BURTON GOLDBERG’S MUTINY at Sailboat Bay was one of the country’s most lucrative hotels, perennially overbooked and sending off armored trucks with sacks of its cash profits, albeit in the new murder-and-drug capital of America, a city that had been ravaged by race riots, gun killings and the sudden arrival of 125 thousand Cuban refugees, many of them sprung right from Fidel Castro’s jails.
By the turn of the decade, the 130-room hotel and club was a criminal free-trade zone of sorts where gangsters could both revel in Miami’s danger and escape from it.
“All roads led back to the Mutiny,” said Wayne Black, an undercover cop who listened in to dope deals from a tinted van across the street, often wearing nothing but BVDs to cope with the stifling heat and humidity. “The druggies,” he said, “the celebs, the crooked pols, spies, the informants, cops—good and bad—were all there.”
America in the late 1970s and early ’eighties was in a pronounced funk: inflation and unemployment were high; consumer sentiment was in the dumps. But so exceptional was Miami’s cocaine economy that dopers were paying banks to accept suitcases full of cash (while certificates of deposit were yielding 20 percent, on top of your choice of toaster or alarm clock). According to one study from Florida International University in Miami, at least one-third of the city’s economic output was derived from narcotics at the time.
So much hot money was sloshing around Miami that the Mutiny was selling more bottles of Dom Pérignon than any other establishment on the planet, according to the bubbly’s distributor, whose executives visited in disbelief at the turn of the decade. They heard right: a suite at the hotel was converted into a giant walk-in cooler; beautiful women would ooh and ahh at tabletop cascades of bubbly in stacks of flutes; dopers bought bottles for the house when their loads came in and management often flew out the Mutiny’s private plane at the last minute to procure even more from other cities.
Internationally wanted hit men and mercenaries chilled at the Mutiny. Frequent visitors kept their guns tucked in the cushions, and cases of cash and cocaine in their suites. Bullets flew. Thugs were nabbed. Refugees snuck in. Cops were bribed. Dopers were recorded. Pilots were hired. Contracts were placed. Plots were hatched.
You might recognize this backdrop as the Babylon Club in the movie Scarface, whose creators, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma, stayed at the Mutiny and sought permission to film there. In Stone’s screenplay, he accidentally referenced the Mutiny Club; stars Al Pacino, Steven Bauer and other supporting cast checked in at the hotel.
Miami Vice stars were also gravitationally pulled to the Mutiny. Don Johnson partied there, and Philip Michael Thomas moved in with his family and insisted on parking his purple imitation Ferrari out front on the curb. The hit show’s creators studied agents and kingpins at the Mutiny; one cooperating drug lord even finagled his way onto two episodes.
The Miami of the Mutiny’s heyday abounded with the surreal.
So much marijuana was getting confiscated in the waters around South Florida that the Florida Power & Light Company was opportunistically burning tons of it to run its generators: 732 pounds of pot could replace a barrel of crude. Take that, energy crisis!
Area 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.
Burger King, meanwhile, loaned the overwhelmed county morgue a refrigerated truck. Bodies were turning up in gator-infested canals; in duffel bags alongside the turnpike; bobbing out of drums, bins and shopping carts in marinas along Biscayne Bay.
Machine-gun fire rained over the parking lot of the city’s busiest mall.
All of which would soon land Miami on the cover of Time magazine as “Paradise Lost.”
The Mutiny stood out as a lush oasis within this apocalypse. The Magic City was now the planet’s cocaine entrepôt—its Federal Reserve branch was showing a five-billion-dollar cash surplus—and so this hotel and club became the place south of Studio 54 to blow illegal tender.
The club’s seventy-five-dollar metal membership card, embossed with the Mutiny’s winking pirate logo, got you in the door and certainly came in handy for cutting and snorting lines.
But it was cash—lots and lots of it—that got you everything else:
Cases of 150-dollar-a-bottle Dom Pérignon emptied into your hot tub? Right away!
A private jet for jaunts to the islands, stocked with Mutiny girls, a five-man crew and stone crab claws on dry ice? No sweat.
Your machine guns, bullets and silencers discreetly locked in a chest? Sin problema. Plus, a hostess would hide your piece in her skirt if the cops showed up, while another Mutiny girl was adept at clicking her stilettos against guys on the dance floor to check for ankle holsters.
“We couldn’t just walk into the Mutiny with a cheap rubber watch,” said Wayne Black, the undercover cop who would borrow a Rolex from the police evidence locker before going there. “You’d be buying Dom with the bad guys. You owned a Pinto but drove home a Jag. ‘Daddy,’ your kid would say, ‘the neighbors say you sell drugs.’”
None of which would ever make the press release that the otherwise media-shy Mutiny felt the need to put out to start 1981, the year when Miami became America’s murder capital.
THE MOST UNUSUAL HOTEL IN THE COUNTRY
Coconut Grove, Fla.
A hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room.
This variation of the noted Gertrude Stein quotation is a frequent complaint of jaded travelers who are convinced that all hotel rooms look alike.
One hotel, located just 15 minutes south of Miami—the Hotel Mutiny at Sailboat Bay in Coconut Grove—is proof, in the words of Ira Gershwin, that “it ain’t necessarily so.”
At the Mutiny, no two rooms look alike. Every room and suite is decorated with its own unduplicated, luxurious and, frequently, exotic motif.
Decorative themes are based on various ideas. Some are inspired by faraway locales, some sound like titles to novels, some to states of mind and others to flights of fancy.
“Marakesh,” “Coconut Grove,” “Singapore,” “Zapata’s Retreat,” “House of the Setting Sun,” “Midnight Express,” “Cloud 9,” “Lunar Dreams” and “Fourth Dimension” are among them.
Themes are not developed with a single picture or ornament. Rather, the furniture, draperies, art, artifacts, and the basic layout of the rooms all conform to the individual motifs.
A full-time staff of six works at decorating the Mutiny. Two members of the decorating staff work full-time on flower arrangements. As guests walk down the halls, often covered in Oriental rugs, it is not uncommon for them to see elaborate arrangements of rare flowers—Peruvian lilies, birds-of-paradise and the like.
Roman baths and mirrored ceilings are found in some rooms, and many have panoramic views of Sailboat Bay.
Recently opened rooms include “Shoko,” done on the theme of a Japanese inn or ryokan, “Balinese Isle,” a two-bedroom suite with a setting of a rain forest in Bali, and the Moroccan wing with “Zirka,” “Tlata Ketama,” “Marakesh” and “Bourabech,” all named for Moroccan cities.
“Shoko” is designed like a room in a Japanese ryokan. Behind the bed is a wall of shoji screens, a framed kimono is mounted on a wall, a blue-and-white country fabric is used to upholster the furniture and walls and there are carved stone statues from Japan. A low custom-made table is surrounded by cushions on the floor.
“Balinese Isle” is a two-bedroom suite designed around a large screen painted by hand with a scene from a rain forest, highlighted by bamboo lights. The suite includes original Balinese oil paintings, and a tiki bar and furniture custom-made in the hotel from natural rattan.
Throughout the Moroccan wing, a guest will see a combination of terra-cotta floors and carpeting and plasterwork deliberately designed to give the impression of old Moorish architecture, with walls that have lost part of their plaster. A specially designed emblem was pressed repeatedly in cement to create the effect; then four layers of plaster were laid over that, with occasional areas left uncovered. On each layer, several coats of oil were applied, seasoned, waxed and buffed.
“Zirka,” named for a city famous for its fountains, has in the room a large round tub designed to look like a fountain with light streaming down on it. Moroccan arches surround the tub as well as the bed, and backlighted stained glass is embedded in the plaster of the arches. Wrought iron doors and accessories complete the effect.
“Tlata Ketama” is a large city in Morocco. The room concentrates on the use of copper, including custom-made copper light fixtures, copper-treated furniture and copper-glazed Moroccan tiles around the tub. The room also has large plaster columns with capitals created by a Spanish artist living in Florida.
Dining at the Mutiny is as unusual as its rooms. There are no “walk-in” dinner guests. Each diner must be a member of the Mutiny Club or a hotel guest. The club’s large international membership is sustained by the quality of the food and the service.
Hostesses and waitresses at the club, who do not wear uniforms, wear fashionable gowns, and at lunch, often wear broad-brimmed tropical hats.
Following dinner, the music starts for disco dancing. During the course of the late evening, the club has sophisticated shows.
Service at the Mutiny is on a par with the setting and the cuisine. In the morning, guests are brought a festive complimentary continental breakfast that includes five or six fresh fruits, freshly squeezed orange juice and butter croissants, along with the morning newspaper.
Coconut Grove is one of the most interesting communities in southern Florida with a widely diverse population that includes many working artists. Magnificent flowers and trees in the area surround the Mutiny in subtropical abundance. Guests can relax in a large wooden hot tub in the middle of a hanging garden, beneath a waterfall or around the swimming pool, where an alfresco lunch is served.