQ, said as he reclined in his chair parked right outside the establishment near the corner of Northwest 62nd Street and 15th Avenue. “You can’t blame it all on them. It’s up to you to use the dope. I look at it like this: we don’t have the technology to go over there, get [the cocaine] and bring it back.”

Here, on 15th Avenue, the dope was available on “both sides of the street,” Smith added. Dealers used to stand posted on corners. Addicts would wander down the street to their dealer of choice. As Smith described it, the avenue was its own little ecosystem. So much so that when a man who goes by the nickname “Four” bursts out the doors of Barbara’s BBQ and is asked the same question, he too echoes Smith.

“We ain’t got no pockets for that,” Four said. “We ain’t got no nothing.”

“We ain’t got the planes to go get it,” Smith chirped.

“We ain’t got no planes, we ain’t got none of that,” Four repeated, his voice trailing off. “Dope built Miami. Period.”

The critically acclaimed series “Snowfall,” created by the late John Singleton, which came to a close Wednesday evening, explored this question. Set in early 1980s Los Angeles, “Snowfall” chronicles how cocaine made it into the United States and led to the crack epidemic that disproportionately impacted Black communities across the country. The story, of course, is historical fiction yet within Black communities in South Florida, the idea that crack was planted in neighborhoods still has traction.

“It might not have been as exaggerated as it was in the show but somebody had their hand in something,” said Moriah Bryan, 30, of Plantation, a fan of the “Snowfall” series. “It couldn’t just have been us finding a treasure chest like ‘Oh, look at all this coke.’”

This belief isn’t limited to just fans as both Smith and Four didn’t watch the show. Still, there are many elements of “Snowfall” that are rooted in truth. The United States did secretly aid a war in Nicaragua. The war did coincide with an influx of cocaine into the United States during the 1980s, primarily from places in South and Central America, which made the drug more accessible. Then-president Ronald Reagan famously slashed social spending which did disproportional damage on low-income Black communities, leaving many without steady jobs. How these truths evolved into a conspiracy theory involving the CIA and cocaine is part of the myth-making that develops when a marginalized community is impacted by a power structure in ways it can’t confirm, said Patrica A. Turner, who studies folklore and conspiracy theories in Black culture.

“This gives a very specific story,” added Turner, the current dean of the University of California Los Angeles college and the author of a book that explored many rumors within the Black culture, including the allegation of the government’s involvement in trafficking cocaine. “This gives a mechanism through which the majority population is inhibiting the progress of the minority population.”

The cocaine conspiracy, however, happens to contain a little bit of folklore and truth, Turner continued.

“It reflects a time when the well-being of Liberty City, Compton, Chicago, Boston was minimal for most of the people in power and having a drug debilitate was not important enough to make it a priority,” Turner said.

Although Turner asserted that these conspiracy theories had existed for years before her book “I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture” published in 1993, a subsequent investigation published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 brought this rumor to the front page. Written by Gary Webb, the investigative series “Dark Alliance” alleged that a CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contra army had trafficked the cocaine into the U.S. that helped ignite the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The series prompted an internal investigation within the CIA, the results of which cleared the agency of most of Webb’s accusations.

“No conspiracy,” Frederick Hitz, the CIA inspector general who conducted the internal investigation, told PBS in 2006. What the investigation did find, however, was failure to fully investigate when agents made allegations of trafficking as well as institute a policy that outlined how to report such allegations, according to PBS. When asked to explain his findings, Hitz called the agency’s mishandling of trafficking accusations “ineptitude.”

Still, skepticism remains — and not just within the Black community. To filmmaker Billy Corben, the director of the “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries and an expert on Miami’s history of drug trafficking, it’s obvious that the government played some role. He explained how the optics of cocaine as a “rich people’s problem” meant that it was ignored during the 1970s until two factors changed: the drug trade became a lot more violent in the 1980s and the wrong people began making money.

“In Miami, for example, there was very little will to crack down on the influx of drugs because it was so much money,” Corben said, adding that crack undoubtedly came from Miami due to roughly “90% of cocaine” coming through here, a claim supported by Encyclopedia Britannica.

“Once it became a ‘Black problem’ and we can grow the prison industrial complex too out of this… that’s when suddenly [the government] cares about a problem,” he continued. It was as if “nobody cared about the inner city, nobody cared about cleaning up the streets and providing better education and healthcare” until they could “start arresting either drug-addicted Black people or Black people just trying to make a living. I’m not excusing drug dealing but I’m saying that there’s an element of despair that was systemic, that is systemic.”

Predominantly Black neighborhoods like Liberty City, a community already reeling from the Arthur McDuffie riots when Reagan was elected, became targets when it came to, as Corben put it, “cleaning up the streets.” In 1980, Black Americans were already arrested at three times the rate of their white counterparts yet between 1988 and 1993, the rate jumped to five times, according to the Human Rights Watch. The documentary “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption, Conspiracy” explains the confluence of factors — from Reagan’s election to the media’s depiction to the War on Drugs to the resulting mass incarceration — that allege some complicity on the part of the government.

“The Reagan administration cared less about cocaine coming into this country than they did about waging an illegal paramilitary war against a little country in Central America that basically represented no threat to the security of the United States of America,” Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst for the National Security Archive, said in the documentary.

Kornbluh’s analysis explains in part why, nearly a half a century later, a question about the government’s involvement in drug trafficking can still spark a robust conversation outside of a Miami pool hall.

“The crack epidemic was a crisis but the government ain’t did nothing,” Warren Hamm, 64, said. “But let them have an opioid epidemic then the government starts to do something.”

“That’s because it’s dealing with white people,” Smith interjected.

“Hello!” Hamm affirmed.