RUDY REDBEARD GOT out of jail in 1998. Waiting for him was Carlene Quesada, the childhood friend who had testified against him—and presumably others—to get his twenty-five-year sentence slashed down to less than five years. You’re very likely to bump into these old Poop Deck pals at one of the many Cuban diners of Coral Gables.
Two years later, in 2000, their pursuer Raul Martinez became the first Latino to be named Miami police chief. Ironically, the Cuban immigrant ascended to the top job after his predecessor was fired in the furor over his handling of another Cuban immigrant: six-year-old boatlifter Elián González.
In 2001, O. J. Simpson, his girlfriend and a Penthouse model filmed a sex tape in room 310 of the new, gutted and completely sanitized Mutiny Hotel—in an area where a swath of the Upper Deck once stood.
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SAL MAGLUTA, SIXTY-TWO, is now in Florence, Colorado’s super-maximum-security ADX prison. Nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies, the thirty-seven-acre penitentiary houses the Unabomber, the Shoe Bomber, and various busted double agents, white supremacists and cartel and Mafia bosses. His email was cut off.
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THE FILM SCARFACE has traversed the past thirty-four years as nothing short of a pop cultural totem. You see Tony Montana’s lines referenced everywhere: in The Simpsons and on ESPN’s SportsCenter; in the hit show Breaking Bad (pitched to AMC as “Mr. Chips meets Scarface”) and in video games, rap lyrics and even porn scripts. The 1983 movie has been rereleased multiple times.
In Ken Tucker’s 2008 book Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America, screenwriter Oliver Stone recalled:
The first time Brian [De Palma] came to Miami, I took him to the Mutiny . . . It was a great drug hangout and in those days it was chic to be a druggie, and all the girls were beautiful, the clubs were rich and modern—this was new to America . . . The Mutiny Club was one of those places that had forty or fifty hotel rooms, each of which had a different color. I stayed in a red- or white-colored room, but fuckin’ Brian chose the black room! Completely black.
Early in 2017, Universal Studios announced a remake of Scarface that will involve the Oscar-winning Coen Brothers and a screenplay pivot: this time the protagonist will be a Mexican immigrant conquering Los Angeles.
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BACK IN FLORIDA, two related headlines hit the news tape in April: the South Beach location of Scarface’s infamous chain saw scene is being turned into a CVS; Gustavo “Taby” Falcon, on the lam since he was named in the original 1991 Muchachos indictment, was arrested without incident while bicycling with his wife near Disney World. His brother, Willie Falcon, gets out of jail in June.
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MUTINY MOLLIE NOW owns a limo company that chauffeurs Matt Lauer. In 2015, she reunited with J. D. Barker, the Miami cop—“my guardian angel,” she calls him—who in 1982 intervened to help get her sober and into the taxi-dispatch business. It took her years to get off cocaine and alcohol and then learn how to sleep at night without medication. She now trumpets for her church choir.
Burton Goldberg lived in Tiburon, California, where he devoted his life to alternative health. You can look him up on YouTube, where in 2011 he exhorted the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, to seek him out for cancer treatment. Goldberg died peacefully in late 2016.
Owen Band and Alberto Bover were in the hospital on the same day I finally met Alberto—after at least seven years of putting out feelers for the Marielito who spoke so many languages. He passed away just weeks later.
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CINDY PROIETTI IS a flight attendant. She recently ambushed Julio Iglesias in first class, and they reminisced about the Upper Deck.
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IN 2009, THANKS to Mario Tabraue, I finally made it through to Bernardo de Torres, who wanders the grounds of Miami. We met four times. The first time, he was surrounded by black cats and a wake of vultures. The second time, he checked out my license plates.
The final time, he pleaded for ten thousand dollars—showing me two checks that JFK investigator Jim Garrison had written him during the Kennedy investigation. “Buddy,” he said, “this is my life we’re talking about.”
He admitted to me that he received radio waves from a balcony at the Mutiny, and that he never paid a penny of his own money there. He also hinted at something about the KGB. Bernie made me drive him home, where the license plate of my rental car was photographed at his guard gate. He refused to connect the dots any further for me.
“Forces had intersected at the Mutiny in ways no one could imagine,” said T. R. Cimino, the author who advised the production of Miami Vice and raced speedboats with the Muchachos. “The idea that Pablo Escobar, George Morales, George H. W. Bush, cabinet members, CIA officials and top cocaine kingpins visited the club at one time or another could be considered just a coincidence; that they were in attendance at the same time would be, in legal terms, called ‘proximity.’” Factor in what we know today about the Iran-Contra drugs-for-guns scenario, he said, “and you’d have to agree that this was more than just an exclusive Coconut Grove disco.”
Sal Magluta graciously used his prison email account to correspond with me for nine months in 2012 and 2013—mostly daily Bible verses. He mentioned a memory about one debauched night at the Mutiny. And he asked me how Pammy (a gorgeous hostess from the Upper Deck) was doing. I wrote that I visited her in Indiana, and that she’s well. And he was happy.
Both Willie and Sal were immortalized in Meek Mill’s 2013 hip-hop track “Dope Dealer”:
Sal Magluta, Willie Falcon . . .
From Monte Carlo to Los Muchachos . . .
Baruch Vega, sixty-nine, is a fashion photographer in Los Angeles. In his free time, the divorced father runs the “Colombian Traffickers Rehabilitation Program,” where he has helped the US government flip 114 cocaine kingpins. “Dr. B,” as he is called, has appeared on ABC News Primetime and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He is shopping his life’s story.
Ricardo Morales’s nieces say their uncle still visits them—in their dreams, where he is laughing and cursing and drinking. And he’s still playing mind games with Miami.
In a 2005 Miami Herald article that mentioned Morales’s allegations about who bombed that Cuban jetliner, a fingered exile in Hialeah strongly denied having any role in the affair—pointing blame back at Morales. “He can say what he wants,” he told the reporter. “Request a direct line to hell, where he surely is, and ask him what his motives were.”
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TO THIS DAY, says Jorge Valdes, he cannot get his mind off the Federal Reserve, where he had that plum job as an undergrad. What if he had stuck with it? “The most important financial institution in the world,” he says. “And I walked away from it when I was seventeen. I was making five dollars and working and studying full-time. Dead broke but, man, five dollars back then felt like a fortune, you know? I was one of the best finance kids at Miami. Where would I be now? Where would Willie and Sal be now?”
Ralph “Cabeza” Linero is similarly full of remorse. In the decade-plus he spent in prison, the former honor student at Miami Senior High lost his daughter to a car accident and had to attend her funeral in leg-irons and crowded by US Marshals. He had to listen in to his other daughter’s wedding via prison phone. “At the end of the day,” he asks, “was it all worth it? No!”
Nelson Aguilar, another retired cocaine dealer who has spent nearly half of his life in jail, concurred. “Every Mutiny story started in euphoria and ended in a crash. Done. Cocaine don’t solve problems.”
Miami’s cocaine ghosts linger—defiantly. You see them in the bulging skyline, always a mortgage or two removed from drug money. Or on the fiftysomething restaurant owner with the dad bod and busted septum wearing an ankle monitor.
In January of 2016, Pablo Escobar’s former 7,400-square-foot pink mansion in Miami Beach was demolished by its latest owner, a South Florida grilled chicken mogul. “I’m very excited to see the house of the devil disappearing right before our eyes,” he declared to a throng of reporters on hand for the teardown. The chicken man’s wife was adamant about having a Roman Catholic monsignor bless the grounds before they drafted plans for a new mansion.
But the devil refused such a speedy eviction. The demolition unearthed a dented-up but otherwise sealed seven-hundred-pound safe. Was it Escobar’s cash? Coke? Diamonds? A bit of everything maybe?
“This is real. It’s still locked,” said the poultry pooh-bah. “It’s very, very heavy. We can’t believe it—now Pablito is my best friend.”