Missing the good old days of Sunny Isles

I miss the old Sunny Isles, back before the town’s quirky persona was commandeered by dodgy emigres given to Trumpian ostentation and opaque real estate deals consummated by shell corporations and offshore banks. Back before Sunny Isles was home address for Rudy Giuliani’s sleaze-ball Ukrainian fixers.

The old Sunny Isles, a beach town 1.3 miles south of Hallandale Beach, was once a linear tableau of South Florida kitsch, a seaside strip of themed motels, offering homage to ancient Egypt, Rome, the wild west, Polynesia, American Indians and so many nautical motifs, including Neptune and his water nymphs.

You could find me under the roughhewn timbers of the Wreck Bar at the Castaways Hotel, a joint built to evoke a long-ago sailing galleon, the walls lined with portholes, the waitresses looking not at all like sailors. (During the go-go era, the Wreck featured rather more naughty than nautical dancers, “mad maids in gilded cages.”)

That Sunny Isles, a marriage of midcentury architecture and American whimsy, should have been protected as a historical treasure, like South Beach’s Art Deco district 10 miles south. But the likes of Donald Trump beat out the preservationists.

Before South Floridians realized what they were losing, Sunny Isles Beach (as the developers rechristened it in 1997) replaced the motels with — count them — six Trump towers and stacks of other uber-luxury condos with brands as subtle as the Armani Casa and the Porsche Design Tower.

Today, nearly four dozen hotel and condo towers blot out the eastern horizon.

The Trump Royale now looms over life-sized statues of three camels and their Arab drivers at the entrance of the fading Sahara Beach Resort, one of the last remnants of a lost era.

The scene captures the transformation of Sunny Isles, from middle-class kitsch to high-roller tacky. Tourists from the heartland have been replaced by murky characters like Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas.

Fruman, a 53-year-old native of Belarus and owner of what the New Yorker describes as an aptly named nightclub in Odessa, the Mafia Rave, and Parnas, 47, his Ukrainian-born business partner, have been charged with channeling nearly $700,000 in illicit foreign donations to Republican campaigns, including $325,000 to a pro-Trump political action committee. (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott have apparently rid themselves of the pair’s tainted donations.)

The Miami Herald reports that Fruman and Parnas were intent on greasing their way into medical and recreational marijuana distribution licenses in Florida and Nevada. Their company, Global Energy Producers, didn’t seem to do much of anything other than provide a conduit for foreign political donations and hire Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for $500,000. Reportedly, the pair were helping Rudy in his infamous search for politically damaging information about Joe Biden.

Politico reports that Parnas once rented a condo on the 42nd floor of the Trump Palace in Sunny Isles, until his landlord complained to police that Parnas had threatened him with a gun. Fruman resides in a tower three blocks north of the Palace. The neighborhood has plenty of other residents from the old Soviet bloc.

Two years ago, Reuters reported that least 63 Russians had spent $98.4 million buying condos in the six Trump-branded luxury towers in Sunny Isles and a seventh in Hollywood. Plus, another 703 units in the seven Trump buildings had been purchased by so-called limited liability companies, LLCs, that mask the owners’ identities.

In 2016, a Miami Herald investigation found that dozens of Sunny Isles condos, many in Trump-branded properties, had been purchased by Russians suspected of illicit doings.

International fraud investigators suggest that Sunny Isles real estate provides corrupt Russian officials an anonymous place to invest their loot, safe from the scrutiny of cops and tax collectors back home. No wonder they call Sunny Isles Moscow-by-the-Sea.

In 2017, the Daily Beast reported that Moscow travel agencies were marketing $85,000 travel packages to Russian mothers-to-be, including airfare, hospital maternity ward fees and a place to stay until the big day arrives: a condo in a Trump tower on Sunny Isles Beach, complete with gold-tiled bathtubs and a chauffeured Cadillac Escalade. Fly to Miami pregnant; return home a few weeks later, well-tanned, with a new little American citizen in tow.

Last year, a Russian couple was busted on the 18th floor of another Trump tower for running a high-end call girl operation. They offered customers “Russian dolls.”

No such Russian dolls hung out at the old Wreck Bar. I’d remember.