Frequent visitors kept their guns tucked in the cushions, and cases of cash and cocaine in their suites. They heard right: A suite at the hotel was converted into a giant walk-in cooler beautiful women would ooh and ahh at tabletop cascades of bubbly in stacks of flutes dopers bought bottles for the house when their loads came in and management often flew out the Mutiny's private plane at the last minute to procure even more from other cities.Internationally wanted hit men and mercenaries chilled at the Mutiny. So much hot money was sloshing around Miami that the Mutiny was selling more bottles of Dom Pérignon than any other establishment on the planet, according to the bubbly's distributor, whose executives visited in disbelief at the turn of the decade.Ĭases of $150-a-bottle Dom Pérignon emptied into your hot tub? Right away! tweet this "The druggies," he said, "the celebs, the crooked pols, spies, the informants, cops - good and bad - were all there." "All roads led back to the Mutiny," said Wayne Black, an undercover cop who listened in to dope deals from a tinted van across the street, often wearing nothing but BVDs to cope with the stifling heat and humidity. According to one study from Florida International University, at least one-third of the city's economic output was derived from narcotics at the time.īurton Goldberg's Mutiny at Sailboat Bay was one of the country's most lucrative hotels, perennially overbooked and sending off armored trucks with sacks of its cash profits, albeit in the new murder-and-drug capital of America, a city that had been ravaged by race riots, gun killings, and the sudden arrival of 125,000 Cuban refugees, many of them sprung right from Fidel Castro's jails.īy the turn of the decade, the 130-room hotel and club was a criminal free-trade zone of sorts where gangsters could both revel in Miami's danger and escape from it.
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But so exceptional was Miami's cocaine economy that dopers were paying banks to accept suitcases full of cash (while certificates of deposit were yielding 20 percent, on top of your choice of toaster or alarm clock). The following is an excerpt of the volume, which can be purchased via the Penguin website.Īmerica in the late 1970s and early '80s was in a pronounced funk: Inflation and unemployment were high consumer sentiment was in the dumps. This week, Penguin Publishing Group issues the book Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Plotted to Control Miami by NPR personality Roben Farzad. In its time there was nothing like it, and today it lives on in hindsight like the afterimage of a hallucination, bright but blurry." in Coconut Grove as a mecca for the 1980s' cocaine kingpins, adding this: "Fact always did blend with fiction there.
Rowe's piece described the Mutiny Hotel at 2951 S. Editor's note: In 1997, Miami New Times published a story by Sean Rowe, " Glorious and Notorious," that helped inspire the 2006 documentary Cocaine Cowboys.
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