Why a Booktrail?
1979. Lock your doors. Watch your backs. Raise your glasses. Miami is about to blow, in a fiery explosion of cocaine, blood and bullets,
Hotel Scarface
What you need to know before your trail
Behind the bar at the Hotel Mutiny, the hottest ticket in town as the clock approached 1980, waitresses and bellhops were stacking whiskey totes full of the white stuff. The tips — pure cocaine packed in hundred-dollar bills — were sluicing in. Everyone was trying to bribe their way to a coveted New Year’s Eve table at the hotel’s swanky, members-only Club, desperate to sit among the star-studded guest list, and to party with America’s biggest cocaine kingpins.
In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove’s Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel’s club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites.
Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami
Travel Guide
The Mutiny Club, Miami
The Mutiny was a real place and that the characters in the book were real figures in the drugs trade. In fact there is even a role call of sorts at the start of the book
These are the days of the great Drug Barons – before the days of Pablo Escobar, when Cuban immigrants were the major players of the drugs trade across to Miami. The club where they all met, and where the major deals were done was well known to everyone but seemingly untouchable.
“They were Miami’s ruling drug lords. With bullets flying everywhere there at all hours of the day, the town was increasingly being called Dodge City. And so these guys were it’s “cocaine cowboys” the Latin masterminds of the era’s go-go wonder drug: yeyo, perch, toot, snow, white pony. Cocaine. And The Mutiny was their favorite saloon.”
Scarface the movie was made about the club but this caused problems in itself as the drug lords vied for attention as the reigning drug king and for recognition or even parts in the movie itself
It was the era of decadence – Friday night net profits were apparently in the region of $60,000.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Hotel Scarface
Destination: Miami Author/Guide: Roben Farzad Departure Time: 1980s
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