THE POOP DECK and Table 14, rocked by Operation Tick-Talks, were now the stomping grounds of flamboyant kingpin Juan “Johnny” Hernandez. This heavily protected cocaine dealer’s weekly tab at the Mutiny often broke twenty-five thousand dollars, which didn’t even include the 3,500-dollars-a-week rent he was paying for use of the panoramic Sailboat Bay penthouse suite.
Hernandez was married to a Playboy Bunny, but kept a mistress at the Mutiny. The same Upper Deck waitress who not long before kept Monkey Morales’s gun for him in a bread basket now prepared Hernandez’s steak tartare tableside.
Hernandez came to the US from Cuba in 1960. In Spanish Harlem, he and his parents were so poor, they had to cover themselves in newspapers on cold nights; the couch they lugged upstairs off the curb had fleas.
The family left New York for South Florida after a Puerto Rican gang jumped and robbed them. They came to Hialeah, the densely packed center of Latin life in West Miami. Here, Hernandez came under the influence of Alberto San Pedro, a property developer who had a hand in every racket, from narcotics to official bribery to assassination plots. Nicknamed the “Great Corrupter of Hialeah,” San Pedro taught Hernandez how to steal cars. “In fact,” admitted Hernandez, “I lost my virginity in a stolen station wagon.”
But what really clicked for this juvenile delinquent was the bolita, the illegal Mafia-linked street lottery that was a way of life with Miami’s many immigrants, especially before Florida had a state lottery. By his twenties, Hernandez was one of Miami’s biggest bolita runners, overseeing 700 thousand dollars in play per drawing, with eight drawings a week. So flush was Hernandez’s racket that he had five Miami cops on his payroll and literally could not spend money fast enough at the Mutiny. “My guys were like ‘Johnny, bro, there’s too much cash coming in. Buy more bottles. Get tables. Food. Spend it.’
“I loved that place,” he said. “It was the place to be.”
Hernandez said he now felt so at home at the Mutiny that he sometimes arrived with grocery bags of produce and seafood to give Chef Manny to cook up, not just for himself but also for the rest of his Poop Deck delegation, including bodyguards and their girlfriends—and the girlfriends’ girlfriends.
At the end of the evening, they would all follow him out the front door and wave him off at the Mutiny’s valet. “I paid five-hundred-dollar tips to my waitresses,” he said. “I put them through school.” He said Burton Goldberg bought him a cast-iron Johnny Hernandez likeness.
Hernandez tried to diversify his numbers racket into money counterfeiting. When a Colombian printing-supplies vendor was short on cash, he asked him to instead accept a kilo of uncut cocaine as payment. “Dude,” said Hernandez, “I never even did coke. And I never, never, never wanted to get into the drug business.”
How quickly could he convert it to the cash he was owed? Hernandez had many black employees in his bolita racket, a couple of whom were connected to Harlem’s top dope dealer. As fate would have it, the kilo of coke that Hernandez was sitting on was a buttery variety that was especially in demand in the inner city. Said Hernandez: “It was exactly the kind the blacks wanted; it was better for crack.”
Hernandez netted 300 thousand dollars in three days, and with minimal effort. And as with Rudy Redbeard and Jorge Valdes and Willie and Sal before him, all he could think about now was selling his next load. “What the fuck?” he said. “I was in the wrong business.”
Hernandez flew down to Medellín, Colombia, where he was picked up in four Toyota SUVs packed with bodyguards. A helicopter transfer later, he found himself at a huge ranch, where he was greeted by deputies to Pablo Escobar.
Hernandez negotiated wholesale access to their buttery product, via an alternate route. His supply conduit would be the Venezuelan Air Force, with a Colombian senator as their official go-between. The Venezuelans would fly one thousand kilos per trip on camouflaged C-130s, landing at Miami International Airport.
Hernandez asked if they could tack on an extra three kilos apiece of their special “Juicy Fruit” variety that he had sampled—a blow so aromatic and smooth that women at the Mutiny were begging for it.
Deal, they said: 1,003 kilos a pop, into a special hangar at Miami International.
At the Mutiny, Hernandez said he was approached by one of the top producers of Miami Vice, who confided to him that many of his cast and crew were users of cocaine. He didn’t want them out in the mean streets of Miami, dealing with tabloid-bound dealers and middlemen to score blow of questionable quality. Would Hernandez agree to discreetly supply them? The producer would be sure to pay him what he needed. Sure, said Hernandez, who in turn put the producer on the spot: Would he get Hernandez on his show? The producer stuck him on two episodes. Hernandez depicted a stolen-merchandise runner in 1985’s “Made for Each Other,” and Marco, a goon, in “The Fix” (1986).
“Don Johnson was a pain in the ass,” said Hernandez, who recalled him as a whiny, petulant ego who always had to get his way. The show’s leading man moved in to the floor below Hernandez’s massive penthouse condo in downtown Miami. Johnson was mad that Hernandez refused to let him land his chopper on the roof.