Yeah, you heard it right. The story of Netflix’s The Rip, starring Hollywood’s talented duo, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, is indeed inspired by a real-life incident, but the word we are all missing here is “loosely.” In real life, the detectives had come across a marijuana trafficker who had stashed cash behind a wall to hide his illegal fortune from the authorities, but other than this “discovery of money,” the rest of the movie is fictional. Okay, let me hold myself back from complicating the narrative any further and just tell you the real-life story.
Netflix’s The Rip began with Lieutenant Dane Dumars receiving an anonymous tip, or what they call a “crimestopper tip,” about a stash house in Hialeah that allegedly held cartel money which kickstarted the events of the film. However, the real life story centers around a Cuban man, Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez, who had moved to the United States in 1994. For a very long time, Luis had been running a hardware and indoor gardening store called the Blossom Experience, in Miami-Dade, with his sister, Salma, trying to earn a decent living. However, in 2005, some DEA agents saw him selling six pounds of marijuana on the street, and although he was neither arrested nor convicted for it, he’d been on the police’s radar since then. Later, in 2010, the detectives started wiretapping his conversations after a confidential police informant tipped the police off that Luis had been openly discussing the marijuana trade with him. The authorities had been keeping an eye on Luis and recording his conversations, but they couldn’t find any substantial information or evidence against him until June 2016, when Luis’ name resurfaced during a marijuana bust operation in Tennessee. In the bust, the authorities not only seized more than 300 marijuana plants, firearms and cash but also arrested the two ringleaders running the racket. Surprisingly both of them hailed from Miami.
One of the ringleaders, Rego, had been in direct contact with Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez, regularly taking advice from him to help him look after his sick plants. The recorded conversation between the two gave the narcotics detectives and prosecutors the idea that Luis might be a part of the marijuana trafficking ring, and therefore, on 28th June, 2016, they obtained a search warrant for his business store, Blossom Experience. During the bust, the agents seized marijuana seeds and 180 thousand dollars cash from the safe inside the store, with Luis confessing to helping customers properly cultivate marijuana plants. The agents knew that there was more to the story than what met the eye, and therefore they decided to raid his house in Miami Lakes to get a complete picture of his operations. It is at this location that they discovered the infamous secret attic compartment, exactly identical to the one we saw in Netflix’s The Rip. If you had noticed, Dane and his partner, Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne, saw an Our Lady of Good Remedy statue in a wall alcove inside the attic. Even in real life, Luis’ attic entrance was guarded by figurines associated with the Santeria religion, indicating that Netflix’s film had replicated these small details to make the narrative as close to reality as possible. Nevertheless, back to the story, in real life too, the agents punched a hole in the drywall, where they found 24 orange Home Depot buckets stuffed with bundles of 100 dollar bills, with each bundle marked with the exact amount inside it. Yes, the same way we saw in the film. The real-life detectives were quite stunned by the amount of money they had discovered, and called the incident a once-in-a-lifetime situation. The agents loaded these buckets onto the back of the pickup truck and took them straight to the Miami-Dade Police Department, where they counted the bills on a counting machine. Additionally, in real-life, Luis’ sister, Salma, was also charged and arrested in connection with the marijuana trade. That said, there are no reports suggesting that she served any sentence for the same. It can also be theorized that the character of Desiree ‘Desi’ Lopez Molina, the girl TNT came across at the house, was loosely based on Salma Hernandez.
As per the official reports, the investigators had seized marijuana, firearms, and more than 24 million dollars in cash from Luis’s store and house. At first, he was only charged in state criminal court for money laundering and selling illegal substances. However, a few months after his arrest, the federal authorities uncovered suspicious bank accounts through which Luis had made some illegal deposits to avoid the mandatory filing requirement. Basically, he wanted to hide his money from the federal government, but the department eventually tracked these transactions and indicted Luis on federal charges. After a long battle with the justice department, Luis finally pleaded guilty in February 2018 to the charges against him and some two months later, he was sentenced to just over five years in prison. As of today, Luis would most likely have been let out of prison and be living as a free man, but there isn’t much information available about his current whereabouts.
So, you see, writers Michael McGrale and Joe Carnahan, who wrote the story and the screenplay for Netflix’s The Rip, picked up this crazy real-life incident and weaved a narrative around the hidden stash of money. However, it goes without saying that except for these millions of dollars stashed and hidden behind a wall in the attic, none of the things in the film are real. The corrupt cops, the TNT, or the cartel; everything is fictional. None of these agents tried to steal the stashed cash, nor did any of them die during the operation. Carnahan has said that parts of the film’s screenplay were loosely inspired by his friend, Chris Casiano’s lived experience as a member of the narcotics department of the Miami-Dade police.
