If you know hip-hop, you know how much the culture exalts its gangstas. It's all about the stacks of cash, the drugs, the gun-waving bravado and the shoutouts to Tony Montana.

But truth be told, whether East Coast or West, none of those wannabe Gs has a thing on the real kingpins of late 1970s and early '80s Miami, when every day snowed white powder and rained blood.

''It was like California in the Gold Rush, when you had all these outlaws coming to town,'' says Alfred Spellman, who with best bud Billy Corben produced 2006's cult fave Cocaine Cowboys, a documentary about Miami's vice days flush with bloody crime-scene photos and first-hand accounts from the cops who couldn't keep up and the bad guys who ran the drugs and killed anyone who got in the way.

Scarface, icon to so many rappers? He never would have flossed in that white suit or made it past street-punk status if he had run up against Colombian-born Griselda Blanco, the Godmother, who goes down as the one of Miami's most murderous and cash-happy drug dealers of the era.

Earlier this month, the Spellman and Corben released Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin' with the Godmother, which focuses on Blanco and Charles Cosby, the young street-level crack dealer from Oakland, Calif., who so idolized la Madrina that he wrote letters to her in prison. A May-December love affair resulted, and Cosby claims to have scored millions of dollars working for Blanco and made conjugal visits she somehow hooked up.

Blanco has the Miami filmmakers to thank for new-found fame. They were too young to have indulged in any of the fun but are still fascinated with Miami's hedonistic -- if lethal -- past.

''Back in the Wild West, there was prostitution, murders, people getting rich off gold. There was a lot of carousing and debauchery. That's what Miami was like,'' Spellman says.

''I'm sorry I missed it,'' Corben says with a smile.

WILD WOMAN

Blanco, like, mentored Pablo Escobar. She also left piles of bodies all over Miami, is rumored to have knocked off three husbands and even cooked up a scheme from her California prison cell to kidnap JFK Jr.

Now, after serving time, being deported back to her homeland and allegedly finding Jesus (according to her son Michael Corleone, who, unlike his three siblings managed not to get whacked) she has emerged as star of the MTV generation.

Unlike the suits in Hollywood who didn't get Spellman and Corben's pitch a couple of years back -- they have since come around -- the duo knew an under-tapped market when they saw one.

Kids will be kids. And kids have always been into pirates and cowboys, say Spellman, 29, and Corben, 30, best friends since they met in a TV-production class at Highland Oaks Middle School in North Miami Beach. Of course, they mean the older kids. Not the PG-ratings set.

''Robin Hood, the Wild Wild West, Bonnie and Clyde. Kids have always been into that sort of thing,'' says Corben, who directs while Spellman produces.

Take that retro, cops-n-robbers conceit to the current day, and you're talking hip-hop and its fascination with gangsters and hustlers. You don't have to be a high-living bad guy to think they're cool.

''There were definitely market indicators,'' says Spellman, who became obsessed with Miami's coke days after reading a story in New Times about the old Mutiny hotel in Coconut Grove, where the cowboys raised the roof.

''All you had to do was watch one episode of MTV's Cribs to know Scarface was a touchstone for the younger generation,'' Spellman says.

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