If the Mutiny’s walls could talk, they’d need a lawyer. During the 1970s and 1980s the nightclub and hotel in Coconut Grove, became the base for Miami’s cocaine trade. Beneath a glittering disco ball, drug kingpins from Cuba to Colombia made deals, the Hollywood set swanned in to dazzle and dabble, and the F.B.I., D.E.A., C.I.A., and I.R.S. all looked on. Everyone was brought together by the decade’s favorite drug: perico, blow, snow, cocaine.
The infamous haunt was the model for the Babylon club in Brian De Palma’s Scarface and is central to Netflix’s current drug-themed show Griselda, starring Sofía Vergara as the formidable drug lord Griselda Blanco, whose drug operation, at one time, moved $80 million worth of cocaine every month. She was so powerful that the drug baron Pablo Escobar confessed, “The only person I ever feared was a woman named Griselda Blanco.”
While Griselda partied at the club, in real life she was not a regular. But those who were included the Cubans Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta, who were eventually accused of importing 75 tons of cocaine into Miami. Then there was Jorge Ochoa, a member of Escobar’s Medellin cartel, who, with a net worth of nearly $3 billion, made it onto Forbes’s list of the world’s rich drug lords. During this time it was calculated that one-third of Miami’s economic output was derived from narcotics.
In 1968, Burton Goldberg had opened Sailboat Bay, the apartment building that would soon be renamed as The Mutiny. “It was both vision and dumb luck,” writes Roben Farzad, whose book, Hotel Scarface, chronicles the building’s heyday. Goldberg was there just in time for “the Miami Dolphins’ perfect season, an influx of Venezuelan petrol money during the oil shock, and [there was] a major recording studio next door, which meant that The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, The Cars, and others partied at the hotel.”
The club’s nightly guest list read like a Who’s Who of the era’s glitterati: Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Newman, and even Ted Kennedy, licking his wounds after conceding the Democratic presidential nomination, all found solace and celebration within its walls.
By the end of the decade, the Mutiny was selling more Dom Pérignon than any other establishment on the planet, according to the champagne’s distributor. A suite at the hotel was turned into a giant walk-in cooler, and the club even used its own private jet to procure more Dom Pérignon from up and down the Eastern Seaboard. The club helped turn The Mutiny into one of the country’s most lucrative hotels.
Coconut Grove had been founded in the mid–19th century as Cocoanut Grove and, after being incorporated into the city of Miami in 1925, was a quaint, quirky, bohemian enclave before the Mutiny put it on the map. The writer and producer Mitch Glazer, a Floridian born and bred, remembers spending a few memorable nights at the Mutiny. “Coconut Grove was the center of anything artistic and cool in Miami,” he recalls. “It was a beautiful, sleepy, artistic part of the city. But by the time the Mutiny came along, Coconut Grove started to mutate into this slicker disco cocaine vibe. It went from marijuana and hippies to cocaine and cartels.”
It was at the Mutiny that the power players of the cocaine industry made their moves. People such as Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, the C.I.A. operative, F.B.I. informant, terrorist, and drug trafficker who bragged of his part in the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in which 73 people died, used the club as an office. Similarly, Carlos Fernando Quesada, who boasted of making $3 million trafficking cocaine, had a private table at the club and was said to bribe police with Rolex watches to get them to arrest his competition.
It was a time when, as Farzad writes, “even the area’s McDonald’s restaurants were running out of their tiny spoon-tipped coffee stirrers—they were perfect, it turned out, for portioning and sniffing cocaine. Mutiny dopers wore bronzed ones around their necks to advertise how far they’d come.”
The club’s nightly guest list read like a Who’s Who of the era’s glitterati: Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Newman, and even Ted Kennedy.
Status and membership at the club came with extraordinary perks. A $75 metal membership card, embossed with a winking pirate, was your ticket in; a tool for the night’s endeavors. While inside, private jets could be hired and machine guns could be bought. With cocaine selling for $25,000 a pound, money was no object.
The club was so consistently mobbed by big spenders that Goldberg introduced the Upper Deck, a more exclusive, private area that came with the promise of a “Mutiny Girl,” one of the club’s notoriously attractive waitresses, who wore fashionable gowns instead of uniforms, would hide your gun if the police came, and were rumored to bed the club’s members.
But the glory days couldn’t last forever. The cocaine trade brought turf wars to Miami. Colombian and Cuban dealers would pull up alongside each other at stoplights and fire away with submachine guns. From 1980 to 1981, Miami had the highest murder rate of any city in the world. “So many bodies piled up in the morgue,” wrote The New York Times, “that at one point the coroner had to rent a refrigerator van to handle the overflow.”
In 1982, not long after President Reagan launched the South Florida Drug Task Force, $100 million worth of cocaine was found at a hangar at Miami International Airport. Within just 12 months, the D.E.A. had seized 50,000 pounds of cocaine, valued at more than $9 billion.
And by the time Scarface hit screens, in 1983, there was some concern that Miami had lost its luster. (Miami’s politicians had originally not wanted its director, Brian De Palma, to film in the city, concerned it might amplify its seedy reputation.) By then the Mutiny had gone the way of the rest of Miami. “People were scared to show up. Guns would go off inside. One of the hostesses was killed by a serial killer,” says Farzad.
Goldberg saw the writing on the wall, or, rather, in the heavens. His resident astrologer, a woman by the name of Iris Saltzman, told him to sell the club, and in 1984 he did. He eventually moved to California, where he became known as “the Voice of Alternative Medicine,” having published numerous health books that together sold more than 1.5 million copies.
After sitting abandoned for almost a decade, the Mutiny was gutted and re-opened in the late 1990s as a sedate condo-hotel. I lived in Unit 914, one of the few residences there, for a year in 2011. The infamous den of debauchery had sobered up, trading its once noisy narcotic nightlife for the quiet hum of reliable Wi-Fi. The only remnant of its storied past was the pirate logo on the hotel’s Web site.
Natalie Stoclet is a writer, editor, and designer who divides her time between Mexico City and New York City
