If you needed to stash weapons, they had you covered there as well. The club had its own private plane to retrieve high-rollers, and the hotel converted an entire suite into a walk-in cooler to house the incredible amount of booze it required. Rudy Redbeard, so named for his red-dyed beard, docked his 58-foot yacht right in front of the club, and had women “actually kneeling before to kiss his ring and get a Quaalude.” His home included a bedroom “the size of most houses, and featured a grand piano on a rotating stage.” The Fourth Dimension and Nautical suites Dan Forerīusiness was so strong that Redbeard had “six rooms at the Mutiny blocked off for both business and pleasure, some of them adorned with paper grocery bags full of cash.” According to a hotel employee, the cleaning staff would fight about who would handle his rooms, knowing they might find “fist-sized chunks of hashish left in trash bins,” or a “giant rock of cocaine” in the carpet.Īs grandiose as the clientele was, The Mutiny was uniquely equipped to cater to their needs. Burton GoldbergĮarly on, one of the club’s highest rollers was Rodolfo “Rudy Redbeard” Rodriguez Gallo, a drug kingpin who kept his gun wedged in the seats of the club’s leather booths. “She kept bugging Pepe for more blow.” The Mutiny girls in 1976. “Liza Minnelli would not shut up for even a minute,” he said. A police officer named Wayne Black had an informant there wired, and hoped to get dirt on Pepe as he listened from a van across the street. Miami Dolphins majority owner Earl Smalley, Jr., Farzad writes, had a suite in the hotel overlooking the pool, and installed a “pink pneumatic bench that beach babes could saddle up on after long days on his speedboat.”Īnd when a Peruvian dealer named Pepe brought in high-quality cocaine he had “dyed light pink and spritzed to smell like bubble gum,” Liza Minnelli reportedly became such a fan that she inadvertently derailed surveillance on the club. There’s Paul Newman, swilling so much Chateau Lafite that he “had to be carried up to his suite by a hostess.” Ted Kennedy once got so drunk there that he picked a fight with the DJ. There’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, hitting on a waitress. The next night, the Cowboys lost the game by a touchdown to the Dolphins, and Dorsett, looking ragged after his wild night with Aguilar, had an especially poor showing.Ĭelebrities were everywhere. The Miami Dolphins were regular clients, as well as Dallas Cowboy running back Tony Dorsett, who spent one Sunday night partying hard with Aguilar. ‘You hear it, Nelson? What is that sound?! Nelson!’” Kingpin Nelson Aguilar with Rick James in 1983. At one point in the evening, Aguilar was “midcoitus with two women” when James, in the middle of a crack binge that fed his paranoia, “started banging frantically on his room door.” Their subsequent night of partying might have killed a mere mortal, but it was business as usual at a hotel and club known as The Mutiny, Miami’s home for drug kingpins and those who enjoyed their offerings. In 1983, shortly after Miami drug kingpin Nelson Aguilar got out of jail, he hooked up with his friend, funk star Rick James. With narcotics fueling at least one-third of Miami’s economy, the Mutiny was the country’s drug capital, swimming in so much illicit cash that the club sold “more bottles of Dom Perignon than any other establishment on the planet.” “The primate was partial to turtlenecks and a New York baseball cap, and proudly rode shotgun in his owner’s Benz while waving a Cuban cigar.”īut just as with salmon-colored jackets and shoes with no socks, Miami residents didn’t bat an eye at Caesar - it was all just part of the show.Īt the center of it all was the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay, an 130-room hotel and club that was Miami’s version of Studio 54, “a criminal free-trade zone of sorts where gangsters would both revel in Miami’s danger and escape from it,: Farzad writes. The most notorious member of the scene surrounding The Mutiny, the Miami nightclub that epitomized the excesses of the 1980s, was a chimp named Caesar.Īs Roben Farzad explains in his new book “ Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami” (Berkeley Hardcover), Caesar was the companion of drug kingpin Mario Tabraue, who adorned him “with a gold-rope necklace holding a 50-peso gold coin, an 18-karat ID bracelet with his name in diamonds and a ladies’ Rolex Presidential.
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