About the Author
----------------
Roben Farzad hosts the weekly podcast Full
Disclosure on NPR One and is a special correspondent on PBS
NewsHour. He was previously a senior writer for Bloomberg
Businessweek, where he covered Wall Street, international finance,
and Latin America. Farzad is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard
Business School.
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Preface
It was autumn 1980 in Miami, and Willy Gomez, a tall, thickly
bearded twentysomething who looked like a disco conquistador, was
working security at the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay, a club and hotel
in Coconut Grove, just south of downtown. Outside, a long line
snaked by the poolside entrance to the Mutiny Club. If everyone
in Miami cled to know Willy—his gig won him side jobs from
VIPs and action from a smorbord of chicks—it was because they
wanted inside, where the action was.
Gomez, you could say, was living the dream.
Save for tonight.
As he came down the stairs from the club to the hotel’s lobby, he
heard a commotion.
Coño tu madre! [Fuck your mother!]
Come mierda! [Eat shit!]
Hijo de puta! [Son of a whore!]
Come plomo, maricón! [Eat lead, faggot!]
“Fuck me,” thought Gomez, stifling the urge to piss himself.
Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, a Mutiny regular, was pointing his
at some other thug. So intense was the vitriol that spit was
flying in the air.
“I knew Ricky was a CIA guy—an informant,” Gomez said of Morales.
“I knew he was a problem. I knew he was a rat.”
He also knew his .38 Colt revolver was downright smoke
compared with the Monkey’s semiautomatic: “No way I could let him
turn on me with that.”
The domino tables of Little Havana echoed with cigar-smoked tales
of el Mono (the Monkey) meting out and cheating death: about how
once, in broad daylight, he emptied seventeen rounds from a
machine into another exile; how there was still shrapnel
embedded in the busy Miami street where nine years earlier he had
walked away from a car bombing that should have at least severed
his legs; how Morales, the lucky bastard, later survived a
drive-by shooting that nearly blew out his brains by rolling out
of his car and regrouping until he could kill his would-be
assassin with s to the face.
Morales’s menacing appearance—dead gaze, gorilla-sloped back,
huge ears and hands—resembled that of some early hominid you
might see re-created in the pages of National Geographic.
Which was seemingly the only publication that hadn’t profiled
him. Morales had been featured in Esquire, and cover s
by both Newsday’s magazine and Harper’s were in the pipeline. The
Miami Herald and the Miami News had filing cabinets dedicated to
this mythical exile: informant, bomber, drug dealer, assassin,
quoter of histories. Literary agents were calling.
The Mutiny was where Monkey Morales held court, his bloodstream
coursing with cocaine, THC, Quaaludes, Valium, alcohol and
caffeine.
And two decades of Cuban-American rage.
He always snuck in the back of the hotel and in through the
kitchen, where he’d hand Chef Manny—“Manolito!”—choice little
briquettes of cocaine. And maybe a lobster or hog snapper that he
had personally speared.
So, Willy Gomez, security conquistador, hardly ever crossed paths
with this guy—and he was fine with that. But tonight, for
whatever reason, Monkey Morales felt the need to go apeshit a
couple of yards from the hotel’s front desk.
“!” yelled Gomez, hand on his . “Call the .”
But the lobby had completely emptied out, save for the three of
them. Music from the club wafted downstairs:
I got to ride, ride like the wind
To be free again
“If I blink,” Gomez thought to himself, “this psychopath will
kill me.”
He resolved to squeeze the trigger. “Monkey was already dead, as
far as I was concerned. I was worried his brains would splatter
on the artwork.”
The future flashed before Gomez. Burton Goldberg, the Mutiny’s
hard-assed owner, would throw the mother of all shit fits when
crime-scene photographers captured the mess in his lobby. He had
paid tens of thousands of dollars for Hollywood-caliber set
lighting to showcase his art and orchids, micromanaging the scene
down to the last lumen. “I hired the guy that lit up the Statue
of Liberty in ’seventy-six,” Goldberg would always boast to
guests.
Gomez would then have to quit his job, assuming the Mutiny
survived the shooting. You didn’t just plug Monkey Morales and go
on with your life like nothing happened. Yes, many in Miami who
hated Morales would send Gomez drinks and introduce the dapper
caballero to their daughters and sisters.
But the Monkey had too many friends in dangerous places—spooks,
arms dealers, mercenaries, soldiers of fortune—who would put a
retaliatory hit out on his killer, justified circumstances or
not.
(“Or,” Willy Gomez thought, “if you keep thinking about all this,
the Monkey will fucking turn around and kill you himself.
Focus!”)
Then the elevator door opened.
“!” yelled Gomez, with renewed desperation.
Out walked Rafael Villaverde, Morales’s tablemate. As the scene
came into focus through his tinted glasses, the paunchy exile
grimaced, bit a knuckle and took a hesitating step forward. Willy
Gomez now had his at Morales’s head.
Villaverde held out his hand. “No !” he pleaded, looking at
Gomez. “Ricky. Ricky. Hey. Look. Mira. . . .”
Villaverde then carefully walked up to Morales and whispered
something.
Gomez was still convinced the Monkey would blow him away with a
flick of his wrist. He imagined his head in a puddle of blood.
But Morales rapidly tucked his semiautomatic back into his pants.
His rival bolted, but Gomez didn’t put away his revolver.
“Get the fuck out of here, Ricky!” he yelled to Morales, panting,
almost hyperventilating. “Try! If you even try to fucking come
back . . .”
“You know who you talking to?” back Morales, snarling. “Do.
You. Know?”
He pulled back his coat to reveal a giant grenade on his belt. It
was practically the size of a Florida avocado.
The Monkey flashed a deranged grin and took his time walking out
the front of the Mutiny.
Outside, an oblivious and unruly crowd would likely have formed.
Giggling groupies checking the shrubs and walkways for the club’s
gilded matchboxes, looking inside for Quaaludes and nose candy.
The air would have been pungent with smoke, preparty
rum, various overpowering perfumes, colognes and hairsprays,
high-tide salt water, sweaty rayon, joints.
Desperation.
Aspiration.
Ferraris, Porsches, Rollses, Benzes, Maseratis and Lambos pulled
up, windows wide-open, blasting Blondie, Donna Summer and
“Funkytown.” The Mutiny’s valets were tipped to the cuffs to take
their time, hog the curb along South Bayshore Drive and keep the
beats pumping.
site the hotel, a marina led out to a bay containing more
than one hundred boats, sails flapping, the occasional manatee
scraping up against the bows. Giant yachts ferried area
regulars—who at times could include names like the Bee Gees and
Richard Nixon—to land.
In the shallows, you were bound to find a recently arrived Cuban
refugee swatting away mosquitoes with a , desperate to
snag a small shark or ray on a handline. Anything bigger he’d
hawk a mile north at the big intersection on US-1, where others
from the Mariel boatlift emigration of Cubans that spring and
summer were selling fruit and hog trotters.
Abutting this vista were Miami City Hall and the station.
Back across South Bayshore Drive—“Rubberneck Avenue,” wags were
now calling it—a scene of intense star watching was taking place
outside the Mutiny. Recently spotted:
Mr. Universe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, his head appearing
freakishly small atop the boulder that was his midsection. The
tiny waitress from Michigan he’d hit on wondered to a girlfriend
how she could possibly this beast.
Paul Newman, small as a jockey, and Sally Field were in town with
star director Sydney Pollack to shoot the film Absence of Malice.
Newman drank so much of the Mutiny’s Château Lafite that he
passed out and literally had to be carried up to his suite by a
hostess. A brooding Burt Reynolds kept a watchful eye on Sally.
Playboy hopefuls visited for casting calls in one of the hotel’s
130 fantasy-themed rooms and its Playboy Video set. Penthouse
used the joint, too.
The Eagles had just recorded an album in the studio next door.
Waitresses gossiped about which member tipped—and bedded—the
best.
You’d see Frankie Valli, in boosting disco heels—not to be
confused with Dance Fever host Deney Terrio, who reminded
everyone at the Mutiny that, hey, you know, he coached Travolta
for Saturday Night Fever.
And “Super Freak”–destined Rick James, traveling with a
delegation of coke whores and a croc-skin man purse full of
dainty gold utensils for cutting and sniffing lines. It’s true:
every other word out of his mouth was “bitch.” “Slick Rick” laid
into a waitress who accidentally called him “miss.”
Ted Kennedy, fresh off conceding the Democratic presidential
nomination, had often been deep in his cups at the Mutiny, where
he hated bumping into Jimmy Carter wingman Hamilton Jordan, who
was constantly in Miami to negotiate asylum in Panama for the
deposed shah of Iran. Kennedy picked a fight with the club’s DJ,
who was helping Julio Iglesias, a Mutiny resident, hype his
latest record. You catch all that?
The Doobie Brothers partied hard at the Mutiny, where the joke
was they were into way more than just doobies—no: the powdery
stuff was what inspired band members and their roadies to
mindlessly throw cash down from their windows.
And always wandering the grounds like a lost dog was David Crosby
of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—his mustache and teeth nasty from
constantly smoking freebase cocaine with a small blowtorch.
For all the intense people watching at 2951 South Bayshore Drive,
however, the true players at the Mutiny had nothing to do with
Hollywood or Motown or the Beltway.
They were Miami’s ruling drug lords. With bullets flying
everywhere there at all hours of the day, the town was
increasingly being called Dodge City. And so these guys were its
“cocaine cowboys,” the Latin masterminds of the era’s go-go
wonder drug: yeyo, perico, toot, snow, white pony. Cocaine. And
the Mutiny was their favorite saloon.
It was in this parallel universe that the Mutiny’s free-spending
cocaine lords swapped their old-world names (say, Wilfredo Perez
del Cayo) for Cubano goodfella handles like Carlene, Redbeard,
Coca-Cola, el Loco, the Boys, Recotado (“Stocky”), Veneno
(“Venom”). Weetchie, Chunky, Peloo, Perro (“Dog”), Mungy. Venao
(“Deer”), Raspao (“Snow Cone”), the Big Blonde, Super Papi.
Chino, Albertico, Kiki.
Even their pets lived extra large.
Kingpin Mario Tabraue had a chimp named Caesar, whom he adorned
with a gold-rope necklace holding a fifty-peso gold coin, an
eighteen-karat ID bracelet with his name in diamonds and a
ladies’ Rolex Presidential. The primate was partial to
turtlenecks and a New York baseball cap, and proudly rode
in his owner’s Benz while waving a Cuban cigar.
They’d shuttle to and from Tabraue’s mansion around the corner,
where panthers, pythons, raptors and even a toucan roamed the
grounds. Tabraue fed live rats to a two-headed snake and an owl
he kept in a Plexiglas cage. He would sometimes answer the door
with a tarantula peeking out from under his cap.
“Every known narcotic trafficker in Miami would be at the
Mutiny,” recalled Diosdado “D. C.” Diaz, a Miami
detective. “You’d see their wives and mistresses there. Their hit
men. They’d throw a big celebration every time they brought in a
load; they’d send Cristal and Dom to dealers at other tables. I’d
follow the bottles and jot down their license plate numbers.”
So vital was the Mutiny for watching the interplay of dealers,
informants, celebs and public figures, he says, that authorities
were understandably loath to disturb the ecosystem. “Why stir up
the pot and e them all away?” Diaz said.
Indeed, just as Monkey Morales was about to get his brains blown
out by the bouncer in the lobby, his tablemate, one of Miami’s
biggest cocaine dealers, attempted to bribe D. C. Diaz with a
Rolex and an antique, World War II–issue . However, the
kingpin refused to part ways with a silencer-equipped MAC-10
submachine that Monkey had lent him and wanted back.
On the very week Morales stared down Gomez, owner Burton Goldberg
threw a raucous Halloween bash at the club.
Yes, you could argue Miami was now devolving into a third-world
republic that was bound to break off and sink into the Atlantic.
But the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay, adorned with lush, carefully lit
foliage and stunning women, was raking it in.
And so the woolly-chested Goldberg donned two-inch eyelashes, a
flowing blond wig and a long white gown, and skipped around
tapping guests with his wand—a fairy godmother pretending to
sprinkle magic pixie dust.
Subtle.
1
Heaven in Hell
Burton 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, killings and the sudden arrival of 125
thousand Cuban refugees, many of them sprung right from Fidel
Castro’s jails.
By 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.
“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. “The druggies,” he said, “the
celebs, the crooked pols, spies, the informants, cops—good and
bad—were all there.”
America in the late 1970s and early ’eighties was in a pronounced
funk: inflation and unemployment were high; consumer sentiment
was in the dumps. 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). According to one study
from Florida International University in Miami, at least
one-third of the city’s economic output was derived from
narcotics at the time.
So much hot money was sloshing around Miami that the Mutiny was
selling more bottles of Dom Perignon than any other establishment
on the planet, according to the bubbly’s distributor, whose
executives visited in disbelief at the turn of the decade. They
heard right: a suite at the hotel was converted into a giant
walk-in cooler; beautiful women would ooh and ahh at op
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. Frequent visitors kept their s tucked in the cushions,
and cases of cash and cocaine in their suites. Bullets flew.
Thugs were nabbed. Refugees snuck in. Cops were bribed. Dopers
were recorded. Pilots were hired. Contracts were placed. Plots
were hatched.
You might recognize this backdrop as the Babylon Club in the
movie face, whose creators, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma,
stayed at the Mutiny and sought permission to film there. In
Stone’s screenplay, he accidentally referenced the Mutiny Club;
stars Al Pacino, Steven Bauer and other supporting cast checked
in at the hotel.
Miami Vice stars were also gravitationally pulled to the Mutiny.
Don Johnson partied there, and Philip Michael Thomas moved in
with his family and insisted on parking his purple imitation
Ferrari out front on the curb. The hit show’s creators studied
agents and kingpins at the Mutiny; one cooperating drug lord even
finagled his way onto two episodes.
The Miami of the Mutiny’s heyday abounded with the surreal.
So much marijuana was getting confiscated in the waters around
South Florida that the Florida Power & Light Company was
rtunistically burning tons of it to run its generators: 732
pounds of pot could replace a barrel of crude. Take that, energy
crisis!
Area McDonald’s restaurants were running out of their tiny
spoon-tipped coffee stirrers—they were perfect, it turned out,
for portioning and sniffing cocaine. Mutiny dopers wore bronzed
ones around their necks to advertise how far they’d come.
Burger King, meanwhile, loaned the overwhelmed county morgue a
refrigerated truck. Bodies were turning up in gator-infested
canals; in duffel bags alongside the turnpike; bobbing out of
drums, bins and shopping carts in marinas along Biscayne Bay.
Machine- fire rained over the parking lot of the city’s
busiest mall.
All of which would soon land Miami on the cover of Time magazine
as “Paradise Lost.”
The Mutiny stood out as a lush oasis within this apocalypse. The
Magic City was now the planet’s cocaine entrepôt—its Federal
Reserve branch was showing a five-billion-dollar cash surplus—and
so this hotel and club became the place south of Studio 54 to
blow illegal tender.
The club’s seventy-five-dollar metal membership card, embossed
with the Mutiny’s winking pirate logo, got you in the door and
certainly came in handy for cutting and snorting lines.
But it was cash—lots and lots of it—that got you everything else:
Cases of 150-dollar-a-bottle Dom Perignon emptied into your hot
tub? Right away!
A private jet for jaunts to the islands, stocked with Mutiny
girls, a five-man crew and stone crab claws on dry ice? No sweat.
Your machine s, bullets and silencers discreetly locked in a
chest in the champagne cave? Sin problema. Plus, a hostess would
hide your piece in her skirt if the cops showed up, while another
Mutiny girl was adept at clicking her stilettos against guys on
the dance floor to check for ankle holsters.
“We couldn’t just walk into the Mutiny with a cheap rubber
watch,” said Wayne Black, the undercover cop, who would borrow a
Rolex from the evidence locker before going there. “You’d
be buying Dom with the bad guys. You owned a Pinto but drove home
a Jag. ‘Daddy,’ your kid would say, ‘the neighbors say you sell
drugs.’”
None of which would ever make the press release that the
otherwise media-shy Mutiny felt the need to put out to start
1981, the year when Miami became America’s murder capital.
THE MOST UNUSUAL HOTEL IN THE COUNTRY
COCONUT GROVE, FLA.
A hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room.
This variation of the noted Gertrude Stein quotation is a
frequent complaint of jaded travelers who are convinced that all
hotel rooms look alike.
One hotel, located just 15 minutes south of Miami—the Hotel
Mutiny at Sailboat Bay in Coconut Grove—is proof, in the words of
Ira Gershwin, that “it ain’t necessarily so.”
At the Mutiny, no two rooms look alike. Every room and suite is
decorated with its own unduplicated, luxurious and, frequently,
exotic motif.
Decorative themes are based on various ideas. Some are inspired
by faraway locales, some sound like titles to novels, some to
states of mind and others to flights of fancy.
“Marakesh,” “Coconut Grove,” “Singapore,” “Zapata’s Retreat,”
“House of the Setting Sun,” “Midnight Express,” “Cloud 9,” “Lunar
Dreams” and “Fourth Dimension” are among them.
Themes are not developed with a single picture or ornament.
Rather, the furniture, draperies, art, artifacts, and the basic
layout of the rooms all conform to the individual motifs.
A full-time staff of six works at decorating the Mutiny. Two
members of the decorating staff work full-time on flower
arrangements. As guests walk down the halls, often covered in
Oriental rugs, it is not uncommon for them to see elaborate
arrangements of rare flowers—Peruvian lilies, birds-of-paradise
and the like.
Roman baths and mirrored ceilings are found in some rooms, and
many have panoramic views of Sailboat Bay.
Recently opened rooms include “Shoko,” done on the theme of a
Japanese inn or ryokan, “Balinese Isle,” a two-bedroom suite with
a setting of a rain forest in Bali, and the Moroccan wing with
“Zirka,” “Tlata Ketama,” “Marakesh” and “Bourabech,” all named
for Moroccan cities.
“Shoko” is designed like a room in a Japanese ryokan. Behind the
bed is a wall of shoji screens, a framed kimono is ed on a
wall, a blue-and-white country fabric is used to upholster the
furniture and walls and there are carved stone statues from
Japan. A low custom-made table is surrounded by cushions on the
floor.
“Balinese Isle” is a two-bedroom suite designed around a large
screen painted by hand with a scene from a rain forest,
highlighted by bamboo lights. The suite includes original
Balinese oil paintings, and a tiki bar and furniture custom-made
in the hotel from natural rattan.
Throughout the Moroccan wing, a guest will see a combination of
terra-cotta floors and carpeting and plasterwork deliberately
designed to give the impression of old Moorish architecture, with
walls that have lost part of their plaster. A specially designed
emblem was pressed repeatedly in cement to create the effect,
then four layers of plaster were laid over that, with occasional
areas left uncovered. On each layer, several coats of oil were
applied, seasoned, waxed and buffed.
“Zirka,” named for a city famous for its fountains, has in the
room a large round tub designed to look like a fountain with
light streaming down on it. Moroccan arches surround the tub as
well as the bed, and backlighted stained glass is embedded in the
plaster of the arches. Wrought iron doors and accessories
complete the effect.
“Tlata Ketama” is a large city in Morocco. The room concentrates
on the use of copper, including custom-made copper light
fixtures, copper-treated furniture and copper-glazed Moroccan
tiles around the tub. The room also has large plaster columns
with capitals created by a Spanish artist living in Florida.
Dining at the Mutiny is as unusual as its rooms. There are no
“walk-in” dinner guests. Each diner must be a member of the
Mutiny Club or a hotel guest. The club’s large international
membership is sustained by the quality of the food and the
service.
Hostesses and waitresses at the club, who do not wear uniforms,
wear fashionable gowns, and at lunch, often wear broad-brimmed,
tropical hats.
Following dinner, the music starts for disco dancing. During the
course of the late evening, the club has sophisticated shows.
Service at the Mutiny is on a par with the setting and the
cuisine. In the morning, guests are brought a festive,
complimentary continental breakfast that includes five or six
fresh fruits, freshly squeezed orange juice and butter
croissants, along with the morning newspaper.
Coconut Grove is one of the most interesting communities in
southern Florida with a widely diverse population that includes
many working artists. Magnificent flowers and trees in the area
surround the Mutiny in subtropical abundance. Guests can relax in
a large wooden hot tub in the middle of a hanging garden, beneath
a waterfall or around the swimming pool where an alfresco lunch
is served.
2
Monkey in the Middle
Owning a fantasyland for outlaws in the hellscape that was
Cocaine Miami had hardly been in the cards for New Jersey–born
Burton Goldberg when the forty-year-old developer set his s
on Coconut Grove in the mid-1960s. True, his her, Sol,
part-owned midtown Manhattan’s Navarro Hotel, where mafiosi like
Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano held court in the 1950s. But
Goldberg is adamant that he had “absolutely nothing” to do with
the Navarro, and bristles at any suggestions of mob ties.
Coconut Grove, founded in the mid-nineteenth century as Cocoanut
Grove and annexed by the city of Miami in 1925, was an offbeat
bohemian village whose residents left their doors open and
allowed strangers to pluck mangoes off their trees. In 1882, its
Bay View House (later renamed the Peacock Inn) became the first
hotel on the South Florida mainland below Palm Beach. Up until
its turn-of-the-century conversion into a school, the inn was a
hub for Miami’s first community organizers.
The great hurricane of 1926 obliterated Coconut Grove and hit the
reset button on the rest of Miami.
A parcel of land overlooking the water at the corner of South
Bayshore Drive and McFarlane Road used to house the Peacock Inn’s
general store. In 1966, Burton Goldberg bought the plot from its
eventual inheritor, a New England Christian Scientist.
By then, Coconut Grove was Miami’s hippie central. Women with
hairy armpits sunned topless in the park by the marina. Its
Dinner Key Auditorium is where Doors frontman Jim Morrison
infamously exposed himself to a sellout crowd. The joke in the
Grove’s head shops and incense bode was that the most violent
thing in those parts were the wild roosters that chased the
mailmen.
The neighborhood was a y escape from the mayhem a few miles
away: downtown Miami and Little Havana were getting up and
bombed by characters like Ricardo Morales.
Nineteen sixties South Florida played host to the mob’s
internecine “bookie wars,” while thousands of Cuban exiles in and
around Miami channeled their testosterone into what they assumed
would be a chance to take out Fidel Castro and recl Cuba.
Miami hosted dozens of CIA-run para camps and dummy
companies that could procure and ship any materiel at a moment’s
notice. Swift boats. Demolition. Underwater sabotage. Machine
s, plastic explosives and recoilless s. Cuban men and
adolescents alike were steeped in the agency’s dark arts of
regime change.
Cuban exiles and the American Mafia had a shared history. During
the prerevolutionary dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba was
the playground of the mob, a sort of Ve in the Caribbean.
Overlords like Luciano, Lansky and Florida-based Santo
Trafficante owned many of Havana’s casino resorts. They flew and
cruised in to the island to dine on manatee and flamingo steaks;
whore with every shape, size and color of chica; buy cops and
judges and watch live sex shows that would have gotten them
arrested in the States. It was hedonism with no consequences, as
long as you paid off the right people.
In 1959, when Fidel Castro wrested control of Cuba, he
nationalized the resorts and had their slot machines smashed in
the streets. During the ensuing purge, Ricardo Morales, a
twenty-year-old law school student, signed up for Castro’s secret
.
Al pared! Al pared! (“To the wall!”). The Cuban street bayed for
more bodies to be brought before the firing squads. The old
regime’s cronies, enforcers and accused traitors were dragged out
and stood up against pockmarked walls. Some of the condemned were
drained of their blood—syringe after syringe—until they were
about to pass out, the better to use fewer precious bullets in
finishing them off.
Morales quickly grew disenchanted with the secret and
wanted out of Castro’s Cuba. He may also have been flipped by the
CIA, which had assets on the ground in Havana, just as Fidel
Castro had moles up in Miami.
Either way, South Florida echo-chambered with rumors that the
White House would soon take out Castro, much as it had snuffed
out other third-world regimes that it didn’t like. hers, sons
and brothers in Miami’s exile community disappeared for days on
end into training camps in the Everglades and to run drills miles
off the coast. Something was coming down the pike. “I had to
choose between Moscow and Washington,” Morales later quipped. In
1960, he finally defected through the Brazilian embassy and
escaped to South Florida.
In Miami, Morales signed up for Operation 40, an assassination
group that targeted Castro loyalists and assets in Cuba and
abroad. In the early 1960s, Miami’s CIA branch—stocked with
exiles, case agents, front companies, munitions and real
estate—grew into the world’s biggest.
Morales’s aunt and seven-year-old niece lived in a small
apartment in Little Havana, just west of downtown Miami. An
overgrown mango tree touched the bedroom window. Inside, under
the bed, Morales left a bomb and a couple of s with
instructions that if he ever came running through the apartment,
whoever was at home had to race to the bedroom, throw him the
s and escape down the mango tree. The last one out had to pull
the pin on the bomb. His aunt constantly rehearsed the drill with
his niece, Lynette. “I still see that thing under the bed,” she
said. “Let me tell you: it was not a small bomb. It is hilarious
to think back on it, and then you just shake your head.”
But Miami exiles’ belief that taking back Cuba was a fait
accompli was smashed in April of 1961, when Castro’s forces
thwarted Brigade 2506—the 1,400 CIA-trained paramilitaries (most
of them South Florida exiles) who attempted to invade Cuba at the
Bay of Pigs.
It wasn’t even close. The Kennedy administration, which inherited
the top secret invasion from Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA, opted not
to provide air reinforcements. The anti-Castro
“Brigadesmen”—Cuba’s would-be libertadores—who weren’t killed or
repelled out to sea were taken prisoner.
News of which put Miami in a state of shock and mourning. The
mayor went on television to plead in Spanish: “We urge the Cuban
colony exiles that are here to remain calm and composed, and we
pray to God that Cuba’s freedom will flourish from the blood that
is being shed.”
It was an all-around catastrophe for Washington: Fidel Castro
thumped his chest and inspired leftists the world over,
Cuban-Americans seethed at President Kennedy for abandoning their
men, and Havana was now blowing kisses to Soviet Russia.
To pile on the insult, Castro leveraged more than 1,100 Bay of
Pigs captives to shake down the US for 53 million dollars in
cash, food and medical supplies—all of which were critical to the
young regime’s survival. The Bay of Pigs was a coup . . . for
Fidel Castro.
Even so, most everyone in Miami operated under the assumption
that there would be a rematch. Kennedy himself came to Miami’s
Orange in late 1962 to assure returning prisoners that
Brigade 2506’s would be returned to Havana. The CIA
maintained a campaign of secret exile-led raids.
In 1963, Morales regaled the Miami Herald with the story of how
he and nine fellow exiles in two fast boats nearly destroyed a
refinery on the coast of Cuba. He was desperate to see more
action—and crushed when the CIA under President Lyndon B. Johnson
wound down its clandestine campaign against Castro.
A year later, a restless Morales reluctantly agreed to be shipped
to the Belgian Congo, where he and a top secret brigade of Cuban
exiles battled leftist rebels allied with Soviet-trained Cuban
troops. Many of the Congolese soldiers were armed with nothing
more than spears, having been brainwashed by witch doctors. The
Cuban-American mercenaries had such an easy time mowing them down
that Morales’s comrades compared their weapons to fire hoses.
Morales took a bullet to the spine, but kept shooting. For much
of this commando tour, a terrified little Congolese girl latched
onto his shoulders and slept in his arms at night. The memory
would forever haunt the her of four.
In 1965, Morales returned to Miami, disillusioned and
traumatized. So much for the rematch against Fidel Castro—Kennedy
was dead and the Vietnam War was now front and center in the Cold
War.
South Florida, meanwhile, still teemed with spies, double agents,
arms smugglers, Mafia men and retired dictators, providing no
shortage of gigs for orphaned mercenaries.
Morales took a job parking cars at a mob-owned steak house in
Miami Beach and let it be known that this was where he kept
office hours and solicited contract work.
Fifteen miles down the coastline in Coconut Grove: in 1967,
Burton Goldberg hired a crane to park a houseboat on the bend of
South Bayshore Drive. The vessel would serve as a quirky
preconstruction sales office for his forthcoming building,
Sailboat Bay.
This was while Ricardo Morales, acting as a freelance bomber,
scuba dived up to the back of a mobster’s house in Miami Beach. A
rival wanted the wner offed so he could move in on his wife,
a Playboy bunny. It turned out that the gangster, his wife and
four children were ing inside when a pair of bombs ripped
apart the carport. All survived. Maybe Morales wanted it this
way. Who knows?
The Miami Herald ran a “Bombing Box Score” of recent explosions,
perpetrators still at large. (Morales, it turned out, was
responsible for at least half of the incidents, including the
dynamiting of a Miami cop’s front lawn and the double bombing of
a numbers racket in South Beach.)
In another contract hit, Morales a convicted jewel hustler
in the face. The victim survived, and Monkey was never charged.
Later in 1967, for reasons unknown, Morales pulled up to a Cuban
exile in broad Little Havana daylight and sprayed him with
seventeen rounds from a silencer-equipped .45-caliber M3
submachine . Again, the victim somehow managed to live. He
never pressed charges. Morales bragged about the episode as “just
another day at the office.”
In 1968, Morales bombed a firm that forwarded food and medicine
to Cuba. This time, however, found his fingerprints on C-4
explosive. In his house, they seized a bomb and detonator.
Finally arrested, the Monkey was facing serious time.
But the wily Morales promised the FBI an even bigger catch: the
terrorists who had just attempted to attack a Polish freighter at
the Port of Miami with a shoulder-held bazooka. The shell dented
the ship’s hull, and the State Department had to issue an
official apology to (Communist) Poland.
Morales infiltrated the gang, supplying the men and women with
phony dynamite as the FBI recorded his conversations with the
ringleaders. Morales testified against the culprits and won his
freedom. “Chubby-cheeked Morales,” as a front-page story in the
Miami Herald described him, “testified that he didn’t ask to get
paid for his services to the FBI, nor did he get any promises for
his undercover work.”
He did, however, now have an FBI bodyguard shadowing him.
Morales, twenty-nine, was a marked man in Miami, having betrayed
nearly a dozen fellow exiles who were widely regarded as freedom
fighters for targeting that freighter. Whispers echoed that he
was still in the employ of Fidel Castro.
Down in Coconut Grove, Burton Goldberg cut the ribbon on his
twelve-story Sailboat Bay, billed as the Grove’s first high-rise
apartment. He touted how residents would be privy to a panorama
of security cameras that transmitted various live angles to an
in-house TV channel.
Sailboat Bay’s aesthetic was decidedly white and white-collar.
The attorney who represented Linda Lovelace, star of the porn
film Deep Throat—much of which was in a house around the
corner—kept an office upstairs.
Earl Smalley Jr., the majority owner of the league-dominating
Miami Dolphins, scored a suite overlooking the pool. By his bed
was a pink pneumatic fuck bench that beach babes could saddle up
on after long days on his speedboat, which was docked in adjacent
Dinner Key Marina.
In late 1971, Goldberg opened a small club and restaurant atop
the lobby. He called it the Mutiny. He also wanted to convert
Sailboat Bay’s mixed-apartment-and-office concept into a boutique
hotel called the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. “I’d call it the Sex
Hotel if I could,” he said. “This was all about the sexual
revolution. The pill. Boy meets girl. I wanted swingers.” But it
had to be upscale and classy.
Goldberg’s timing could not have been better: the Republican
nominating convention was coming back to Miami Beach. Richard
Nixon’s best friend, banker Bebe Rebozo, often wined and dined
guests at the Mutiny while his yacht was out front. E. Howard
Hunt, the GOP operative who was chief political officer for the
CIA when Castro rose to power, lived in Coconut Grove and drank
at the Mutiny’s bar. Baron Joseph “Sepy” De Bicske Dobronyi—the
internationally renowned aristocrat, nude sculptor and ladies’
man—was bringing beauts and European royalty to Coconut Grove.
The Super and perfect season–bound Miami Dolphins were
drawing national press; all sorts of media and sports VIPs
flocked to the Mutiny.
Best of all for Burton Goldberg: two massive commodity booms were
about to pack Miami with free-spending horndogs.
For starters, the global oil shock of 1973 gave rise to the era
of the “Dame Dos” (Spanish for “Give Me Twos”)—oil-rich
Venezuelans who’d flock to Miami to strip shelves bare, spend big
on fine food and wines and luxuriate at resorts. Also known as
the Cows of Caracas, these men would often fly in with their
families in the morning, leave their planes at Miami
International and send their wives and daughters to shop at
Dadeland Mall—all while they relaxed, wined, dined and fornicated
at the Mutiny. They’d all reunite in the evening at Miami
International Airport to fly back to South America.
At the same time, thousands of Miami’s Cuban exiles dived
headlong into smuggling marijuana. After all, this was the 1970s.
Everyone in America wanted good weed, and no one knew how to
smuggle it into the country better than South Florida Cubans who
spent a decade and a half memorizing every nook and cranny of the
state coastline, with help from the CIA.
Adding urgency to their career pivot: in 1975, the government of
the Bahamas (free of British colonial rule for two years) banned
US fishermen from its waters, on the justification that it needed
to defend lobster from overexploitation by Florida trappers. This
gave the nation’s corrupt government more nationalistic
cred—i.e., “Our seafood is our natural endowment, not to be
plundered by the richest country on the planet.”
Miami’s seafood industry was overwhelmingly Cuban. Boat captains
and laborers were at most a degree of separation from someone who
had served at the Bay of Pigs, men who had by now sublimated
their CIA training to storm Cuba into smuggling marijuana up and
down the coast of Florida.
“Some of [these exiles] made over one hundred, two hundred, three
hundred missions to Cuba . . . going in against the most heavily
patrolled coast that I’ve ever heard of,” explained a commando
who had trained many of them. “These people came out knowing how
you do it. . . . And they found it absolutely child’s play when
they started in [with drug smuggling] over here, because US law
didn’t have that kind of defense. They didn’t even
need most of their expertise.”
Accordingly, one Jose Medardo Alvero-Cruz, a charismatic Brigade
veteran, became known as “King of the River,” for being connected
to just about every Cuban fisherman and vessel docked along the
Miami River. His value proposition to the men and their crews was
straightforward: they no longer had to sully their hands on
lobster traps, bycatch and fish guts; they could now become rich
smuggling in neatly packed bales of marijuana—dubbed “square
groupers”—off giant ships Alvero was anchoring miles off the
coast.
The new thinking: Why just sit around and go poor when there was
easy marijuana millions to be made? Look, hermano: Fidel Castro
took your wealth, and Washington let him keep it. Bay of Pigs II
wasn’t happening anytime soon—surely not under a post-Watergate
Democratic president, who would be in no mood to prioritize
Havana. No, fuck that: it was time to get paid.
Not that Miami’s reefer madness was solely supplied by Cuban
smugglers. Mutiny waitress Deb Kendrick moonlighted as an
unlikely smuggler for the Black Tunas, a marijuana gang run by
two Jewish peddlers from Philadelphia.
Loaded, padlocked sedans would get delivered to her at the
Mutiny, fresh off a barge on the Miami River, ready to be driven
up the East Coast for delivery to various doormen on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side. “I was ed to death,” said the Michigan
native. “The cars stunk. I stunk. I was too terrified to stop.”
But blond, 105 pounds, and five feet one, she didn’t exactly fit
the profile of a drug runner.
3
Snow in Miami
Sometime in 1976, a Venezuelan oil trader nicknamed the Sultan of
Caracas summoned his Mutiny server to bring him a 1.5-liter
magnum of Château Lafite Rothschild 1827. When his waitress tried
to gently remind him that the Mutiny only took cash, “el Sultan”
asked for a phone, plugged it into his table, made one call and
had thirty thousand dollars delivered right to the hotel.
“Everyone who’d come from Caracas, I’d put them up at the
Mutiny,” said Norman Canter, a Miami businessman who was dating a
cocktail waitress who worked there. “You started seeing a lot of
deals going down. Guy in a long ponytail and black suit walks in.
Takes a drink at the bar. Looks around and takes a table for
stone crabs. Always a lot of women around. It was like
Casablanca. It had that aura. The mystery. The Venezuelans wanted
women, and the women were at the Mutiny.”
It was getting ever harder to score a table at the Mutiny Club.
By 1976, its newsletter was showcasing three dozen “Mutiny
Girls,” including a recently hired Playboy Club bunny, a
Doublemint twin and stunners from Hungary, Australia, Canada,
Texas, Poland and Cuba:
Fresh, vibrant, aware. An international sampling of beauty. They
come from all over the world with a variety of backgrounds.
Actresses, top fashion models, singers and dancers. They’re
carefully screened and selected from a multitude of applicants.
Silka, a Dominican brunette who spoke four languages, helped
guests shop, land babysitters, replace lost passports and ship
their loot back home. “Silka, soft as her name,” read a brochure,
“has become an invaluable friend to our international members.”
Bo Crane, the Mutiny’s first DJ, remembered Tom Jones, the
international sex icon of “What’s New Pussycat?” fame, walking in
one night. “The dance floor was the size of a postage stamp,” he
said, “but the women went nuts. Barry White was fucking huge
then. Seduction music. You’d get up and grind. It felt like the
hottest place on the planet.”
So big had the destination become that it was canonized by
artists Crosby & Nash in the song “Mutiny” and in the
Stills-Young Band’s “Midnight on the Bay”—the latter penned by
Neil Young on a Mutiny cocktail napkin in the bay-windowed booth
atop the valet.
Both Crosby and Young had been mistaken for hobos by the hotel
staff, which Burton Goldberg drilled to enforce a strict dress
code (even if the owner himself sometimes sat naked at his
penthouse desk overlooking the bay).
By 1977, the likes of Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Prince Faisal of
Jordan, the ex-president of Colombia, Joe DiMaggio, Rod Serling
and Jackie Mason were turning up at the Mutiny. The place was so
consistently mobbed by big spenders that Goldberg added a more
exclusive level he called the Upper Deck.
The Mutiny Club’s seafaring theme, which Goldberg had signed off
on just six years earlier, now expanded to levels known as the
Poop Deck and the Lower Deck. Also in the offing: a tiki bar
above the pool that would be called the Gangplank.
Members could now rent the Tonga—a seventy-two-foot ketch once
owned by Hollywood swashbuckler Errol Flynn—a six-seater,
twin-engine Aerostar plane or a turbocharged Beechcraft B60.
“We can supply a Mutiny girl and ample provisions,” touted an ad.
In 1978, Goldberg brought in San Francisco set designer Carolyn
Robbins to complete the Mutiny’s multiyear transformation into a
hotel with 130 individually designed fantasy rooms. “You walked
into the club and realized it was all about the seduction of the
Latin male,” she said. “Burton would always yell: ‘We are a sexy
place! Don’t you know what a sexy place looks like? What do sexy
people want?’”
The owner shuttled telenovela-grade beauties to Caracas, Bogotá
and Panama City to sell memberships, wine and dine executives and
extend reciprocity to exclusive South American clubs, such as
Colombia’s Unicorn Disco.
As the Mutiny’s caliber of VIPs ever higher (Hollywood
starlets, wealthy Latin families in the crosshairs of
kippers), Goldberg hired Fernando Puig, a hulking Bay of Pigs
veteran, to run security. During the botched 1961 invasion of
Cuba, Puig was stationed by the CIA in Nicaragua, where he became
best friends with Anastasio Somoza, next in line in a dynastic
family to run the Central American country.
By the time Puig was hired at the Mutiny, Somoza was preparing to
flee Nicaragua with billions and cronies in tow. Though the
dictator was unwelcome in the US (he would later get assassinated
in Paraguay), Somoza’s cabinet and colonels flocked to Miami—to
work for Fernando Puig’s security firm. They all became active
members of the Mutiny.
Norman Canter remembers all sorts of types crowding into
the Mutiny in the mid- to late 1970s. A pair of Venezuelan air
force guys approached him to see what he thought about their
smuggling in cocaine several times a week in their
planes. Could he help them cut and place the kilos in Miami? Did
he know people?
Canter said using marijuana was as illicit as he would get. “I
didn’t know cocaine, and I didn’t do cocaine,” he said.
Perhaps he hadn’t read the January 1975 issue of Playboy that was
making the rounds up and down the Mutiny. In a lengthy feature
titled “A Very Expensive High: The Truth About Cocaine,” the
magazine observed:
A blizzard of cocaine is blowing over us, little spoons hanging
from our necks like crucifixes, snorting noises in the next room
coming from people who don’t have colds, people working
twenty-hour days who used to work four. . . . Who, even as
recently as five years ago, would have guessed that otherwise
straight people, doctors, lawyers and merchant chiefs, would be
snorting what many were calling “flake,” “blow” and “lady”?
Cocaine was being promoted as the Dom Perignon of illegal
narcotics: non–habit forming, mind opening, invigorating,
high-class. No less than Thomas Edison thought best under its
influence, and Sigmund Freud wrote poems about it. “That issue
was everywhere,” says Mutiny girl Joanna Christopher. “It was the
topic of conversation not just at the club but at your dentist’s
office and at your exercise classes. Everyone wanted to try
cocaine.”
Mutiny member Nelson Aguilar recalled his first bump. In 1971, at
age thirteen, he was the class president at Ada Merritt Junior
High, where he won a trophy for his speech on the life of Martin
Luther King Jr. He was doing so well that his aunt (his guardian)
moved him to a school in a more well-to-do neigborhood. To earn
money on the side, Aguilar signed on as a door-to-door sales boy
for the Miami Herald. “It was,” he said, “the best thing. I was
so awesome at selling subscriptions; I shattered fucking records.
You would knock on the door and Cuban-Americans would shout back:
‘What? The Miami Herald? It’s Communist! Here’s the money. But
it’s for you, okay? Just don’t ever send the fucking paper!’”
Within a year, Aguilar was clearing one hundred dollars a week
and eyeing a promotion that promised him five times as much
in salary and commissions—a fortune for a teenager in the early
1970s. But his big cousin Jesús, a high school dropout,
intervened with other plans. One night, while the boys were being
chauffered in Jesús’s new Cutlass Supreme (he was sixteen and had
his own driver), the older cousin stuck a under Nelson’s
nose. “Sniff!” he ordered from the front seat. “Come on, bro.
Sniff!”
“When I did that hit,” said Aguilar, “the whole world—anything,
anything became possible. No doubt that you ever had meant
anything anymore. It was euphoria—like heaven.” Aguilar said his
eyes felt like they had 360-degree vision. His heart raced, and
he felt like running a marathon. And saving starving kids. And
fucking for hours on end. And then doing more coke.
“You suddenly had all the answers to every problem the world ever
had,” he said. “Bam! Solved. The only problem is, no one woke up
the next day to do all that solving. Reality sets in. And then
you just feel dirty.”
It took Aguilar little time to drop out of school. Aguilar
remembered shooting up signs on the downtown expressway with his
big cousin’s .44 Magnum. He recalled Jesús somehow managing to
shoot himself in the hand; he was so coked out that, bloodied
left fist be damned, he just at everything else on the
expressway while ordering his driver to go faster. Faster.
FASTER!
In 1975, a gregarious Peruvian named Pepe Negaro barnstormed the
Mutiny with samples of his high-purity cocaine, which he had dyed
light pink and spritzed to smell like bubble gum, ostensibly to
razzle-dazzle the ladies. He was an absolute hit at the club,
recalls then-manager Chuck Volpe. Liza Minnelli latched onto him,
and he had little trouble bedding women who were mesmerized by
his charm and nose candy.
Pepe the Peruvian had his cocaine smuggled into Miami
International Airport from Lima in giant cored-out wood hangers,
the kind that might hold a heavy fur or knee-length leather coat.
They’d then get driven over to the Mutiny in the trunk of limos
he owned with a Miami heroin dealer.
When he wasn’t boinking various women in his suite at the Mutiny,
Negaro would carefully pry apart the hangers and portion out
sample sizes in recled Vicks s.
There was a radio station on the fifth floor of the Mutiny. Its
Sunday night DJ was so fond of Negaro’s import that he would cue
up especially long jazz LPs while he was downstairs mooching
stuff to nose-binge. He sniffled so much that listeners across
Miami assumed he had a permanent cold.
Cop Wayne Black wired an informant inside the Mutiny a