If you're the king of nightlife, you're the king of the city.
—MICHAEL CAPPONI
When moist-eyed locals reminisce about the Golden Age of Chris Paciello in South Beach they never fail to say how handsome he was, how sexy, what heat he radiated, and that there wasn't any girl in Miami Beach he couldn't fuck— and didn't. But it wasn't his pretty face, or his big biceps, or other endowments that made him so seductive; it was his aura of mystery and his surprising thuggish charm.
When Chris Paciello showed up in South Beach on Labor Day weekend of 1994, he looked like just another mook in a wife-beater undershirt, a twenty-three-year-old tattooed muscle-head from Brooklyn, New York, wearing sweatpants and sneakers, casing out Ocean Drive and the bikini babes on Rollerblades. He had an impassive face, pouty cupid lips, amber eyes, and dark curly hair, pomaded and cut short. He was a big guy, six foot one, with a thickly muscled body, the rewards of a regimented two hours in the gym every morning and two hours again in the late afternoon.
That Labor Day weekend Paciello stayed at a friend's apartment off Washington Avenue and hung out with his buddies at the Clevelander Hotel, then one of the cheesier places on Ocean Drive with a reputation as a party hotel— open room doors and all-night hookups. The Clevelander's big daytime draw was its wavy-shaped outdoor bar that was practically right on Ocean Drive, with girls in skimpy bathing suits and wet T-shirts drinking Fuzzy Navels, or lolling in a tiled swimming pool behind it. By weekend's end Paciello would have faded into memory along with every other sweaty guy looking for a piece of ass in South Beach. Except for one unusual thing.
By weekend's end, the unemployed twenty-three-year-old had made a deal to buy a nightclub. He agreed to pay $140,000 in cash for a fleabag club at 1203 Washington Avenue and promised to assume the club's $400,000 debt. It was the kind of place where regular customers passed the time pitching pennies up against the front wall. The joint was named Mickey's Place after one of the partners, actor Mickey Rourke, a Miami Beach High School graduate and local bad boy who reportedly was given a piece of his namesake club because he showed loyalty to Mafia don John Gotti in 1992 by showing up at Gotti's murder and racketeering trial in New York and sitting in the spectators’ section. The principal owner of Mickey's Place was a man named Carlo Vaccarezza, who was once John Gotti's driver in New York. Gotti's presence was thick at Mickey's Place, where framed photographs of the Mafia don hung alongside autographed photos of famous Italian prizefighters and sports figures. Carlo Vaccarezza migrated to Miami from New York in 1993 after his restaurant, Da Noi, was investigated as a possible front for money laundering. Coincidentally, the owner of Mickey's previous to Vaccarezza had been convicted of money laundering for the Genovese crime family.
Paciello and a cohort at the time, a Manhattan party promoter and Ecstasy dealer named Lord Michael Caruso, renamed the club Risk because that's what it was, risky business. It opened in late October 1994, less than two months after Paciello first hit town.
The doorman described the opening-night crowd as “mobster chic.” Paciello had given the place a half-assed face-lift, with zebra print carpeting on the floors, an eighteen-foot bar with cheap mirrors behind it, and semicircular banquettes bought from another dive that had gone bankrupt. There was also a cheap smoke machine that coughed wisps of smoke onto the small dance floor, and toward the back of the club was a “public shower” under which go-go girls (or customers) could wet themselves down. There was also a separate “VIP” area for taking drugs, cordoned off with bamboo screens and an intimidating bouncer. Part of the gimmick of the club was that to get into the VIP room, customers had to use a password they could only get by dialing an unlisted phone number and listening to the word whispered on an answering machine.
“I was a big Guido from New York opening up a club,” Paciello later said. “Everybody thought I'd be out of business in a week.” The big surprise was what a good host Paciello turned out to be, smooth, charming, and accommodating. He was a quick study, and he soon lost the sweatpants and undershirts and bought himself a couple of pairs of good slacks and some tapered designer shirts. Paciello instituted some clever marketing ploys. In an attempt to attract Miami Beach's large gay population, one night a week he started a theme night called “Risk Your Anus,” and on Monday nights he appealed to African Americans by reviving an R&B-themed night started by the bar's former ownership called “Fat Black Pussycat.” “It kept Risk going and introduced me to all the locals,” he said.
The club did okay; word of mouth among the Miami goons was good, and on any night there were a bunch of tough guys from New York lined up at the bar with the kind of ladies who love outlaws. Once in a while a big-time Gambino family member would stop in, such as Johnny Rizzo or John D'Amico, but in the main Risk was considered a local hoodlum den, small time and inconsequential on the lucrative Miami Beach nightlife scene. “Risk wasn't clicking at first,” Paciello said. “I was successful, I was making money, but not a lot of money.” There were lots of crappy little nightclubs like Risk all over Miami Beach, but only the top four or five big nightclubs were grossing real money—very real money, maybe $5 million a year— among them Glam Slam farther down Washington Avenue, owned by the rock star Prince. “I felt a New York–style nightclub would work in Miami,” Paciello later said. “I didn't know if it was vision, brains, balls, or just plain stupidity, but I did it.”
Paciello was ambitious, but he was young and an outsider, and the tough little Miami Beach nightlife community was wary of newcomers on their turf. If he wanted to play in the big league, he needed a way in. He was tipped off that there was a young guy about his own age who walked on water in Miami Beach as far as the nightclub business was concerned: Michael Capponi. But there was a catch. Capponi was a freak. He wore leather pants and flouncy shirts and did pirouettes on the street, pretending he was Jim Morrison. Everybody said what a nice guy he was, and that he was super-knowledgeable about the nightclub business, but also that he was a fucked-up heroin addict on his way to an overdose.
MICHAEL CAPPONI chokes up when he tells his story. It's his epic poem and he's the hero, pure of heart but tragically flawed and betrayed by circumstance. The way he tells the story the listener realizes that he has told this story many times, if not aloud to other people then inside his head, the kind of black-and-white movie that plays when you're nodding out on heroin.
He was sitting at the dining room table of his handsomely decorated waterfront house on Sunset Island 1, staring out the window as the setting sun created long amber shadows on Biscayne Bay. His girlfriend, Erin Henry, had just come home from a modeling audition and was puttering around in the kitchen behind him, putting things away in cabinets. When she was finished she came into the dining room, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. She sat down at the table next to him and quietly listened to his story. Capponi was trying hard to explain how innocent and callow he was when he was nineteen years old, still doing wheelies on his bike or 360s on his skateboard along Ocean Drive, handing out party flyers from his leather shoulder bag to all the pretty young girls who were beginning to flood South Beach. Back in those days the surf rats and the models hung out on the beach together. “South Beach— there was nothing there,” he said. “Half of the windows on Ocean Drive were knocked out. There was nothing— the Palace and the News Café, nothing else.”
One afternoon out of a hundred sunny afternoons, he was surfing in the blue waters off Lummus Park, tripping out on the beautiful day, when Francesca Rayder, in a bikini, strutted out of the ocean nearby and he thought, “Uh oh, this is the end, my friend” She would be the end of him because he would never be able to make her fall in love with him. He would never be able to make her understand that he would be forever true, that she would be Pamela to his Jim. “It happened that quick,” he said. She was an instant obsession. Like a drug addiction.
She walked across the sand and gathered her belongings, and with the languid voice of Jim Morrison playing on the sound track inside his head, and his surfboard tucked under his arm, Capponi followed her up the beach onto Ocean Drive and down the street until she disappeared through the door of a modeling agency. He asked everyone in town who she was, and as soon as he mentioned her dark hair and green eyes, people said that must be Frankie Rayder, that he should leave her alone, she was just a kid (so was he), sixteen years old or so. She had been scouted one day in a local shopping mall in her hometown of River Falls, Wisconsin, by a local modeling agency, and she was whisked to New York, where photographer Steven Meisel fell in love with her boyish toughness and put her on the cover of Italian Vogue.
Capponi couldn't rest until she agreed to go out with him. “I literally thought about this girl one hundred times a day,” he said. “I would go to the News Café and grab fifteen fashion magazines and just look through them to see pictures of her.” But whenever he tried to catch her attention she seemed unimpressed and distant. So he embarked upon an elaborate scheme of romantic pursuit, filled with improbable coincidences and dramatic encounters as he tells it. Unable to stay away from her, he flew to Paris when she moved there to model, and not knowing where to find her, he wandered the streets and boulevards until one day a quirk of fate brought them face-to-face. When she saw him there on the Paris street, he said, Francesca wordlessly took his hand and led him to Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery, where they shared their first kiss. “I walked around until dawn,” he said, “singing in the streets.” On another occasion he broke into Francesca's apartment in New York and left the movie Doctor Zhivago playing on her VCR. “It was amazing how madly in love with her I was,” he continued. “You can't even imagine. I would dance in the streets of Miami Beach out of pure joy. I would tell every single person who I ran into for a year how madly in love with her I was. I had a flower in my hand the whole time. I would do pirouettes and sing. It was so funny.” He laughed sadly, “Ha ha ha.”
By the time Capponi was twenty years old, he was like a rock star in South Beach. “I was making five or six thousand dollars a week,” he remembered, “and I had not yet opened up a bank account under my name. The cash basically sat in a shoebox under the bed, and every night before I left I'd just grab a thousand bucks and spend it on drugs and alcohol.” Just a few years before, he mused, he was eating cookies and drinking milk out of a carton sitting in front of the TV in his mother's apartment and now he was living in a condominium tower overlooking the ocean (he lied about his age on the lease). He had a brand-new 300 SL Mercedes, and he drank only Cristal champagne. His satin pants and chiffon shirts were hand tailored, and his hair was long and fashionably scraggly. He was mystical and deep and smoked clove cigarettes. The word TRUTH was tattooed on his arm in Japanese and the word LOVE written in ballpoint pen on his Filofax, which went everywhere with him, the forerunner to his omnipresent Black-Berry.
In March of 1993 journalist Tom Austin followed Capponi on his nightly rounds for New Times magazine and described him as “a nightlife star alternately attracted to and repelled by the world he inhabits.” Austin observed that “women slithered around him like cats in heat,” despite which Capponi was filled with “hopeless despair and aching lovesickness” for his girlfriend. “She's killing me, man,” Capponi lamented about Francesca. “And this life is killing me more.”
Six months later, on September 12, the Miami Herald crowned twenty-one-year-old Capponi the “SoBe Prince” of nightlife. But he didn't sound very princely. “I have to be out literally seven nights a week,” he complained to the Herald. “I have to buy a hundred drinks a night for customers. I don't stop. I have to take people to dinner, I have to literally shake a thousand hands. People grab you, they shake you, “Hey what's up?’ They hit you on the head.” The article noted that in his voice there was “a tinge of sadness— or is it plain weariness?” It was neither. It was heroin.
THE WIDESPREAD white-collar use of heroin in Miami Beach was the unexpected side effect of a federal Drug Enforcement Agency crackdown on Colombian cocaine smugglers. The DEA was putting pressure on the Medellín drug cartel through improved surveillance and monitoring of the Florida coastline, where most of the “go fast”–type, cigarette-boat drug smuggling took place. As more smugglers were being caught, the risk-versus-profits ratio increased. So the cartel decided to switch the drug they were peddling from cocaine to heroin. Cocaine was bringing only $25,000 to $30,000 a kilo, but heroin was selling for $400,000 a kilo, and heroin had the same legal risk as cocaine; both were considered Class A narcotics and carried the same prison sentence.
One of the problems with selling heroin in the U.S. was the deeply ingrained middle-class taboo against intravenous drug use, so the Colombians began to cultivate poppy fields that produced a much purer quality of heroin that could be inhaled. The cartel used Miami as an experimental model to decide whether the purer heroin could replace cocaine with regular users. Ground zero was the Miami Beach nightclub scene, where street-level drug dealers marketed the newer-quality heroin to Miami's cocaine set. The number of heroin-overdose patients seen in Miami-Dade emergency rooms rose by 300 percent in the early 1990s. Heroin soon began to filter into the modeling scene, and the brief fashion era of “heroin chic” was launched, a look that model Kate Moss made famous with her ashen skin and dark circles under her eyes, turning the ravages of addiction into a style in itself.
It wasn't difficult to get Michael Capponi interested in heroin. It was the drug that killed Jim Morrison, most likely, and smack, or “chasing the dragon” as Capponi romanticized smoking it, held great allure for him. A friend turned him on to the drug with a “bump,” a little snort, which he took with the ironic self-awareness that heroin might someday kill him like Morrison. Then he tried smoking it, and four days later he was a heroin addict. “Within a month I was doing eight hundred dollars a day of one hundred percent high-grade heroin,” Capponi said. “Imagine that. So my judgment, obviously, is not that good.
“I was super skinny. I had a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar DuPont sterling silver lighter and a sterling silver straw with my name on it to snort the heroin. How stupid. I smoked heroin in front of everybody. I smoked it just like people smoke cigars. Even at Sly Stallone's house. I was at a party and I went into the wine cellar with some people I knew and smoked heroin. I thought it was cool.” Stallone told him, “Get some new role models, kid.”
Francesca Rayder didn't think smoking heroin was cool either. “Francesca was becoming a really big model, so it was harder on me,” Capponi said. She was living in New York and Paris and he didn't get to see her much. “She was very famous. I was basically in competition with every guy on the planet for my girlfriend.”
He still can't say exactly what it was that he did to lose her, yet memory of her loss fills him with remorse to this day. “It was a series of a hundred things— cheating, being mean to her, saying horrible things, and choosing heroin. Do you know the toll it takes to be with somebody who's addicted to heroin?”
The end came when “Francesca went to Australia on a weeklong job, and while she was away some young girl called me and I did heroin with her and had sex with her. When Francesca came home I told her and she cried and grabbed her bags and took off. I sat in a chair devastated for a week. Soon my addiction was so bad I had to smoke heroin every twenty-five minutes. One day I went to the bank to talk to my banker and I had to excuse myself after twenty minutes to go smoke heroin and come back and finish the conversation.”
In November of 1994 he was arrested for possession of heroin outside of the Amnesia nightclub and released from jail with charges pending (this arrest was later expunged from his record). An hour after his release he was back on the street chasing the dragon, pursuing his fate.
PEOPLE JUST assumed Chris Paciello was “connected,” but within his small circle of friends the Mob was never discussed. The intrigue was part of his allure. Clearly he knew a lot of gangsters from Brooklyn, but by not knowing the exact truth, you could imagine Paciello being as bad as you wanted him to be. Ironically, even with his Mob ties Paciello could never be a “made” man in the Mafia because he wasn't 100 percent Italian. His real surname was Ludwigsen, and his father, George, a small-time prizefighter and junkie who beat the crap out of Chris when he was a kid, was German. Paciello adopted his mother's maiden name to sound more Italian. He called Paciello his “stage name,” and no doubt he thought of himself as the star of his own independent feature.
His mother, Marguerite, worked as a hairdresser in Benson-hurst, Brooklyn, where Paciello grew up in a lower-middle-class Italian/Jewish neighborhood of semidetached row houses with tomato gardens in the backyard, a church on every other corner, and an Orthodox synagogue on the others. His older brother was a convicted bank robber and his younger brother was a local tough. When he was sixteen years old he and his mother moved to a row house in Staten Island.
Paciello was a bad egg by the time he was a teenager— a car thief, bank robber, and apprentice hoodlum who enjoyed beating up people, and he was good at it, too. He was a natural boxer, coached by his father, and strong like an ox. Part of his legend was that one night at a New York nightclub, he got into an argument with the bouncer, a member of the Latin Kings gang, who came at Paciello with an ax handle. Paciello simply took the ax handle out of the guy's hand and cracked his skull open with it. He got the nickname “Binger” because once he went off on something— women, booze, violence, thievery— he could hardly stop himself.
Paciello was drawn to the New York nightlife scene, and he moved in on the Limelight nightclub in Manhattan, a veritable drug supermarket, where he set up shop protecting “franchised” drug dealers and beating up and stealing from others. He also enjoyed going to the all-night gay raves at Roseland, where he'd strip to his waist and be admired by two thousand gay men, and then ask around to find out who was dealing Ecstasy. Once he found the guy, he'd beat the crap out of him and take his drugs.
Paciello fell in with a gang of a dozen or so young hoods known as the “Bath Avenue Crew,” led by Joseph Benante, a young gangster with financial ties to the Bonanno family, under whose protection they fell. Paciello was recruited as the group's muscle. He worked with another up-and-coming non-Italian hood named Thomas Reynolds, and together they robbed video stores and ripped off drug dealers. Occasionally they scored big; in December of 1992 they stole $300,000 in night-deposit bags in a “smash and grab” at a Chemical Bank in Staten Island.
Paciello visited Miami Beach several times before Labor Day of 1994 to have a good time, but this time he was there to lie low because of the accident with Judith Shemtov. In February of 1993, twenty-one-year-old Paciello was tipped off that Shemtov's husband, Sami, who owned a successful electrical supply company, kept a lot of cash at his home in Richmond Valley, Staten Island, as much as $300,000 locked in a safe in the basement. Paciello masterminded the heist— just ring the bell, a push-in, menace Shemtov with a gun to open the safe, tie him up, and leave. Paciello's job was to wait out front and drive the getaway car while the other guys did the dirty work. He was sitting behind the wheel of the car that night in February while the three other men rang the Shemtovs’ doorbell. When forty-six-year-old Judith Shemtov answered the door, the men stormed in, guns drawn, and just a few seconds after they stepped inside the foyer the .45 automatic handgun that Thomas Reynolds was holding accidentally went off and a bullet entered Shemtov's right cheek and penetrated her brain. She collapsed, choking on her own blood, and Shemtov's husband, who was drinking tea in the kitchen, ran to the foyer to discover his wife dying on the floor as Reynolds and his accomplices panicked and fled.
When Paciello was told in the getaway car what had transpired, he was furious with Reynolds for turning a burglary into a homicide and making them all accomplices. Paciello was screaming uncontrollably when Reynolds took out the gun he had just killed Judy Shemtov with, cocked it, and put it to Paciello's right temple, warning him to shut up, calm down, and not “rat” the others out.
Shemtov's death was such a random hit that it took the Staten Island police over a year to get a lead on it, but eventually somebody snitched. By the summer of 1994, homicide detectives were coming close to fingering Paciello and his pals for murder, so it seemed like a good time for him to leave New York and relocate, and what better place for a petty thug to hide than Miami Beach, where petty thugs are kings? Reportedly the money Paciello used to buy Mickey's Place was a loan from the Gambino family so they could have a front in Miami to launder money, but Paciello claimed he had his own stash of illegal funds into which he was able to dip. Whatever way he was bankrolled, within a year in Miami Beach, Paciello had two driver's licenses, two names, three birth dates, two Social Security numbers, and at least half a dozen addresses. One of which was Michael Capponi's.
“I MET Chris Paciello at a club on Washington and Espanola Way that I was promoting called Dune,” Capponi remembered. “Paciello came into Dune dressed all in leather with a cheesy silver necklace. He was buying bottles of Cristal and he had a harem of girls with him. He was making an impression buying all that champagne, so I walked up to him and I shook his hand. I didn't know it at the time, but he had a mission to get to know everybody and infiltrate the market. His plan was to basically get to know everybody through me. But I didn't know that. So I was just cool with him and he started hanging out with me.” At this point in time, Capponi continued, “I was probably making fifteen thousand dollars a week and everything I made I smoked. If I had bought real estate with that money, I would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. I was constantly broke, but I was living large. I was two months behind on my forty-five-hundred-dollars-a-month rent for my apartment and the landlord had sent me an eviction notice. One night Chris Paciello mentioned in passing that he was looking for a place to live, so I invited him to move in with me. He got me out of my eviction by paying the rent.”
Paciello hated drugs, it was said, because his estranged father was a heavy drug user. Apparently steroids were enough of a high for him. He was justifiably disturbed that Capponi openly used heroin. “Look at you, man,” he said to Capponi one night as he was nodding out. “What's wrong with you? You got to get off that shit.” Even though they had known each other for only a few months, in December of 1994 Paciello managed to talk Capponi into going to rehab, for which Capponi's mother agreed to pay. Capponi went to a clinic in Oklahoma for the first of what would be a cat's cradle of rehabs and treatments in Europe, Canada, and the United States. “They tried to detox me cold turkey with teas and they almost killed me,” Capponi said. “I was strapped down and held. I was put in a bathtub screaming. If I could have punched the mirror and taken a piece of glass, I would have slit my throat.”
Two months later he was back in Miami Beach. “I was sixty days clean and I was extremely skinny and so weak I could barely walk,” Capponi said. One of the first things he did when he got back was call Francesca in New York and tell her he was clean. “She said to me, “Do you have any fucking idea what you did to me?’ And she hung up the phone.”
When Paciello saw how serious Capponi was about his sobriety, he began to watch out for him. “I would be in a public bathroom and he would kick down the door just to see if I was in there doing drugs. So he did care. He was very protective of me. When I got back from rehab I was tired and weak, and I was walking down Washington Avenue and these three gangster guys with big muscles walked by in the opposite direction and brushed my shoulder. Chris came up to the biggest of the guys and said, “What's up, man? Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?’ Then he grabbed the guy by the neck and he hit him and the guy fell flat on the sidewalk, with one shot. Then one after another Paciello laid all three of them out. We laughed, “heh heh heh heh heh’ and just kept walking down the street. Basically, if the head of the crime family had someone to get beat up, he'd send Chris. He was a real tough guy.”
Capponi hated the way he felt when he was clean of heroin. “I walked around for two and a half months with a dead body,” he said. “Then one day I ran into somebody in a restaurant and they handed me a little bit of heroin and I smoked one puff, and all of a sudden I could walk and I looked amazing. I just did one hit of heroin and I was fine. That's when I understood that I couldn't function without it.” He asked an addiction doctor who worked with rock stars why he felt so much better on the drug than clean, and the doctor told him, “You know, my advice to you is to just maintain your addiction. You'll never get off of it.” Within a week Capponi was back doing $800 a day.
“Once I relapsed, Chris had no respect for me,” Capponi said. “But he continued to live with me. When you're addicted to heroin, it's a very scary life. I had to knock myself out at night with roofies, and when I woke in the morning the bed was soaked through with a bucket of water. And I always needed dope. I would say, “Chris, Chris, Chris, I need a thousand dollars.’ And Chris would say, “What can I hold on to?’ I remember I had a real Louis the fourteenth chair that I sold to him, but Chris didn't know what it was. Little by little he inherited all my furniture and art and everything else. I pawned everything. I'd be holding my sound system sweating and shaking in the lobby of my building on my way to the pawnshop and I'm going to pawn it for two hundred dollars. I'd be walking down Lincoln Road with a painting of Francesca, the love of my life, and I'd be ready to sell it for five hundred dollars and I did.”
What finished Capponi completely in South Beach was an April 1995 cover story in New Times magazine titled “Heroin Be the Death of Me.” It was certainly the death of Capponi's career. “A reporter called me up,” Capponi explained, “and she said, “I know that you are a heroin addict and I'm writing a story to try to make people aware how bad a problem heroin is in Miami. Will you talk to me about it?’” Capponi agreed but only if the writer promised not to identify him. He asserted that he was going clean, this time for sure, and that the journalist could spend his “last night on heroin” with him. In Capponi's destructive vanity, he decided that for the sake of the article he'd throw a going-away party for himself, what the reporter called his “narcotic version of the Last Supper.”
Capponi took the reporter along with him on his nocturnal peregrinations, including a visit to the apartment of a heroin dealer, where he shot up in front of the reporter. Capponi's tour included a frantic attempt to borrow money from friends at several bars, including Risk, which Chris Paciello then owned. Capponi ended up trying to sell his furniture at ten in the morning. The writer described his expression as having assumed “the beseeching aspect of an animal caught in a trap.”
The article didn't name him, as the reporter had agreed, but it hardly disguised his identity. Capponi was described as “one of South Beach's best-known nightclub party promoters … fond of spouting stream-of-consciousness poetry and spontaneously breaking into dance.” Soon things changed drastically for him; even his longtime friends, who'd tolerated his heroin use before, dropped him.
“After that article I didn't do any more “nights,’” Michael said. “I couldn't get a job. I was in official free fall and no one would hire me. I was living on Biscayne Boulevard in twenty-dollar-a-night hotels. I was no longer involved in the scene; I was on the “other side’ already. I was shooting heroin because I couldn't afford to smoke it anymore, and it brought the cost down to three hundred dollars a day from five or eight.”
That April, Capponi left the Miami area and moved to New York City, where he existed day to day, feeding his habit. The last anybody heard of him for a long time was that he was shivering on the street, living in a cardboard box (it wasn't true, but close). Then an item appeared in the newspapers that a man named Cap-poni had been murdered in Miami-Dade, and lots of people simply assumed that Michael Capponi was dead. But this was Miami Beach and life went on.
Anyway, there was a new king of nightlife in town.
THE SAME month that Capponi crawled out of town in April 1995, Chris Paciello's nightclub Risk burned to smoldering ruins. Paciello was reported to have cried when Risk burned to the ground. As the story went, he sat on a barstool out front in full view of people passing by, his head in his hands. When the possibility of arson was raised, Paciello hired high-powered criminal defense attorney Roy Black, who quoted the official fire report as saying “a cigarette fell in a couch cushion” and the fire was accidental. “Everyone thought I did it,” Paciello said. “I did not.” Federal authorities would later claim differently The Feds claimed that three of Paciello's cronies had specifically come down from New York to South Beach to burn the place down. There was a handsome insurance payoff— $250,000— which Paciello was going to use to open up the biggest, hottest club South Beach had ever seen.