IN FEBRUARY OF 1977, after months of being tailed by the DEA, a Mutiny girl was arrested when she tried to sell a pound of cocaine to undercover officers at the hotel’s beauty salon. Three months later, a pair of Miami Dolphins players who frequented the club was arrested for trying to sell their own pound of cocaine.
But these busts were penny-ante compared to the volumes being moved by a couple of flamboyant Cuban drug lords who by 1977 were practically running the Mutiny.
Thirtysomethings Carlos “Carlene” Quesada and Rodolfo “Rudy Redbeard” Rodriguez Gallo held court on the Mutiny’s Poop Deck, an elevated set of tables over the driveway that served as a landing of sorts between the club’s two floors.
Redbeard, Quesada and their crew wedged their guns in their booths’ giant leather cushions and sat steps from the back exit, ready to bolt, should wives or the cops suddenly arrive unannounced.
Redbeard dressed in white Italian suits and dyed his whiskers red, earning him his sobriquet. Quesada was partial to silk shirts and reptile-skin shoes. Even for a Miami Cuban, he spoke fast—faster than most gringos could ever understand—often having to repeat his order in slowly . . . enunciated . . . Spanglish.
At the Mutiny, these coke lords swilled Dom Pérignon, Perrier-Jouët and 1,300-dollar bottles of wine, preferably from years just prior to the Cuban Revolution. Flanked by hit men, Ricardo “Monkey” Morales and Bay of Pigs veterans the Villaverde brothers and Frank Castro, they ordered lavishly and tipped in the hundreds. Waitresses would angle and tussle for the privilege of serving them.
“When I got there,” said Redbeard, “the Mutiny, it shot up in popularity. The manager knew how to take care of me, rotating the waitresses. I wanted to be fair to everyone with my tips.”
“We bought the fucking place,” said his son, Rudy Jr. “Dad rented a whole floor of rooms. Nobody gave a fuck anymore if you were Cuban. We had the connections. What else did you fucking need?”
Well, how about a giant yacht? Redbeard docked Graciela, his fifty-eight-foot Bertram, right in front of the Mutiny. It had a grand piano, a king-size bed and a sixty-four-inch projection TV. On board, guests could challenge Captain Rudy to arcade games for a kilo of cocaine.
At least, if the drug lord was feeling social.
On most evenings, “Uncle Rudy,” as he was also known at the Mutiny, preferred to smoke his special cocaine mix in dark paranoid isolation. “Keep the squatters away!” he’d warn his waitress, Eugenia, a Miss Florida contestant.
Mollie Hampton was a churchgoing brunette from Tampa who took a job at the Mutiny in early 1978, having just left her fiancé to explore women. She was assigned to hostess for upstairs VIPs.
“It was overwhelming to walk into that place,” she said. “You had all these gorgeous women—so confident—big shots at the bar and tables. You felt it. There I was: wearing my big Mutiny girl hat [a mandatory piece of attire, per Burton Goldberg’s rules]. I had no idea what was going on.”
“We said she wouldn’t last a week under Burton,” said another Mutiny girl, noting Mollie’s Bible Belt drawl, unladylike guffaw and refusal to wear makeup and haute dresses. “But she was so funny and sweet that we hid her from him.”
Goldberg was notorious for firing girls on the spot for a transgression as small as a dirty ashtray. Everyone also had to undergo monthly lie detector tests: Are you using drugs? Do you steal? Are you a prostitute? Have you ever taken home liquor from the hotel?
Staff knew that passing them was a joke; you just had to walk in stoned. One working girl who managed to land a waitressing job at the Mutiny popped downers before her test.
But it was cocaine that unleashed Mutiny Mollie. “After that first hit,” she said, “I was hooked. I felt like fucking Superwoman. You felt empowered, invincible. Like you could solve all the world’s problems.”
She now thought nothing of showing up for work and ordering a prime rib and a bottle of fine vintage on Redbeard’s or Quesada’s tab. The Poop Deck tables would be covered with pricey bottles, with various women actually kneeling before Redbeard to kiss his ring and get a Quaalude. “What you want, baby?” he and Quesada would ask her, Dom getting popped left and right.
“I’d zip over there, do a hit, have a cocktail, go from table to table,” recalled Mollie. “There was always cash thrown around; we’d snort out of hundred-dollar bills. It wasn’t even like we were working; it was like we were hosting the party.”
Word soon got out that Mollie was a lesbian, she said, and suddenly the most feared dopers and gunmen at the Mutiny were stuttering in her presence. “It fucking drove these guys nuts,” she said. “They’d get all curious and serious, asking me about it.”
Rudy Redbeard had her on his yacht, where she would enjoy other women. When they were alone, the drug lord would have Mollie individually empty out his cigarettes and reroll them with freebase cocaine. His manic side would last until about sundown. “People were definitely scared of him,” she said. “Sometimes he’d be so happy. Sometimes you didn’t know if he’d kill you.”
In a suite at the Mutiny, Carlene Quesada called down to the club and asked Mollie to take a break and head upstairs. “Girl, whatchoo doing? Come over!” He introduced her to his mistress, Terecita, and asked if she’d initiate the shy, crucifix-wearing brunette into her sapphic ways. “I want you to be with her,” he said, his rapid-fire voice slowing to a quiver. Quesada watched, seemingly traumatized, while Mollie undressed and made out with someone she’d literally just met—a woman who had never kissed a woman, no less.
Within a week, she said, it was Terecita who was calling her upstairs.
For Mollie’s twenty-fourth birthday, Bernardo de Torres, a mysterious Bay of Pigs operative who practically lived at the Mutiny, ordered her eight escorts, including Colombian sisters who roughed her up in a bruising threesome. Mollie found herself enjoying the straddle between pleasure and pain.
“They thought I was a woman who had all the good parts of a man,” she said. “Everyone was doing everyone. They loved watching me with other women.”
Monkey Morales, the Redbeard-Quesada gang’s de facto head of intelligence, got off in a whole other way. One evening at the Mutiny, he threw Mollie the keys to his red Cadillac Seville and told her to meet him and Quesada by the valet. In the car, Morales handed her a gun and told her to be ready to drive fast. “I’ve never been so scared in my life,” she said.
Mollie off-loaded Morales and Quesada in front of the famous Fontainebleau Hotel and waited for what seemed like way too long. She lost her nerve and went up to look for them. “I opened the door and saw guns everywhere,” she said. “Screaming in Spanish. It felt like a rip-off or shoot-out.”
The trio got out of the hotel alive, bumping hits of cocaine and laughing fiendishly across the causeway back to the Mutiny. The next day at the club, one of Quesada’s associates handed Mollie an envelope stuffed with ten thousand dollars in cash.
The Mutiny was paying her one dollar and fifty cents an hour.
“I never thought about money at that job,” she says. “All my food and drink was free. My ride. My rooms. The parties. Then you got gigs like this, and they’d throw you stacks of cash and say, ‘Just take it.’ Other times I’d help them count cash, and they’d hand me a stack for myself. I can’t believe I lived that.”
• • •
RUDY REDBEARD AND Carlene Quesada were childhood pals in the fishing port town of Batabanó, Cuba. In 1962, the teenage Quesada stole his father’s gun and hijacked a shrimp boat, hell-bent on making it to Miami.
Redbeard had fled to Miami a year earlier when he paid his way out of La Cabaña, an infamous prison and torture chamber in Cuba supervised by Che Guevara. He had been part of the anti-Castro underground that lobbed grenades into police stations.
“The fucking Americans screwed us,” said his son, Rudy Gallo Jr. “They just handed our country to Fidel.”
Reunited in Miami, the duo lived a life of mostly petty crime. Gallo’s legitimate line of work was a boatbuilding business that he says was felled by the 1973 oil shock. He then scraped together a living installing vinyl tops on Monte Carlos at a big Chevrolet dealership whose owner took long lunches at the Mutiny. Mafioso customers of the Chevy lot particularly liked Rudy Redbeard’s landau roof work.
He developed a taste for cocaine, which was a delicacy for big shots in the old country—something you might see on a tiny gold saucer in a governor’s country home. Playboy’s treatise on the drug reported that prerevolutionary Cuba had the world’s highest per capita cocaine use. It made sense: cocaine paired perfectly with the era’s bordellos, casinos and frenetic cha-cha-chá. Exiles who brought the habit to Miami looked at it as a nostalgic indulgence, something to turn to when the homesickness became unbearable. Some called it postre, pastry.
Rudy Redbeard was godfather to a child of Miami pot smuggler Juan Cid, who hooked him up with a guy who could provide quality blow. “Coke,” said Cid, “was nonexistent here. It was rare, like a couple of mules coming into Miami International from South America or ten kilos in a banana boat in the Miami River. It was not yet the big gold rush.”
As associates kept trying to mooch the stuff off Redbeard, he turned to dealing cocaine himself. “If there was any other merchandise with that profit,” says Gallo, “I’d do that. There was so much money. Too much.”
Juan Cid connected him with suppliers in Colombia. “I needed someone older,” he said, “with a little more reputation. Rudy had the boat business. He liked cocaine. He had a warehouse. He partied all the time.”
And so Redbeard and Quesada, the pals from Batabanó, Cuba, ran with Cid’s hookup. They installed a chemist and lab in Colombia’s southernmost city and experimented with the smuggling of cocaine in the bilgewater of Gallo’s custom fast boats—the drying and desalination saved for South Florida, where Gallo built a nine-acre cocaine lab.
As more cocaine was smuggled into Miami, users—everyone from gangsters to dentists to depressed trophy wives—became discriminating connoisseurs. You could only command high prices if you could deliver consistently good stuff; too many upstarts were trying to cheat the market with heavily diluted or hastily cured batches.
For Rudy Redbeard, cocaine became a family business. Son Rudy Jr. stocked the big lab with drums of ether and acetone, sharkskin boards and Pyrex filters. He told everyone he was a chemist. “All I did was count cash, pack coke and go to school—in my Jaguar convertible,” he said. He also got to drive Maseratis, Porsches and Ferraris. “I’d be carrying suitcases full of cash around. I was still in fucking high school!”
The Redbeard-Quesada syndicate was now riding one of the most lucrative commodity plays in history. Consider:
Cultivating a thousand cocoa leaves in Peru, an easy distance from their south Colombia hub, cost them 625 dollars. Converted into a kilogram of paste and cocaine base, it was now worth upward of 6,500 dollars. When the resulting kilo of high-purity cocaine hit South Florida, it would be cut, or diluted, to make two kilos of cocaine, worth a total of eighty thousand dollars. Finally, two or three middlemen cut their take—one kilo having been diluted into six to eight kilos—and sold the cocaine on the streets at seventy-five dollars a gram.
The upshot: a kilo of “pure” cocaine was actually somewhere between 92 and 96 percent cocaine hydrochloride. “Uncut” 96 percent cocaine could be cut all the way down to 12 percent potency, which was enough to satisfy most mom-and-pop palates. Pushed all the way through the transcontinental supply chain, spanning planes, boats, plastic baggies and baby laxative, an original 625-dollar investment could eventually turn into six hundred thousand dollars of street value.
Rudy Redbeard smoked basuco, the ashen base of cocaine that some drug lords craved for its mellowing, stamina-boosting attributes. Colombian processors would prepare it by larding up cocaine dregs with brick dust, chalk and even volcanic ash. Unrefined and unpurified, basuco contained varying amounts of lead, sulfuric acid, ether, chloroform, kerosene and sometimes gasoline.
Smoking it was asking for multiple layers of highs and lows—it was risky, unpredictable stuff.
Pepe Negaro, the Peruvian coke dealer, smoked way too much of his own product: by 1977, he was reduced to showing up across the street from the Mutiny in a banged-up Subaru with a propane tank tied to its roof. Like David Crosby with his blowtorch, Pepe was now so addicted to the stuff that he felt the need to travel everywhere with his freebasing fuel.
By 1978, Rudy Redbeard was smoking through a pound of basuco a week in his hollowed-out Marlboros, which gave off an antiseptic aroma, akin to an electrical fire in a dentist’s office. “We’d smell him walk in from the back,” said Jane Podowski, a Mutiny waitress. “We’d be like, ‘Oh, my God, who’s station was he going to sit at tonight?’ He tipped like crazy.”
Redbeard’s estate in Miami’s posh Banyan Drive neighborhood had roaming peacocks and Miami’s biggest library of Betamax porn. His bedroom was the size of most houses, and featured a grand piano on a rotating stage.
“The party was ongoing with Rudy,” said Mutiny girl Joanna Christopher. “It didn’t start or finish. It just went on.” She remembers the kingpin masterfully tickling the ivories in his bedroom. Dozens of party girls would shuttle between the mansion and the Mutiny. Rudy could screw for hours at a time when he was fully “based out.”
Redbeard befriended Christopher’s boyfriend and his pals in the Italian mob, who had been members of the Mutiny since the early seventies. The Cuban told them he lit a candle for Lucky Luciano, the Italian mobster who had owned swaths of pre-Castro Havana. He adored the film The Godfather, and took to buying Brioni suits from Miami’s finest Italian tailor. “He saw himself in Don Corleone,” said his son.
“The first era of cocaine in Miami,” Redbeard insisted, “was me. When I started in the biz, the cocaine was very rare. The elite did it in Cuba—the vice president, doctors.”
“We were young,” said Quesada. “We didn’t respect the law. The only thing we wanted was to be alive, party and go back to a Cuba without Fidel.”
At the Mutiny, Rudy Redbeard’s traveling pianist, Sunshine Sammy, lived in the 5,500-dollar-a-month Egyptian Suite, where he mixed vodka with ’ludes in a rickety blender and mined the room service boy for intel about his volatile boss.
A nocturnal creature, Sammy would sometimes commandeer the club’s piano to play the theme to The Godfather.
Redbeard was also obsessed with the song “Life’s Been Good,” by Joe Walsh, which was recorded right next door to the Mutiny in 1978. He tipped the DJ two hundred dollars to play the crowd killer. (Mollie and other Mutiny girls got their playful revenge against Uncle Rudy by getting the DJ to spin anything by the Beach Boys, which, she said, “Cuban dopers hated. It was like Kryptonite to their ears. They cleared out of the joint in no time.”)
“Redbeard and Quesada were gods to us,” said Nelson Aguilar, the young dealer who caught a glimpse of the kingpins when he first snuck into the Mutiny at age sixteen. “They had made it. And if they could, anyone else here could.”