COME 1987, THE Mutiny Club barely registered on Miami’s party radar: management complained that many members, past and prospective, incorrectly assumed that the joint, so connected with 1970s Miami, had closed. With paid membership having tanked as much as 30 percent, the latest iteration of club management loosened restrictions on who could dine at the club (now: anyone).
The new-look Mutiny also flooded Miami with trial membership cards. “If you don’t like one club,” said Jennifer Caramatti, long one of the highest-grossing Mutiny girls, “you can go to another.” She was now membership director at nearby Ensign Bitters, where Willie and Sal made occasional cameos. Her head of security was former CENTAC-26 chief, Raul Diaz, now a private investigator.
Another exclusive Mutiny offshoot was Cats in the Grove, which was designed by Carolyn Robbins, the visionary Burton Goldberg hired in the late 1970s to help him convert his hotel into a free-spender’s fantasyland. “We are strictly private,” the manager of Cats remarked to the Herald, before getting in this dig at the struggling Mutiny: “Other clubs are part of hotels and they are forced to allow hotel guests in.”
In March of 1987, undercover narcotics detectives busted a hundred-strong bash in the Mutiny’s fading Cappuccino and Santa Fe suites. But this was no fifty-thousand-dollar Rudy Redbeard boondoggle.
Amid the cries of hysterical teenage girls, cops arrested an adolescent who went by “Manky” for carrying a Ziploc with a few pinches of cocaine. A sixteen-year-old DJ who had been spinning the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC sobbed as he told officers that his father had driven him to the bash.
The saddest part: the shindig wasn’t even supposed to happen at the Mutiny. The teens had had no luck checking in to the newer hotel down the road. Either way, quipped a writer for the Miami Herald, “Police did not exactly find Scarface-size mounds of cocaine.”
That August, Mutiny hotel engineer Jose Rotger, a deputy to the late Fernando Puig, was shot dead, execution-style, at his hunting cabin in the Florida Everglades. The father and husband, who had borrowed Baruch Vega’s yacht to retrieve his loved ones during the Mariel boatlift, was forty-seven.
A month later, 250 former Mutiny staffers and Burton Goldberg descended on Coconut Grove for a reunion. Only, not at their old stomping ground, which was so rapidly deteriorating and understaffed that Goldberg & Crew could not bear to see the joint.
Goldberg, now sixty and relatively mellowed, had since reinvented himself as an alternative-health guru. His former workers had a surprise: they hired a near-naked woman to jump out of a pasta-filled bathtub—a nod to Goldberg’s rumored Ronzoni fetish. These days, the old nightlife mogul was far more keen to talk about all the impurities in everyday foods and nontraditional treatments for cancer and depression. He urged former staffers with ailing family members to call him for a consultation.
An undercover DEA agent who used to case the Mutiny reminisced about his job description in his heyday to the Miami News, which wrote about the staff reunion: “The company pays for my [membership] card and all I do is sit here and eat, drink and watch the big dealers watching me.”
In October, the Mutiny’s central banker, Ray Corona, was sentenced to twenty years in prison. As fate would have it, the onetime free-spending patron known for making loans he never collected on owed more than five million dollars to Sunrise Savings and Loan, the insolvent bank that financed the sale of the insolvent hotel he frequented.
Corona’s beloved Table 3—and everything else at 2951 South Bayshore Drive—was now property of the federal government, which just a week after his sentencing put out a press release announcing that the property was up for sale. Though the hotel remained open (barely), the Feds quietly shuttered the Mutiny Club, which was hemorrhaging cash. At its peak, the place was pulling in sixty thousand dollars on Friday nights alone.
Much of the magical thinking that made the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay so hot just a few years earlier now made it radioactive to Washington, which was being assailed in the press for the collapse of the financial system and the commercial real estate market. So many banks were failing that the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation was already insolvent and needed tens of billions in taxpayer-footed bailouts.
“The rooms will have to be toned down a bit,” admitted an official from the quasi-governmental agency handling the Mutiny’s sale. “I don’t think the French bordello look is in anymore.”
Offers came and went, and came and went, until the property became such a money pit for the Feds that they finally shuttered the Hotel Mutiny as well in 1989.
By this point, the government was also pursuing a criminal case against Robert Jacoby, the hotshot former chairman of Sunrise Savings and Loan. Nicknamed “banking’s boy wonder,” the then-thirty-three-year-old Jacoby told Forbes magazine: “I’m an ego-status person. I have a pretty wife, a Jaguar, a Mercedes, a beautiful home, a yacht. I want a Ferrari, a bigger house, a bigger boat. I want an airplane, an apartment in New York.”
Such tales of conspicuous consumption and risk-taking by bankers rotted across Miami’s skyline, as building after shiny building fell into receivership. Government officials were coming to terms with the fact that it would probably be cheaper to burn down certain properties than to operate them and hope for a sale. The savings-and-loan crisis dragged on the economy well into the 1990s, ultimately costing taxpayers an estimated 124 billion dollars.