Wear enough makeup, show enough skin, and your photo will wind up on michaelcapponi.com. Come prepared to make out with strangers.
—“SEVEN DAYS OF MIAMI PARTIES,” NEW YORK MAGAZINE, 2006
Michael Capponi was chimping again. It was a Thursday night and he was sitting in a roll-backed chair at his usual table at the Vix, the swanky restaurant at the Hotel Victor on Ocean Drive, intently typing away at the miniature keyboard of his handheld BlackBerry with his thumbs. It had been raining on and off all day and he was text-messaging the tribe, trying to round up a crowd for tonight's party upstairs at the rooftop nightclub. He seemed oblivious to everything around him, the buzz of the busy restaurant, the loud music, and all the beautiful young women sitting at his table, one more exquisite than the next, all of whom were trying to flirt with him. If he would only look up.
One thing finally did get his attention away from his Black-Berry. A young Hispanic busboy tried to remove a large oval platter of chipped ice on which huge piles of stone-crab-claw appetizers— several thousand dollars’ worth— had just been served, and the ice slurped off the side in a slushy sheet and onto Michael Capponi's lap. Michael jumped to his feet, but too late; his pants and sport jacket were drenched in fishy-smelling ice water. Diners at other tables turned to watch while the manager rushed over to Capponi to dispense cloth napkins and help blot his pants. The mortified busboy, who had the hangdog expression of someone who was just about to get fired, kept his distance from behind one of the diaphanous white curtains that billowed between tables.
“Please don't get the busboy into trouble,” Michael said to the manager with a hint of weary forbearance. “It was an accident.” But the manager only nodded halfheartedly, so Capponi repeated a bit more firmly, “Okay? Don't get the busboy into trouble?”
The manager finally agreed, “Okay.”
Satisfied, Capponi sat back down at the table and grinned at his dinner guests with a kind of goofy, just-my-luck expression on his face. He was a nice-looking man with neatly combed dark hair and a strong jawline. It was typical of him to be gallant and try to protect the busboy. The first thing people in Miami Beach say about Michael Capponi is that he's a nice guy with a good heart, charming and sweet-natured, and isn't that amazing considering that at age thirty-four he's the biggest nightclub promoter in the city— maybe the biggest nightclub promoter in the whole country, for that matter— and nice and nightclub don't often go together.
The second thing people say about Capponi (and he will be more than happy to affirm) is that he used to be a bad-ass heroin addict who practically came back from the dead, which makes him a folk hero in Miami Beach. His story is the recipe for greatness South Beach–style— notoriety, drugs, public flameout, and, always, forgiveness and redemption— but not necessarily in that order. He went from being the Prince of SoBe nightlife, as the Miami Herald crowned him at the tender age of twenty-one, to a homeless junkie who dropped out of the scene, as good as dead. A few years later he reappeared, full of humility and ambition, with a good haircut and a ready smile, clean of smack, seemingly even a nicer guy after all he'd been through.
In Miami Beach, Capponi's imprimatur on an invitation, or on the marquee above a nightclub's entrance, can materialize thousands of revelers at $20 a head admission. His parties deliver what his name has come to promise: a sexy young crowd under age thirty ready to party, 70 percent women, 30 percent men, and a sprinkling of gay men and a drag queen or two for a dash of diversity. Capponi's followers are so loyal to him that when he announced he intended to celebrate his thirty-first birthday at Nygard Cay in the Bahamas, more than two thousand people flew to the island to celebrate with him, most of whom he didn't personally know.
As for his drug habit, Capponi has been clean of drugs for seven years. “And I've never gone to an AA meeting,” he said. “Never! Not once! And I've never relapsed. I'll never touch a drug again and I'm completely in the heart of nightlife. I'm surrounded by people who do drugs, and it doesn't affect me.”
Yet he enjoys drinking. Having an omnipresent flute of Moët nearby helps him get through the long nights of meaningless chitchat with the thousands of strangers who want to talk to him. “You know what Jim Morrison said?” Capponi asked. Jim Morrison is his muse— not a great role model, but nevertheless. “Morrison said, “I drink so I can talk to assholes. And I include myself in that.’” For Capponi, who is at heart a rather shy person, talking can also be hard because he's deaf in his right ear, the consequence of having a tumor removed from his brain while he was on his 1990s tricontinent odyssey to kick heroin. All night long Capponi is besieged by a procession of characters who want his attention and pump his hand, or touch his shoulder, or ask if he remembers them (he always says yes but he remembers no one's name). He treats everyone with equanimity and seems bemused and bored at the same time. On most nights at a club, he buys more than a hundred drinks for people whose names he doesn't know. That night at the Vix a woman wearing a red bustier interrupted him while he was eating and mistook him for his nemesis competitor, promoter Tommy Pooch, and went on for a time about Pooch's success, but Capponi didn't flinch or correct the woman, he just nodded his head pleasantly and let her move on.
Aside from Capponi's good nature, there was another, simpler reason why he might have been so gracious about having ice water poured in his lap, and that was because at the moment he was being studied with great fascination by a dozen young women sitting at his table, none older than nineteen. They were part of this year's pick of the crop of freshman models from the Wilhelmina modeling agency. A week or two ago many of them were living at home with their parents, or in a college dormitory, or working as waitresses in their hometowns. Tonight they were decked out in their best finery, showing lots of tanned skin and cleavage, looking overwhelmed by their surroundings. Why were they invited to this dinner? What was expected of them? And was this expensive meal really free?
Michael Capponi's watchful girlfriend, Erin Henry, twenty-four, who was sitting to his left, could have told the young women that although not much in Miami Beach comes without a price, yes, this meal was free, and so would a lot of other meals and drinks be free to them in Miami Beach, in exchange for serving as ornaments. Models were coin of the realm in Miami Beach— the sizzle that helped sell the brand— and models went almost everywhere for free, because where models went, money followed. The top boutique hotels of South Beach were so eager to have models as guests and be seen in the lobby or lounging around the pool that a model could rent a room at the Raleigh Hotel for only $95 a night— $250 off the high-season price. Models also get free admission and drinks at nightclubs, even though it is illegal to admit anyone under twenty-one years of age into a nightclub in Miami Beach, except for what the Miami SunPost called the “young, beautiful, and famous law.”
Erin could have explained a lot about life in South Beach to this neophyte class of beauties because three years ago she was sitting where they were, figuratively. Like most of them she came to Miami Beach from her hometown— in her case Portland, Oregon— to break into modeling. She signed with a top local agency, Michele Pommier, and went out on “castings.” But she didn't get much work, because she was six feet tall and she had the athletic build of a volleyball player, not the long, lithe frame of a high-fashion model. To compensate she began to starve herself to look gaunt, and it worked: “I started to get booked a lot,” Erin said. “I was what they called a “money girl,’ which meant that I had a dependable stream of income from catalogs, not high fashion. I'm the kind of girl that when you open a JCPenney catalog the customer feels comfortable looking at me. It wasn't glamorous, but it was a great job; six shots and you get paid three thousand dollars a day.” The only problem was she couldn't eat.
In January of 2003, Erin went to a Super Bowl Sunday party at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Collins Avenue and a mutual friend introduced her to Michael Capponi. After chatting with her for just a minute Capponi took his friend aside and whispered, “That's the kind of girl I'm going to marry.” He searched Erin out later in the afternoon and found her sitting on the grass out back, watching the ocean, and he sat next to her and they talked for an hour. She was shocked when she later found out he was promoting the party. “He pretended he had nothing to do,” Erin said. “He was such a mystery. I had no idea about the heroin. I didn't know a thing about him. After that Sunday he called me for a couple of weeks and I kept putting him off, not making a date, and then one day he called and said, “Last try.’ And so I went out with him.”
Just a few weeks after they began dating, Erin fell seriously ill. She had been taking diet pills, not eating, and she was working out six hours a day to stay modeling-thin. Capponi called his physician-to-the-fast-lane-crowd, Jeff Kamlet, and Erin was whisked away to a room in Miami Heart Institute, where they discovered she had a kidney infection exacerbated by dehydration and lack of nutrients. Michael slept on the floor of her room for three days until she was discharged, and then he chartered a plane and took her to a hotel in the Bahamas to recuperate for three weeks. “I will always adore him for rescuing me like that,” she said. She also loves him because he cries so easily, suddenly, unexpectedly. He'll remember something, some little moment from his past, and his eyes will fill up. And she'll always love him, she said, because he is barking crazy, quite literally— he often barks, just like a dog, to relieve tension, in the house, or out of the car window, or just that day, in the Publix supermarket, just the two of them alone in an aisle.
It was at the Publix market, in the yogurt department, that a beautiful young woman came up to her and asked if Erin wanted to ditch her shopping cart and go home with “me and my boyfriend,” as the young woman put it, who was available for inspection in line at the checkout counter. The “me and my boyfriend” invitation had stopped surprising Erin. It was part of the ethos of the Beach. “Threesomes were in fashion,” Erin said. “It was expected”— although not her personal cup of tea. In fact, she wasn't so certain that Miami Beach was the right place for her to begin with. “I grew up in West Linn, a suburb of Portland. My mother was a microbiologist and my father was a sales executive. I lived in a safe community where you didn't have to lock your doors at night. People talked to each other in the street.”
There was no small amount of adjustment when Erin threw her lot in with Michael Capponi. She gave up her apartment and moved into his handsome house on Sunset Island 1, and she stopped modeling and started eating. She got her real estate license and a job at Sotheby's that would allow her to make her own hours. At night she went to a parade of restaurants, parties, and nightclubs with Michael, and she learned to tolerate the flirtations of other women. Three years of Miami Beach nightlife had passed and it had become more lonely than tedious, mostly because there was no one to talk to, and it was hard to make friends in the night crowd. It was hard to make friends in Miami Beach because people never stayed, they kept coming and going. Michael promised her that eventually he was going to give up nightclub promoting and get into real estate and design, but it was impossible for him to let go at the top of his game. He always said, “If you're the king of nightlife, you're the king of the city.”
A photographer who worked for Capponi arrived at the Vix restaurant and took photos of all the guests at the table hugging and smiling, which would appear on Capponi's website at michael capponi.com the following week, archived along with thousands of other photographs taken at Capponi-promoted events, an effective marketing tool that drew 3 million hits a month. Erin posed for a photograph with a writer who was profiling Michael, smiling her professional smile but thinking to herself that she wasn't going to attend one of these promotional dinners again.
IT IS the promise of nighttime hedonism, according to the city of Miami Beach's Economic Development Office, that is the third most important draw for tourism, next to the natural gifts of climate and surf. Just as Mickey Mouse makes Orlando the number-one tourist attraction in the United States, and the slot machines and Barry Manilow bring millions of tourists to Las Vegas, in Miami Beach, in order of importance, it is the beach, big tits, and the probability of getting laid that feed the tourist engine and pack its hotels. There are more nightclubs per capita in Miami Beach than in any other city in America, and the consumption of alcohol adds $800 million yearly to the city's coffers. As for the famed Art Deco district drawing tourists, although 70 percent of the people polled by the chamber of commerce said they came to see the old buildings, “Let's face it,” said former Miami Beach mayor Neisen Kasdin, “we like to talk about the Art Deco district and preservation, but to the rest of the world Miami Beach is sex.”
During high season, the nightclubs in South Beach vie to monopolize a particular night of the week and make their club that night's prime destination. At that particular moment Capponi promoted the most “nights” on the Beach. On Monday nights he promoted a party at B.E.D., a club on Washington Avenue where customers reclined on the floor on linen-covered futons and pillows while they drank Pussy Galore cocktails and ate dinner served to them on rattan trays. On Wednesday nights he promoted the wildest party of the week, the Mardi Gras–like celebration at The Forge restaurant and Glass discotheque that attracted a slightly older crowd. On Friday nights he promoted the party at Prive, the ultramodern “überlounge,” as it was billed, with upholstered sofas, low hassocks, low tables, and high liquor prices. (A “setup” of an ice bucket and glasses can run anywhere from $500 to $1,000 without liquor.) On Saturday nights Capponi promoted the biggest, most bacchanalian party on the Beach at the 11,000-square-foot Mansion, which was also his biggest paycheck.
Thursday nights Capponi was at the trendy Hotel Victor. The seven-story hotel, designed in 1937 by architect L. Murray Dixon, had been treated to a gutting and reconstruction by the Hyatt Corporation in 2005, and lavishly decorated by Parisian designer Jacques Garcia in over-the-top 1930s Miami Beach style. The hip hotel also has a “vibe” manager whose job it is to program the mood music in the six different “sound areas” and burn scented candles to create the right sensual atmosphere. Rooms start at $750 a night in season.
Part of Capponi's perks (or trials) for his Thursday night promotion at the Hotel Victor was a gratis 10:00 p.m. dinner, to which he would invite a dozen young models to dress up the party at the rooftop club that would begin around midnight.
IT WAS at another of those Thursday night promotional dinners that Capponi invited the girls who were living at the Karin Models agency's “models’ apartment” at the Mirador condominiums. A “models’ apartment” is a dormitory in which modeling agencies warehouse out-of-town recruits—typically, six vain, immature, and highly competitive young women age eighteen to twenty years old. Each pays $1,000 a month to sleep in bunk beds and share two bathrooms and all the neuroses that go with selling your beauty for validation.
“It was, in one word, hell,” said Ambika Marshall, at age nineteen the oldest girl in the Mirador apartment at the beginning of that season. “All the girls talked about was the modeling business, photographers, and guys,” she continued. They compared bookings and agencies and worried about what they were eating. None read anything but fashion magazines in the two weeks Ambika had been there. And unlike her roommates, Ambika hadn't been out on the town every night since she arrived a fortnight before from her hometown of Richmond, Virginia— “being the good girl that I am,” she said.
She wouldn't have even gone to dinner that night at the Vix except that she was in a celebratory mood because she had finally landed her first modeling job— a runway gig at a fashion show for Roberto Cavalli— booked for the next day. She had no idea who Michael Capponi was or where she was going for certain, except that it was free, and that's how she wound up at the Hotel Victor.
Ambika was five foot ten, leggy and gamine. She was wearing a simple black dress with a V-shaped neckline, dangling earrings, and her dark hair piled up on her head. She had a warm smile and calm presence as she walked across the room to Capponi's table. Ambika— the name is Hindu for “nurturing mother”— was born in London, England, to West Indian parents from New Delhi. She was three years old when her mother took her to Richmond, Virginia, and remarried a well-to-do attorney. Ambika attended private schools and led a relatively sheltered life, and she spoke to her mother on the phone every day. She had been toying with a career in modeling since high school, and had no problem getting representation with an agency in Washington, D.C. But after a brief foray in the fashion jungle of New York City, where she was told she had a better chance for a successful career as a runway model than as a photographer's model, she headed to Miami Beach for the winter season to give it one more try in a fresh place.
“As soon as I got to the Hotel Victor,” Ambika said, “I made a beeline for Erin Henry, Michael Capponi's girlfriend, because just looking at her I knew that Erin was the kind of girl I would know at home.” Within an hour they felt as if they were old friends. After dinner they went up to the rooftop nightclub overlooking Ocean Drive and the beach. It had been pouring in sheets all day, and the air still felt wet and cool. The club had teak floors, striped canvas tenting, and wicker bucket chairs with canopies. The adjoining wall of the hotel's main building had been covered with a white stretch fabric, and a slide show of the revelers from previous Thursday night parties was projected on the wall.
Below them Ocean Drive stretched out like a neon-rimmed midway, a gauntlet of tourist restaurants, boozy nightclubs, and Art Deco hotels painted pastel colors like in a children's book. Architect and designer Philippe Starck called the Art Deco district “a pink fluorescent machine to pick money from tourists.” There was a river of people on the street, a high-spirited carnival of gawking tourists with an occasional local sideshow freak thrown in— a man with a yellow snake draped over his shoulders, a Rastafarian hawking counterfeit CDs, a happy drunk in a Santa Claus hat. Across the street was a low stone wall with a wide grass park with benches and palm trees, and beyond that the white beach and the lapis-colored ocean under a cloudy sky.
Ambika stayed a long time, drinking and dancing, until about 2:30 a.m., when Michael and Erin asked her to go on to another party with them— insisting that it was still early, that it was always early in Miami Beach. But Ambika had her very first job the next day, and so they gave her a lift to the Mirador apartments and said good night. She figured chances were fifty-fifty that she would ever see them again.
The following morning at the Roberto Cavalli show, the stylist dressed Ambika in a long brown fur trench coat with only red panties on underneath. As Ambika strode from the wings onto the runway for the first time, the tent exploded with the harsh stop-action lightning of the photographers’ strobes. It sent waves of adrenaline through her. The fifteen seconds she spent strutting up and down the runway in that long raincoat, flashing the red panties, thrilled her, as it did the audience. “I felt so hot,” she remembered. “My heart was jumping out of my chest.”
That night Erin and Michael surprised her by calling and asking her to celebrate her first job with them. Ambika was still wearing the professional hairdo and makeup from the runway show and she was glowingly beautiful. Michael and Erin took her to dinner at Casa Tua, an Italian restaurant with a clublike private dining room upstairs, and later to the nightclub Prive, where the security guards separated the crowds of people for Capponi like Moses parting the Red Sea and ushered him and his guests inside to the VIP area. Ambika danced until she was exhausted.
After that night Erin and Michael “took her up.” She went out with them practically every night, everywhere, from one great party to another. During the day she went to an occasional audition, or to the beach with girlfriends, or met Erin for lunch on Lincoln Road. On Saturday afternoons she partook in the ritual of taking Michael's fifty-three-foot Sunseeker out to a sand bar about two miles south of Point Biscayne and anchoring to have lunch. Michael would show off for everybody by passionately waterskurfing behind the boat, and later they had a bottle of wine and Ambika and Erin stretched out in the sun on the back of the boat while Michael retreated into his BlackBerry.
The little city engulfed her with pleasure. The weather was always perfect, the trade winds intoxicated her, and she was golden tan from lolling on the beach. Everywhere she turned there were beautiful young people. As part of Michael Capponi's entourage she met a passel of celebrities. She went to so many glamorous parties in mansions and penthouses and nightclubs and hotels— two or three a night, all punctuated by the strobe lights of pho tographers, taking her picture as though she was a star— that it soon became an amalgam, undifferentiated pleasure, until one particular Saturday night when Michael and Erin called to say they were going to take her to a party at the estate of the notorious real estate developer Thomas Kramer, who owned the most expensive private house in Miami Beach, at the most expensive address, Star Island.*
LIKE SO many beautiful things in Miami Beach, Star Island is artificial. A scant 2,100 feet long and 1,000 feet wide, it was dredged up from the bottom of Biscayne Bay in 1917 by the real estate company of Carl Fisher, the first of nineteen man-made islands that were built to buttress the bay side of Miami Beach and increase waterfront real estate. Despite the island's evocative name, it is shaped not like a star but like an attenuated oval, to create as much waterfront footage as possible. At the northern end Fisher built an elegant yacht club and began selling waterfront lots for $200 a foot on what real estate brochures of the time called “The Isle of Enchantment.”
A century later Star Island is still enchanted, perhaps even possessed. Its fifty-four mansions are the homes of some of the most famous personalities of our time, including TV host Rosie O'Don-nell; entertainment entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs; the singer Gloria Estefan and her husband, Emilio; recording industry executive Tommy Mottola and his wife, Mexican superstar Thalia; billionaire businessman Phillip Frost, the owner of IVAX pharmaceuticals; and Stuart A. Miller, president and CEO of Lennar, the largest builder of homes in America.
The island is accessible by land only from the MacArthur Causeway, over a two-lane bridge illuminated at night by white glass plinths, like a celestial runway. It has only one grand, elliptical street, Star Island Drive, with a wide, landscaped meridian studded by palm trees and ringed with the protective gates to fifty-four fantasy mansions of every style and architectural persuasion. Unfor tunately for the prominent residents of Star Island, its greatest attraction— that it's an island— is also its greatest bane; all the backyards of all the houses are on Biscayne Bay, which is a public waterway. This means that from morning until dusk, tour boats circle the island like sharks around a rowboat while tour guides, in two languages, identify the houses of the rich and famous over piercing loudspeakers, frequently using the names of celebrities who don't even live there, such as Julio Iglesias and Madonna. The high-end shoe designer Donald J. Pliner got so frustrated hearing his Moorish mansion described as belonging to Sylvester Stallone that he personally called the tour-boat companies and corrected them, so now at least he hears his own name when the sightseeing boats go by.
Not every resident is as good humored about the attention as Donald Pliner. The constant scrutiny was misery for Star Island's biggest draw, Miami Heat center Shaquille O'Neal. Before O'Neal, the only other black person to live on Star Island, where deed restrictions prohibited the sale of property to blacks, was boxing promoter Don King. After he joined the Miami Heat, O'Neal paid $19 million for his eight-bedroom, ten-bath mansion, with a two-bedroom guest cottage, indoor racquetball court, three hundred feet of waterfront, and a swimming pool in which he had a Superman insignia tiled in the bottom. One big selling point for O'Neal was that the house had been built for another Miami Heat center, six-foot-eleven Rony Seikaly, who had the doors custom-built eight feet high, which meant that seven-foot-one O'Neal didn't have to duck. He did have to duck outside, though. O'Neal's three hundred feet of Biscayne Bay waterfront was packed with vessels of every description, like a boating convention, crammed with paparazzi and fans with binoculars and telescopes. Because the boaters were in public waterways, the authorities were unable to make them leave, even at night. O'Neal responded by erecting two colossal lighting poles with high-wattage floodlights focused into Biscayne Bay to blind prying eyes and foil cameras.
Unfortunately, the lights also blinded the residents of a huge condominium building on West Avenue in Miami Beach. The condo owners made a polite plea to O'Neal to have the lights extinguished or refocused, but O'Neal had little sympathy. “If they don't like it, tell them to pull the shades,” he told a reporter, and he threatened to double his lights to four poles. In the end, the paparazzi and fans ruined the Star Island house for him, and in a little less than a year, O'Neal put the house on the market for $32 million, $13 million more than he had paid for it. He was so angry he threatened to leave Miami altogether and move to Fort Lauderdale. By the fall of 2007 O'Neal and his wife, Shaunie, were in the middle of a divorce and Shaq had moved out, leaving Shaunie, their four kids, his mother-in-law, a nanny, a chef, housekeepers, and estate managers behind. O'Neal almost had a buyer for the house in superstar baseball player Alex “ A-Rod” Rodriguez, who signed a contract but backed out after a judge ruled Shaunie and the entourage were allowed to stay there until O'Neal found them another place to live. In 2008, with no buyer in sight, O'Neal reduced the price of the property to $29 million.
The island's lack of privacy was also the undoing of Miami Vice actor Don Johnson's brief romance with Star Island. The hit TV series had catapulted him to national stardom, and in February of 1986 Johnson purchased an undeveloped two-acre lot on Star Island for $800,000, intending to make Miami Beach his home. When his hapless real estate broker divulged the sale to the press, Johnson sued the man for $2 million for invasion of privacy, claiming that it was going to “cost a fortune,” according to his lawyers, for extra security now that the public knew the nation's hippest TV cop was going to live on Star Island. Johnson not only won a settlement from the real estate broker for an undisclosed amount, but in August of 1987, claiming the city of Miami Beach was ungrateful to him for all he had done in uplifting its image, he sold his land for $1.39 million, a tidy profit, and quit Miami Beach altogether.
Ironically, although the island is exclusive, its main street is not legally private. The guard booth at the entrance is more of an amenity and psychological barrier because there is no authority to stop anyone from coming onto the grassy meridian, which is public ground. The residents were sharply reminded of this in 2006 when two hundred janitors from the University of Miami, on strike for higher pay, invaded the island and held a protest picnic because three board members of the university, including Gloria Estefan, owned homes on Star Island.
Security on the island is a problem. In 1998, while Estefan and her husband were away on vacation, $250,000 worth of watches were stolen from their home, and their compound has now become command central for a state-of-the-art security and surveillance system that blankets the island with discreetly positioned security cameras.
Although the island is not a chummy place— it's hardly the kind of community where you'd meet a neighbor walking a dog— for the most part people get along, even with high-strung personalities rubbing property and egos. The home of Rosie O'Donnell and her partner, Kelli Carpenter, and their brood of kids abuts the property of music impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs, not an auspicious pairing since O'Donnell is seriously into her children and a quiet home life and Combs is seriously into his party life. He has held huge promotional events at his house and blasts music at night over outdoor speakers. Once he set off a fireworks display that frightened O'Donnell's kids, and their dog “peed himself whimpering in terror,” Rosie wrote in her blog.
The mansion in which the O'Donnells live was once the headquarters of the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, whose leaders paid $270,000 for the property in 1975. The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church was unusual in that it had no Ethiopians, Zionists, or Coptics, but it did have an amenable leader named Thomas Francis Reilly Jr., otherwise known as Brother Louv. Brother Louv's teachings advocated smoking marijuana as part of the church's religious ritual, and he considered pot a sacrament protected by the law. The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church generated huge amounts of publicity, including a segment on CBS TV's 60 Minutes. Things came to a head when the Coptic children appeared on local TV news taking tokes on marijuana spliffs and the outraged state district attorney moved in. Eventually nine members of the church were indicted for distribution of marijuana, the church was disbanded, and the property was sold.
The island may have reached its apotheosis of silliness in the 1980s with the arrival of billionaire bad boy Mohammed al-Fassi, whose sister married Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz, the son of the king of Saudi Arabia. That familial connection gave Mohammed royal status and nearly unlimited funds to buy toys, trinkets, and houses. He wandered the globe, spending lavishly, finally coming to national fame in the United States in 1978 when he built a thirty-eight-room mansion prominently situated on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, which he had painted Day-Glo green. He also hired artists to paint the pubic hair of his statuary black.
In Miami Beach Prince Turki and his clan spent some $17 million on real estate, and Star Island residents were apprehensive when al-Fassi overpaid $1.5 million for two adjoining properties on the condition that the owners pack up and leave the very next day so he could have their houses torn down. A construction crew immediately began work on a four-building compound with its own artificial mountain and five waterfalls. There were plastic pyramids as well, a thirty-foot-high mosque with gold-leaf ceilings, a bowling alley, bathroom fixtures that cost $300,000, and a two-story clock tower with a computerized Swiss clock that would announce the time in twelve languages. Al-Fassi fled America in June of 1982 with a stack of bills, an unfinished estate, and an ex-wife after him. The property was abandoned, with tons of marble lying around, the doors open. The Miami Beach City Commission voted to demolish the estate in 1983.
Perhaps the most amusingly eccentric resident on Star Island was its very first, Edward R. Green, who bought the mansion that Fisher had built on the north end of the island as a yacht club and made it his home from 1925 until he died in 1936. Known as “Ned” Green, he was the son of the tightfisted “Witch of Wall Street,” Hetty Green, who earned her nickname from the black clothes she wore when she visited her banker. Hetty Green amassed a $140 million fortune in the 1920s— $500 million in today's dollars. She was so cheap that she refused to light the candles on her birthday cake so they could be reused every year. When Ned was fourteen he dislocated his knee, and Hetty, refusing to pay for a doctor, took him to free clinics to be treated. Gangrene set in and his leg had to be amputated. Ned was fitted with a wooden leg, which didn't seem to hamper his many relationships with women. He kept a virtual harem of pretty things in his house on Star Island.
His mother might have been a miser, but Ned was not. He was driven around Miami in a glass-roofed car, and he had a replica of a Mississippi riverboat built on his dock with a 400-seat auditorium. He once entertained by inviting the Ringling Brothers Circus to perform. Since he had only one leg, he had all the toilets in his house built very high, so his guests would find their feet dangling in front of them when they sat down. This proved to be such an amusement to him that he had secret peepholes cut into the bathroom walls so he could watch.
He wasn't the only Star Island resident who liked to watch.
There was also Thomas Kramer.
“TO ANOTHER lousy day in Paradise!” Thomas Kramer toasted his guests in a big booming voice, a schoolboy's mischievous grin on his rosy lips. His huge Star Island estate stretched out behind him— the tiled patio and royal palms, a floodlit swimming pool, cabanas and a sauna on Biscayne Bay, and a yacht moored at the private dock. The night smelled of lavender, sprayed into the air like a fine mist by a machine to keep away mosquitoes.
“To Paradise!” the guests shouted in answer, raising their glasses. One of the guests, a kittenish young woman with dark hair and green eyes, was wearing a T-shirt that read “Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go to 5 Star Island.”
“I was mesmerized by Thomas Kramer's house,” Ambika said, yet from the start she felt something foreboding about its owner. Kramer behaved like an out-of-control child in the body of a 6-foot 3-inch, strapping adult. He looked as though he might have just stepped out of a beer garden during Oktoberfest, his face flush from singing German marching songs and drinking beer, only it was $300 bottles of champagne he was drinking. He had a Lil’ Abner shock of golden blond hair and a strong, Germanic nose and ice-blue eyes. He was wearing elaborately embroidered jeans with a white dress shirt opened one button too many.
Years ago, when South Beach was a slum, in one breathtaking $40 million splurge, Kramer bought up entire blocks of real estate like a man running up and down the aisles in a supermarket throwing groceries into a shopping cart, including thirteen waterfront acres, eighteen apartments in South Pointe Towers (the condominium building in which he then lived with his beautiful wife, Catrine Burda), the Ocean Haven Hotel, the Leonard Hotel, and the Diamond Apartments, all on Ocean Drive, and the Playhouse Bar on Collins Avenue, the Flagler Fidelity Building on Lincoln Road, and half a dozen rental properties. At one point he owned an estimated 20 percent of the southern tip of South Beach. That property today would be worth fifty times what he paid for it— that is, if he still owned all of it.
Kramer was a stockbroker from Frankfurt, Germany, who had earned and lost several fortunes. After he made $120 million in one day shorting gold prices, the German newspapers nicknamed him “Golden nose.” In his twenties he dated Princess Yasmin Khan, who said that when she looked into Kramer's blue eyes she saw “dollar signs.” Kramer had far-flung investments and kept offices in the World Trade Center in New York before he discovered Miami Beach and made it his home. He was instrumental in the revitalization of South Beach. He built the first of the new wave of luxury condominium towers in South Pointe called the Portofino Yacht Club that served to jump-start the deluge of upscale development in the area.
At it would turn out, the money that Kramer had been spending wasn't all his own. The money was from a German billionaire named Siegfried Otto, who owned the printing company that printed all official Federal Republic of Germany documents and legal tender, including passports, stock and bond certificates, and the German deutschmark. He was also Kramer's father-in-law, the stepfather of Catrine, whose mother had recently married the publishing billionaire. Otto allegedly gave his new stepson-in-law $145 million to invest in Miami real estate. When Otto died in 1994, his heirs wanted an accounting. Kramer claimed that the money was a loan and the Matisse painting he bought with it belonged to him. Otto's relatives— including Kramer's own mother-in-law— sued him for misappropriation, fraud, and for ownership of 5 Star Island, claiming he stole $60 million from them. Catrine, loyal to her mother, divorced Kramer in 1995. In 2000, under legal pressure from the heirs of Siegfried Otto, Kramer was forced to sell most of his real estate holdings to the Related Companies. But he remains an extraordinarily rich man. And a mischievous one.
Over the years Kramer has gotten himself into all sorts of trouble. He'd recently outraged the patrons at the steak house Prime 112 by having a big-buxomed woman crawl under his table and perform fellatio on him while he and his friends were having dinner. He has been sued at least twice for sexual harassment, and in London his secretary accused him of raping her, but she dropped the case before it went to court. More recently he was accused of touching a young boy in the bathroom of the Rainbow Room in Manhattan, which was settled out of court.
Kramer makes no apologies for his behavior. In fact, he revels in his reputation. He will be the first to tell you that he's got the devil in him. The devil— and the color red— is Kramer's theme. His short-lived South Beach discotheque was called Hell, and its sign is still evident hanging along the cobblestone patios of the outbuildings as one enters his estate. The red-toned Mediterranean main house is named “Casa el Diabilito”— the Little Devil's House, though there was nothing little about it—a compound of six buildings that included an office complex, a three-bedroom guesthouse, two staff quarters, and a nine-car garage with marble floors.
The interior decor was Moulin Rouge meets The Damned—red walls, upholstered sofas and chairs with gilt frames, marble busts, a taxidermied head of a giraffe, dragons painted on the ceiling, and floor-to-ceiling paintings of landscapes and still lifes. In the media room there was a huge red divan big enough for twenty people to lie down on and watch TV. The ceiling of the dining room was covered with a trompe l'oeil of gods and goddesses with big breasts throwing food down at the diners, and the dining room table was embedded with two gold “stripper poles” for what Kramer called “calorie-free dessert.”
The estate displayed another motif: voyeurism. Prominent signs warned visitors that security cameras were photographing everything that happened in the house— including in all the bathrooms and the nine bedrooms of the main building. Kramer had been taping everything for years, and the British tabloids once ran a story about him headlined A SPY CAMERA IN EVERY ROOM. Kramer's penchant for kink was no secret. He had no secrets. He had much pride and little shame. His exploits and peccadilloes were extensively reported in the press, none of which seemed to particularly perturb him, and much of which evidently pleased him, since he posted most of his press on his personal website, thomaskramer.com, along with videos and party pictures.
Among the other guests that night at Kramer's party was the famed “breast man” in Miami, Dr. Leonard Roudner, also known as “Dr. Boobner.” Dr. Roudner is the area's busiest breast-enhancement surgeon, a vocation he practices exclusive of all other plastic surgery: “I'm so inundated with clients.” He is also so consumed with mammaries that the swimming pool of his house on Palm Island is shaped like a breast. In choosing his specialty, Dr. Roudner was no fool; breast-enhancement surgery was the number one type of plastic surgery performed in Miami. Roudner had a long waiting list of patients and charged an average of $7,000 for implants. He was so busy that he operated on five women every day of the week and squeezed in two more implants every other Saturday. “People are very exposed here,” he said, “and South Americans love cosmetic surgery.” He'd even shaped the breasts of three generations of women in the same family. Breast connoisseurs in Miami Beach claim they can tell a Boobner breast job from across the street. He called the trademark rounded, pert breasts he created “Goddess Breasts,” which seemed to be in evidence on the attractive young women who arrived at the party with him.
Kramer offered to give Capponi and Erin and Ambika a tour of the house. “Everybody wants to see the bedroom,” Kramer bellowed in his thick accent. He led them up a corkscrew poured-concrete staircase that spiraled three times to the gallery leading to the master bedroom. Outside the door there was a red light and a sign that read SEX. His bedroom was a large room with windows overlooking Biscayne Bay. It had a red ceiling, a red rug, and a king-size bed in an alcove. There was a red fire extinguisher disconcertingly mounted on the wall next to the bed, as if he expected pyrotechnics. Kramer also gleefully displayed a trunk of sex toys and referred to an adjoining room as the “recovery room.” There was also a nearby “safe room” in case of a robbery, in which Kramer reportedly kept machines guns, handguns, and a bazooka. Kramer also showed his guests his walk-in closet. “There must have been fifty pairs of red pants,” Erin said.
Ambika remembered the “straps on the ceiling right where the bed was,” she said, “and he had all these photographs of orgies; it wasn't in secret or anything.” Kramer also had photos on his cell phone that he showed everyone, taken in this bedroom, of a woman, his girlfriend he said, on the bed on her hands and knees, smiling at the camera with her ass up in the air, peeking out from under a flimsy negligee. Then the next photo was— Kramer in the same negligee in the same pose.
Ambika was speechless. Kramer seemed delighted she was shocked. He became even more animated and demonstrative, and as soon as they could break away, Capponi and the two young woman hurried back downstairs, where the party was getting boisterous. A woman with suntanned breasts wearing a crocheted top came up to Kramer and kissed him. He pinched her brown erect nipples poking through the yarn and everyone laughed. At a certain point it seemed as if some of the women were unbuttoning their blouses completely, and one of the men took off his shirt. “It got very weird,” Ambika said, and Michael and Erin started giving each other nervous looks. The three bid Thomas Kramer adieu and got the hell out of there.
* Another private island, Fisher Island, is reportedly the most expensive address in the Miami area— some say in the entire United States— but it's not a part of Miami Beach.
