Stream It Or Skip It?

In The Bus Driver: Britain’s Cocaine King, a two-episode docuseries streaming on HBO Max, we learn about the life a man named Jesus Ruiz Henao led when he wasn’t operating a double-decker bus in London: that of maybe the biggest cocaine supplier the city had ever known. Interviews are featured with the Metropolitan Police authorities who investigated Henao, his criminal associates, and his family members. But it’s the interviews with the man himself that make for a lot of the most interesting moments in The Bus Driver. “Now Jesus Ruiz Henao is telling his story on camera for the first time,” the docuseries says. “This is his version…”  

Opening Shot: We catch some spotty old news footage from Medellin, Colombia in 1993, and the funeral of notorious drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. 

The Gist: When he was a child, growing up poor in a little Colombian village, survival was Jesus Ruiz Henao’s hustle. Any work he could get was in service to feeding himself and his large family. Still, at that time in the country – the late 1970s and early 80s – cocaine distribution was becoming a very lucrative business. Looking to support himself, and obsessed with the high-profile life of Escobar, who despite being a criminal was a kind of celebrity benefactor in Colombia, Henao and two friends started their own three-man drug cartel. 

“Jesus loved the risk,” journalist Ron Chepesiuk says in The Bus Driver. (Chepesiuk is interviewed extensively, and the doc seems to draw heavily on a tell-all book he wrote with Henao.) First, the cartel in miniature expanded to partnering with organized crime in Italy. Chepesiuk says it was Henao who helped the mob transition from selling heroin to slinging coke. But when major drug players in Colombia sent sicarios after Henao, he fled for his life to London, where he gained asylum and began his quiet life as a married man driving the double-decker on London’s route 134. Quiet that is, until he saw an opening. People in nightclubs were clamoring for powder.

As Henao tells it, sitting for an interview with Bus Driver director Anabelle Marshall outside the walls of La Picota Prison in Colombia, he was simply the right guy with the right connections at the right time in London – this was in the late 1980s – when coke was suddenly the shiny new thing. Bus Driver also interviews Stephen Lear and Ian Floyd, both former detectives with the Metro Police, who describe how the cops were already tracking the transition from heroin to cocaine as Henao’s personal influence over the city’s drug trade grew, grew, and grew some more. 

So how could a bus driver make all this side-hustle drug cash and no one noticed? His sister Omaira says she believed Jesus was just lucky, while his brother Fabio, himself a former drug squad cop in Colombia, seems hurt that his brother hid his double life from the family. We also know, since Henao is being interviewed while incarcerated, that eventually his double life did catch up with him. That will be the thrust of Episode 2 of The Bus Driver, which teases more of the London detectives’ side of the story. “Breaking their silence,” in the doc’s words.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cocaine and the drug biz seem like big winners for true crime and the documentary game – Netflix has The Business of Drugs and Dope, while Prime Video features Drug Wars, a three-episode series that interviews users and sellers in the UK. Meanwhile, HBO Max also features Life of Crime 1984-2020, a powerful documentary look at the personal costs of addiction. 

Our Take: The jailhouse interviews with Jesus Ruiz Henao are the centerpiece of The Bus Driver, and really do reveal a man who even now seems far removed from what most anyone would consider a “Cocaine King.” The way he describes the growth of his drug business, it’s through many quiet transactions separate and apart from his work driving the double-decker. But that’s also kind of the problem: “the way he describes it.” At least in its first section, this docuseries doesn’t press Jesus Ruiz Henao on the particulars, like at all. We want to know how this unassuming guy managed to transform moving a few kilos of coke per month on the side into a transnational operation with thousands of moving parts, and the stock reenactments the series applies to some of his story can’t fill in the gaps. 

But we’re sticking with The Bus Driver, because we feel like more of the cops’ side of things will flesh out the narrative in its second half. How did they get onto Henao in the first place, and how did they pierce his carefully-maintained plain sight veneer? Even as Henao waits in his Colombian prison for extradition to the US on drug charges, he still maintains a “low profile” philosophy. We’re interested in specifics: where the slip-ups happened, what strings were pulled to trip him up, and how his double-life was revealed. Because from what we’ve seen in the early going of The Bus Driver, Henao himself would rather speak in generalizations.  

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Scenes shared from the second installment of The Bus Driver suggest that what brought down Henao was what always seems to happen in fictional drug business movies: his operation got too big, and too many people noticed.

Sleeper Star: Bus Driver dives pretty deep into archival news footage, and its scene-setting of 1980s London with its new appetite for coke is full of new wave music, people in nightclubs with Duran Duran hair, and gushy reporters intoning things like “Every year, the white line just gets longer.” 

Most Pilot-y Line: Ian Floyd, former Metro Police Detective Sergeant: “A new social demographic was starting to use drugs. That is the professional class, those with money, the party scene – a different social set. People were having cocaine at dinner parties, in nightclubs, in pubs. Policing it became more challenging because you had to look in different places.”

Our Call: The Bus Driver: Britain’s Cocaine King is a Stream It, especially for True Crime heads who eat content like this for breakfast. But the docuseries also feels like it’s doing more teasing than telling in its first part, so we’re looking forward to takedown in its second installment.  

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.