Welcome to HOTEL SCARFACE
It was THE favoured hangout for drug lords and rock stars – and was the inspiration for Al Pacino’s Cuban killer, Tony Montana. Now a new book reveals the inside story of the Dom Pérignon-popping excess of the
So much hot money was sloshing around Miami that the Mutiny, the favourite haunt of gangsters, celebrities and politicians, was selling more bottles of Dom Pérignon than any other establishment on the planet.
And among the characters who packed into the Mutiny in the years when the club and hotel provided the inspiration for the Babylon Club in 1983’s gangster classic Scarface, one was more memorable than any other.
Caesar wore a gold-rope necklace holding a 50peso gold coin, an 18-carat ID bracelet with his name in diamonds and a ladies’ Rolex Presidential. And he rode shotgun in a MercedesBenz waving a Cuban cigar.
Why so memorable? Because Caesar, the constant companion of drug kingpin Mario Tabraue, was a chimp. At the Mutiny, where Miami’s drug lords held court, even their pets lived large.
In the drug-and-murder capital of America, ravaged in the late Seventies and early Eighties by race riots, gun killings and the steady arrival by boat of 125,000 Cuban refugees – many of them unleashed by Castro from prisons and asylums – the Mutiny was a lush oasis where the underworld met high society.
Some nights, as Ferraris and Lamborghinis pulled up outside and giant yachts moored under in the marina opposite, you might see Arnold Schwarzenegger flirting with a hostess, or Paul Newman drinking so much Château Lafite that he passed out and had to be carried up to his suite.
Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Prince Faisal of Jordan, and Jackie Mason all stopped by during the Mutiny’s peak. The Eagles recorded in the studio next door, and waitresses gossiped about which member tipped – and bedded – the best. Playboy hopefuls visited for casting calls in one of the hotel’s 130 fantasythemed rooms.
Mutiny DJ Bo Crane recalled Tom Jones walking in one night. ‘The women went nuts. It felt like the hottest place on the planet.’
Ted Kennedy often drank there, once picking a fight with the DJ, who was helping Julio Iglesias, a Mutiny resident, hype his latest record. Neil Young was once mistaken for a hobo by the hotel staff.
Owner Burton Goldberg drilled his employees to enforce a strict dress code, though at one of his own Halloween parties he walked among guests
dressed as a fairy godmother pretending to sprinkle magic pixie dust.
Dom Pérignon’s distributors visited the Mutiny at the turn of the Eighties in disbelief at the number of bottles the hotel was selling, only to find a suite at the hotel converted into a giant walk-in cooler.
However, the true players at the Mutiny had nothing to do with Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll or politics. They were Miami’s Cuban-American drug lords who would all later argue that they’d been the chief inspiration for Al Pacino’s Scarface character, Tony Montana.
These were Miami’s ‘cocaine cowboys’ ,and the Mutiny was their favourite saloon. ‘All the movers and shakers of the underworld were at the Mutiny,’ recalls detective June Hawkins.
‘You’d see their wives and mistresses there, their hit men,’ said Diosdado ‘DC’ Diaz, a police detective. ‘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 licence-plate numbers.’
So vital was the Mutiny for watching the interplay of dealers, informants, celebs and public figures that authorities were loath to disturb the ecosystem. ‘Why stir up the pot and scare them all away?’ said Diaz. Internationally wanted mercenaries chilled at the Mutiny, which became a sort of criminal freetrade zone. Frequent visitors kept cases of cash and cocaine in their suites. Police were bribed. Drug dealers were recorded. Pilots were hired. Contracts were placed. Plots were hatched. The biggest drug lord of them all, Pablo Escobar, owned a pink mansion in Miami Beach and visited the Mutiny when he was in town.
This backdrop provided the direct inspiration for the Babylon Club in Scarface, whose creators, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma, stayed at the Mutiny and sought permission to film there – although opposition from the local Cuban community persuaded them otherwise. Nevertheless, Al Pacino, Steven Bauer and other supporting cast members checked in at the hotel. New Jerseyborn owner Goldberg had originally had something different in mind when he set his sights on Miami’s sleepy Coconut Grove neighbourhood in the mid-Sixties. He built the Mutiny as a high-rise apartment building known as Sailboat Bay, then added a small club and restaurant above the lobby and turned his thoughts to a boutique hotel, aimed at swingers.
‘I’d call it the Sex Hotel if I could,’ said Goldberg. ‘This was all about the sexual revolution. The pill. Boy meets girl.’
But another revolution was set to sweep Miami. In the mid-Seventies, Cuban exiles started smuggling marijuana. This trade soon gave way to cocaine. In 1975, a Peruvian named Pepe Negaro barnstormed the Mutiny with samples of his highpurity cocaine, which he had dyed light pink and spritzed to smell like bubble gum.
He was an instant hit at the club, where hangerson included Liza Minnelli.
The police were soon on to him, but when they attempted to listen in to Negaro from a surveillance van, they encountered an unusual problem. ‘Liza Minnelli would not shut up for even a minute,’ said policeman Wayne Black. ‘She kept bugging Pepe for more cocaine.’
Cocaine came to Miami in industrial quantities when Cuban exiles Carlos ‘Carlene’ Quesada and Rodolfo ‘Rudy Redbeard’ Rodriguez Gallo found that $625 worth of Peruvian coca leaves could be converted in Colombia into two kilos of pure cocaine, with a US street value of $600,000, once bulked out with other substances.
The Mutiny’s decline started before Scarface even appeared in cinemas,. The police were telling Goldberg they had had enough.
In January 1984, a month after Scarface hit the box office, Goldberg struck a deal to sell the Mutiny for $17.5million. From the minute he handed over the keys, the hotel spiralled into insolvency. The drug lords had supported the club, and when the new management cleaned it up, revenues collapsed.
Goldberg reinvented himself as an alternativehealth guru, and died in 2016.
n‘Hotel Scarface’ by Roben Farzad is published on January 25 (Bantam Press, €16.99).