Miami Beach is its own reality.
—ALVIN MALNIK
It was nearing midnight on a Wednesday night at The Forge restaurant and Glass discotheque, and the atmosphere of giddy mayhem was gaining in momentum, just like the salsa/disco/conga music was getting louder decibel by decibel until the infectious beat had people dancing at their tables, beautiful women holding champagne glasses above their heads, the red-faced waiters in tuxedos bullying their way through the crush while balancing trays of lamb osso buco and $65 bone-in eighteen-ounce filets mignons under shiny silver domes.
Most of the women at The Forge were in their twenties and thirties, tanned and worked out, South Beach supernumeraries with white smiles, perfect veneers, Goddess Breasts, and tattoos on their breasts and ankles or at the bottom of their spines just above the cracks of their buttocks, which sometimes showed along with the straps of their thongs. There were also older women with Goddess Breasts, dressed in short tight dresses, accompanied by men with small bellies and pastel dress shirts who recognized each other from Delmar, New Jersey. Sitting on a small banquette in the bar area were two stunning young women in their twenties, expensively dressed, sharing a portion of French fries served in the Belgian manner in a waxed-paper cone with mayonnaise. Near them, standing at the bar, a zaftig woman in her forties sipped her mar-garita and shook her behind to the music while her companion showed the rest of the bar his territorial imperative by cupping her buttock in his palm, to which she responded by stepping up a bit, the anxious movements of a horse about to be hooved. A few of the women looked like professional escorts, but it was hard to tell; if they were escorts, they weren't $200 hookers, they were top of the line, Miami Beach Maserati call girls.
The Forge's owner, Shareef Malnik, a former attorney and professional speedboat racer, is bemused by stories of hookers at The Forge. “The high-class hookers these days don't look like hookers,” he said. “In Miami Beach, where everybody is naked, it's hard to tell the difference.”
Hookers or not, The Forge is decorated like a nineteenth-century New Orleans brothel, with more stained glass than the Vatican, including the main Dome Room, where a chandelier purported to be from the Paris Opéra house hangs from a backlit stained-glass ceiling purported to be from Trinity Church in New York, and on a brick wall purported to be from the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans are hung a set of fourteen-foot brass wall sconces purported to be from Napoléon's bedchamber at Waterloo. In each case, the provenance, like The Forge's clientele, is not easily verified.
That particular Wednesday night, the B-list comedian Pauly Shore was celebrating his birthday at a big round table with helium balloons tied to the backs of the chairs. Across the aisle the prizefighter Lennox Lewis sat at a table that put him literally back to back with former Miami Dolphin Bernie Kosar, which in turn put Kosar a few feet to the right of Elaine Lancaster, the phenomenal female impersonator, who was having supper with Miami Herald nightclub columnist Lesley Abravanel. Tennis player Boris Becker, who lives in Miami Beach, was at a small side table with two friends. A magician in black tie managed to wend his way from table to table, trying to entertain. “I might be a magician,” he said to a group of disinterested patrons, “but I'm not a mind reader. You have to tell me what card you were thinking of.”
Although The Forge's food is good and the crowd is fun to watch, the thing that makes The Forge the most fascinating is not that last night John Travolta sat in the same place Michael Jordan is sitting now, but because in 1977 Meyer Lansky's stepson, Richard Schwartz, gunned down Craig Teriaca, reportedly a mobster, over a fight about $10, and Schwartz's body was later found in his Cadillac; and because Shareef's name was Mark when he was bar mitzva-hed, before he converted to Islam and married into the family of Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz, the son of the king of Saudi Arabia, who gave Shareef and his wife, Hoda, a $2 million wedding present; and most of all, because Shareef s father, the charming Alvin Malnik, seventy-four, was dubbed by the Miami Herald as the heir to Mob kingpin Meyer Lansky's throne— although most people don't think there's a throne anymore.
Malnik Sr. has always denied a close relationship with Lansky One time he said he was Lansky's lawyer; then on another occasion he insisted that he'd only “met Lansky in an elevator once.” Although Malnik Sr. has been under the scrutiny of federal and state prosecutors for decades— the U.S. Tax Court investigated him for twenty years— he's never been indicted for any wrongdoing, despite some rather suspicious things happening around him, such his yellow Rolls-Royce blowing up in the garage of a luxury building he once owned.
Alvin Malnik lives about thirty miles north of Miami Beach in a 35,000-square-foot waterfront Beaux Arts mansion with a white stretch limousine parked in the circular driveway. He has ten children from his multiple marriages— the last three, triplets with his present wife, Nancy, a former model whom he married in a $250,000 wedding in 1995 when he was sixty-one years old and she was twenty-five. Like his son Shareef, Alvin Malnik is pleasant and engaging. He is known in the business world as a clever deal maker and compelling negotiator, particularly for people with problems. His clients have included Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Malnik recently represented the business interests of Michael Jackson. His son Shareef calls it “junk” and turns dark and angry if you ask him about his father's reported Mob ties, and polite people don't ask.
Alvin Malnik bought The Forge in 1968 so he and his friends “could have someplace to eat,” and he ran it for twenty-three years before turning it over to his son in November of 1991. By the time Shareef took over the restaurant it was a relic. “The perception was that it was old, not relevant, staid,” said Shareef. “I started Wednesday nights because Mickey Rourke said to me that he'd only take his mother to The Forge on Mother's Day. I thought, how can I get people there? Let me start a party one night a week.” Shareef hired nightclub promoter Tommy Pooch to start Wednesday nights at The Forge, and Pooch deserves much of the credit for creating the wild mélange that Wednesday nights became.
“It's become such an overwhelming happening,” said Alvin Malnik. “It's composed of so many elements that analytically you wouldn't think it could fit together.”
WEDNESDAY night at The Forge, for fourteen years the longest-running “night” in Miami Beach, was now Michael Capponi's night. He was sitting at the head of a long table of twenty or so young women, keeping to himself as best he could, sipping a flute of champagne and working his BlackBerry His girlfriend Erin, having lived through enough Wednesday nights at The Forge to last a lifetime, was happily at home. That particular night Cap-poni's dinner guests were an assortment of nymphets from a variety of modeling agencies on Miami Beach, much younger than the rest of the crowd, yet grown up enough to be primed for a Miami Beach adventure.
A short, nervous-looking man, with a five o'clock shadow, a gold ID bracelet on his wrist, and his expensive silk shirt hanging out of his pants, shyly approached Capponi. He bowed a little and began chattering away until Capponi shook his head no and the man backed off into the crowd looking disappointed
Capponi laughed. “That guy was telling me that he's a billionaire in telecommunications,” he said. “He claims he met me before, years ago, at some club, when he was poor, and now he's very rich.” The man indicated to Capponi that he was interested in meeting the girl with red hair sitting at Capponi's table and asked to be introduced. The twenty-year-old girl's name was Ronni, and even with the abundance of beautiful women in the room, she was a standout. Instead of the skimpy Miami underwear look, Ronni was wearing a tight Diane von Furstenberg cotton floral print dress that showed off her natural, full figure to great advantage. She had the winsome face of a 1930s movie star, and her magnetism was great enough that whoever walked by the table glanced in her direction for a better look. No girly cocktails for Ronni, she was knocking back Dewar's on the rocks.
In another minute a waiter appeared with a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in a bucket, a gift for Ronni, compliments of her admirer. Three seats down the table, Mandi Nadel, nineteen, was not amused. “That man,” she said, pointing to the alleged telecommunications billionaire, “is trying to pick up my date by sending her champagne.” Mandi meant her date, not her companion. To prove to everyone in the near vicinity— and the admirer who had sent the champagne— exactly what her claim to Ronni was, Mandi walked to where Ronni was sitting, pulled her out of her chair, and arched her pelvis against her. For a brief moment the two young women hugged and rubbed up against each other.
Mandi is 5 feet 9% inches tall, a willowy blonde, her green eyes flecked with yellow. She grew up in the Miami area and was enrolled in Florida State University, where she was taking poetry classes, and worked part-time at Brown's, a high-end shampoo and cosmetics shop on Lincoln Road. Mandi had been signed by the Irene Marie modeling agency, but her lithesome, innocent look hadn't gotten her many jobs. Her parents had paid for her apartment and college, and she wasn't supposed to be hanging out in nightclubs— back in her apartment at the Floridian there was a sign on the refrigerator door to remind her that she'd been grounded for a month— but Michael Capponi often invited her to his promotional dinners and she couldn't say no.
At first Mandi's parents had been “freaked out” when they heard their daughter was part of Capponi's entourage, but she convinced them he was a good guy. Although she'd been clubbing since she was sixteen years old, she was new to dating girls. She'd only recently acknowledged her attraction to other girls during her first ménage à trois. “It changed my sexual life,” she said. “I was seeing this guy for about six months, and he was also dating this other girl, and we all ran into each other at a club. Later we went back to my apartment together. I was a wreck. She and I were cuddling and he was on the other side of the bed. I had this urge to take pictures.” She didn't.
Mandi looked around the room at the crowd. “I feel like I'm too young for The Forge,” she said.