In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Burt Gonzalez, a veteran officer from the Miami-Dade Police Department, for an unfiltered look inside one of the most violent and chaotic eras in American law enforcement history. Bert has published his story title The Real Greatest Show on Earth.

With decades of experience spanning multiple divisions, Burt recounts the transformation of Dade County’s police force—from Metro-Dade to Miami-Dade—and now back to an elected sheriff. He walks us through the gritty evolution of policing in South Florida, where the drug trade fueled daily violence and cartel wars left bodies in the streets. Burt shares firsthand stories from Miami’s cocaine-crazed years, including a shocking drug bust that netted 208 kilos of cocaine and over a million dollars in cash, offering a vivid glimpse into the unpredictable and dangerous life of a street cop.

Beyond the shootouts and seizures, we explore the human side of policing—the growing mental health crisis in Miami-Dade, the deadly unpredictability of domestic violence calls, and the emotional toll that constant exposure to trauma takes on officers. Burt emphasizes the importance of training, de-escalation, and support systems for those on the front lines.

The conversation also previews Burt’s upcoming show, Sergeant Maverick, a podcast where he’ll tackle everything from police work and politics to financial advice for first responders—and even the decline of customer service in America. Join us for this candid, eye-opening conversation as Burt Gonzalez pulls back the curtain on the realities, dangers, and hard-earned lessons of Miami policing during the height of America’s drug war.

Click here to get the book, The Real Greatest Show on Earth

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Transcript

[0:00 ] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, welcome to the studio of Gangland Wire. I’m back here, and I have a fellow copper from down in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Burt Gonzalez. And, you know, I worked all the jobs on the police department, mainly spent my time in intelligence, so that’s why I focus on organized crime. But I worked all the rest of the jobs, almost all of them. I never was a wheel man. But other than that, I think I did everything. And Burt’s done a lot of things, too. So welcome, Bert. Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. And guys, you need to know, and we’ll talk about this later, Bert has a book out there about his career and some great stories called The Real Greatest Show on Earth. And believe me, Bert, it is the real greatest show on Earth, isn’t it? Well, that’s why I named the book that.

[0:49 ] I was thinking about what is it that we do and what do we call it out there ourselves, in the street, in the homes of our citizens and everything. And really, it’s a circus. So that’s where I came up with that. True circus. All right, now tell the guys a little bit about your department that you spent your time in and how you ended up going on that department and a little bit about the history of it and what it was like as you went over the years. So go ahead. So I was with Miami-Dade Police, formerly known as Metro-Dade Police, when I joined in 1983. And in the areas where my family moved here from New York and I followed a year later, the area was unincorporated Dade County at the time. It wasn’t called Miami-Dade County yet.

[1:40 ] And so the police of the jurisdiction was Metro Dade police. And our neighbor behind our house, Bob Johns, was a sergeant with Metro. So then all of my interactions, I’ve seen Metro everywhere. And then as I got to know Bob and I got to know more about the department,

[2:00 ] Metro Dade is the largest department in the Southeast United States. Now is Miami Dade. It still is. And it’s the sheriff’s office, even though we didn’t call ourselves that. We just called ourselves Metro-Dade and now Miami-Dade Police. It is a sheriff’s office as of a few weeks ago again. First time in 60 years we’ve elected a sheriff. And that involves all the politics about the county governing itself away from the capital, Tallahassee. And then the voters here a couple of years ago said, we want to have an elected sheriff again, as opposed to an appointed director by the mayor and the county commission. And you know, as well as I do, that if you have an appointed chief or an appointed director, the mayor has control over them. So the director is not answerable to the citizens or the chief of police isn’t really answerable to the citizens. They’re answerable to the mayor.

[3:04 ] And it caused a lot of problems. And finally, the citizens down here said, we want an elected sheriff again. In November, we elected a sheriff. One of my colleagues, Rosie Cordero-Stutz, who highly qualified, she was an assistant director with us. So now we’re the sheriff’s office again.

[3:22 ] So the more I learned of what department I wanted to apply to, it was going to be Metro-Dade and only Metro-Dade. I didn’t think about the city of Miami, which is another, the second largest department in South Florida.

[3:37 ] But it was going to be Metro all the way. And there’s going to be folks that may be here, listen to this, and going to say, well, that sounds pretty arrogant. Well, it is the best department down here for sure. And it is a leading agency around the country. And we’re very proud of that reputation. So I joined Metro, like I said, in 83.

[4:00 ] And two years later my brother got out of the army and he came on as well and I gotta tell you at that time it was the height of the cocaine cowboy wars when we came on.

[4:13 ] This is what I was thinking, Miami Vice. You say Miami area in 1983. I’m thinking Miami Vice, maybe. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a kilo of cocaine anywhere. I mean, it was everywhere. And the district that I work, Southwest District, we had a lot of dopers that lived there. They built these big houses. And of course, oh, that’s not a doper there. Of course not, right?

[4:41 ] Cameras outside. You know, and the thing about the cowboy wars at that time, besides the fact that cocaine was everywhere, we had a lot of dead bodies dropping all the time. And there was a time literally every day we were finding bodies all over the county, all our different districts. And the homicide rate was so high that our department had to create a specialized narcotics-focused homicide squad to handle it. So when you say Miami Vice, and also, I’m sure you’ve seen it and many of your viewers and our fellow colleagues, Scarface. Yeah. The movie Scarface. And that scene, I’m always reminded of that scene where Tony Montana and his crew are walking into the banks with duffel bags full of cash. Yeah. Well, I’ve got one story about that. And I was working, I worked mostly uniform in my career. I did a lot of training as well, but I also did plainclothes work.

[5:58 ] And we did a lot of street-level narcotics. So I was on this crime suppression team playing clothes, and we were getting hit with a lot of driveway robbers. We have an affluent area in the district I was working. And from the expensive department stores.

[6:19 ] Macy’s, Bloomingdale, Neiman Marcus, the people would get followed home and get robbed in their driveway. And they’re driving an expensive car, You know, so we got assigned to do surveillances and try to catch these bad guys. And, uh, like I wrote in the book, I always describe a bad guy as an asshole bad guy. Yeah. Cause that’s what they are. Right. So what we were doing these surveillances and we hired extra officers, uh, to increase our numbers. Cause we were a small plainclothes squad. Mark, Sylvia and I, uh, went down this one street one night about eight o’clock at night. And it was dark, and as we drove by this one house, we see two guys looking in the picture window next to the front door. Look really suspicious. We drove down the street. We didn’t see a car in the driveway. We came around. They were gone. Okay, we got something here. Go down, park in somebody’s driveway. I got out, told the owner who we were. Can we park in your driveway? We’re going to watch this house. We called the rest of the squad in. we surveilled for a while.

[7:30 ] No movement so we went to the house Mark and I went to the back of the house, and what