Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami

Author: Farzad, Roben

Number Of Pages: 352

Details:

The wild, true story of the Mutiny, the hotel and club that embodied the decadence of Miami’s cocaine cowboys heyday—and an inspiration for the blockbuster film, Scarface...In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites.   Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement.   Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine—and the Mutiny—in Miami.

About the Author:

Roben Farzad hosts the weekly program 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 . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2017 Roben Farzad   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 claimed to know Willy—his gig won him side jobs from VIPs and action from a smorgasbord 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 gun 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 Gunsmoke 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 gun 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 gunshots 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 treatments 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, bombe...

EAN: 9781592409280

Release Date: 17-10-2017

Languages: English

Item Note: Readable book with typical wear and small creases. Part of cover is torn. Has a remainder mark. Hardcover Used - Good 2017

Item Condition: UsedGood

Binding: Hardcover