And lots of really deranged things, in 20/20 hindsight, happened in that midst.īLOCK: Here's what I don't understand because these drug kingpins were basically hiding in plain sight. And amid all of this, you have the hot pursuit of cocaine, money and sex and speedboats. So Miami was really ill-prepared to handle that inundation. Some of the most violent ones indeed had their weapons of choice tattooed on the inside of their lips. He unleashes 125,000 refugees - maybe 10,000 to 15,000 of those were criminals. And on top of the fact, in 1980, Fidel Castro says that he's flushing his toilets on the United States. And you talk about the murder rate in Dade County, which is doubling in just a couple of years.įARZAD: You think about the combustibility in those wild cash profits. But at the same time, of course, this cocaine trade brought a world of violence to Miami. Up to about '82, no one had kind of realized that promiscuity can bounce back and hit you in really deadly ways.īLOCK: So, Roben, there's all this craziness and excess. As as everybody explained to me, this was pre-AIDS. So in a weird way, it was kind of a democratizing thing.īLOCK: Or probably not their wives, actually.įARZAD: (Laughter) No, they were mistresses. But it didn't matter because you were telegraphing to all the celebs and all the groupies and all the, you know, gorgeous, bored trophy wives there that money was no object to you. And you jump in and burn your privates anyway. Why don't you just fill your hot tub with Dom? So you buy hundreds of bottles. One asks another, what's the most extravagant thing I could do? And the other guy's, like - I think he's coked out - and says I don't know. You know, one of the bodyguards - he had his steering wheel covered in $50,000 worth of diamonds that spelled out his name. So people could not spend money fast enough. I mean, the Federal Reserve system down there in 1980 had a $5 billion cash surplus, which was more than all the other Federal Reserve banks combined. You multiply that by hundreds and thousands of kilos, and you can truly see that this city was inundated with hot money. By the time it hits Miami, the street value, long and short of it, is $625,000. You get $625 of cocaine base in the Andes. What were the other outrageous stories you heard about what went on at the Mutiny?įARZAD: I mean, cash money was truly no object. People, as you describe it, were literally bathing in tubs that were filled with hundreds of bottles of Dom Perignon. I kept thinking back to that tableau and what the heck was going on over there.īLOCK: Well, the Mutiny had fallen totally far from its heyday when it was a - just a place of complete excess. Why was this gorgeous property on a waterfront strip in front of a marina in an exclusive part of town derelict? And why were there vagrants in the building? Why was there graffiti everywhere? Why was the pool overflowing with turkey vultures and - the point is I became homesick when I went to college, and I kept scratching that itch. And, really, for the first time in my life I feel like I was truly, truly haunted.īLOCK: Haunted, why? What did it look like?įARZAD: It didn't make any sense. But right before I left off for college up north in 1994, I had a job just downtown in Miami, and I was stationed in front of this abandoned building. Why don't you describe what had become of the Mutiny Hotel when you first saw it when you were a teenager in the early '90s?įARZAD: I mean, I grew up with much of the rest of the world experiencing Miami Friday nights on "Miami Vice." That was the it show of the mid-1980s, kind of a Hollywood MTV-ized representation of a lot of the ugliness and cosmopolitan splendor (laughter) that we had of Miami at the same time. ROBEN FARZAD: Thank you so much for having me.īLOCK: And Miami is your hometown. Journalist Roben Farzad charts the rise and fall of the Mutiny in his new book "Hotel Scarface." Roben, welcome to the program. It was a palace of decadence and intrigue, and it quickly became a hub for Miami's exploding cocaine trade. Everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Led Zeppelin to Teddy Kennedy might be found at the Mutiny's exclusive, members-only nightclub. In the late '70s and early '80s, the Mutiny Hotel in Miami was the place to be seen and to drop scads of cash.
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