BACK INSIDE THE Mutiny Club, the Poop Deck was shorn of its old patron saint, Rudy Redbeard, who had also just been sentenced to fifteen years in prison, thanks to Monkey Morales’s machinations and Carlene Quesada’s testimony. Mon, Redbeard’s fugitive Puerto Rican hit man, was still on the lam.
Now Quesada, Morales, the Villaverde brothers and Frank Castro drank together at Table 14. They shared the Poop Deck with arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, who was known around the world as the “Merchant of Death.” The rotund Armenian enthused about how much money he was going to make selling arms to whichever Arab nation decided to take the lead against now-rogue Iran, which was holding American hostages.
The Cold War was hot again at the Mutiny. Soghanalian, for example, hung out with the retinue of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who had been best friends with Mutiny security head, Fernando Puig, ever since they met at the Bay of Pigs. In addition to his job at the Mutiny, Puig oversaw Somoza’s massive Miami funeral in September. The former Nicaraguan leader was refused entry to Miami by Jimmy Carter and had to settle in Paraguay, where a hit team killed him. There was no love lost in Miami for the Democratic incumbent.
Republicans, on the other hand, were amenable to the idea of arming those who would take on Nicaragua’s leftist regime. Nominee Ronald Reagan was running with George H. W. Bush, former CIA director under Gerald Ford. Two Bush sons ate at the Mutiny. Jeb, a Spanish speaker married to a Mexican woman, had just moved to Miami from Houston and was working with prominent exile millionaires who kept tables at the club.
Bay of Pigs veterans such as Frank Castro and the Villaverdes were increasingly eyeing a retake of Nicaragua as the Cold War’s next big Latin American front. Somoza’s old guards and army officers were reconstituting into a guerrilla force called Contrarrevolución (Contras). The CIA had an asset in John Hull, a rancher who owned eight thousand acres in Costa Rica, right on the border with Nicaragua. At the Mutiny, Hull, Frank Castro, Soghanalian and the Villaverdes had plenty to talk about.
As usual, stuff was complicated with Ricardo “Monkey” Morales. He was on the outs with Rafael Villaverde, who had agreed to testify against his friend, rogue ex–CIA guy Edwin Wilson, who was doing political hits for Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. One night at the Mutiny, Morales got in a loud argument with Villaverde about the matter and threw butter pats at him.
By 1980, the Monkey, self-medicating with a constant regimen of cocaine, alcohol and downers, was above all else paranoid. Surely, he reasoned, Fidel Castro had dispatched his own assassins to Miami in the deluge of humanity that was the Mariel boatlift. Thus, every Cuban exile who had participated in clandestine raids—especially a turncoat like Morales, who had first worked for Castro—was now a target.
Seeking to calm his nerves with a walk on the beach, Morales reached for his gun when he saw a dark Latin male walking toward him with a machete. But he was just a parks employee trimming bushes on a sand dune.
Authorities in upstate Florida heard Morales had strangled a Latin man with a piano wire, and in front of as many as twenty witnesses. Perhaps that show of force was a refresh of the way he pumped seventeen rounds into a guy in broad daylight in Little Havana.
As tens of thousands of Mariel refugees poured into South Florida, and the area’s homicide rate featured on President Jimmy Carter’s daily briefing, Ricardo Morales started carrying a gag grenade on his belt. Translation: “Threaten me, challenge me, etc., and I will blow us both to bits. I’m crazier than you are.”