Skylab was America’s first space station. On July 11, 1979, it ran out of gas (figuratively) and gravity took over. As it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, the 99-foot-long Skylab disintegrated, spewing 154,000 pounds of soon-to-be flotsam over most of the Indian Ocean. Donna Summer’s Bad Girls was the Number One pop song and TIME magazine put Miami’s Colombian Connection on the cover.
A Closer Look at the Mutiny Hotel in the Days of the Cocaine Cowboys
One of Miami’s first public shootouts happened when Cuban cartel hit men stepped inside the Crown Liquor store in Miami’s open-air Dadeland Mall
It wasn’t an enclosed mall like it is now, a million and a half square feet of Latin American shopping magnet. It was just another open strip center. All of the stores had doors that opened onto the parking lot. The shooters had come to assassinate a Colombian drug lord and whoever was with him. All had guns and all started shooting (blazing away, said some witnesses, a wild west shootout, said others, hence the name Cocaine Cowboys). Police said more than 60 shots were fired in less than two minutes. The two targets were dead and two store employees were wounded.
Smugglers have been around since the days of sailing ships
Florida is bounded on three sides by 8,436 miles of Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico shoreline. Let’s see you patrol that.
When Prohibition was repealed, smugglers who’d gotten rich with contraband liquor turned to importing a common weed
Marijuana had been considered the scourge of the United States since Harry Anslinger built a massive propaganda machine that convinced America that smoking a single joint caused people to turn into inhuman zombie animals that robbed, stole, raped, plundered, and murdered. We’ve since learned none of that was true, we now know. It was a different feeling about town. No longer was smuggling a laid-back trade. When cocaine arrived, users really did rob, steal, rape, plunder, and murder. Smugglers had so much money they had to weigh it by the ton rather than try to count it.
It was a simple Business 101 decision
Marijuana money was what they call a mere pittance when cocaine took over Miami. One of my reliably unreliable AISAs (Artificial Search Agents) told me this:
“The value of a ton of marijuana can range from several hundreds to several thousand dollars per ton.”
How far off was that “fact?”
Marijuana sells for $5,000 a pound and more, not AISA’s reported $5,000 a ton, which is $25 a pound, which is a buck fifty an ounce which is a nickel a gram when you do the middle school math. A cubic foot (shipping unit of measurement) of marijuana sells wholesale for as much as $50,000. A cubic foot of cocaine sells for as much as $2 million. That’s 40 times as much money for shipping the same volume of contraband.
People from out of town were bowled over by the open availability of cocaine in Miami bars
Plus, it cost only half as much and got you twice as high. How much cocaine was around? If you dumped a week’s worth of smuggled cocaine on Calle Ocho, you’d need a couple of snowplows to clear the street. You could walk into Coconut Grove’s hotspot, the Mutiny, any time of night or day and people would be openly doing lines on the bar. Most of the Mutiny’s customers snorted openly, not in the bathrooms, because people in both the men’s and the women’s were having jacked-up sex.
Robert Farzad, in his book Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami, said his book is “a portrait of a city high on excess and greed”
The book blurb says the Mutiny Hotel was center of it all because all kinds of moneyed people hung out there – models, the rock stars du jour, actors, smugglers, powerboat racers (an entire industry that ran on a powdered fuel), and the just plain stinking rich.
Vice called it a “Playboy Mansion for Miami that brought drug lords, killers, and CIA affiliates together with Jacqueline Onassis, Led Zeppelin, and Miami Dolphins players.”
Nouveau riche means you suddenly have more money than the lottery. A favorite recreation at the Mutiny was having sex atop beds smothered by hundred-dollar bills.
One of the things about cocaine is that it allows you to drink twice as much as you could before and without ever noticing
This lack of self-awareness makes it so you can stagger around twice as drunk as you’ve ever been, but having a blast with one thousand-dollar-a-bottle champagne after another.
When you spread around mounds of cocaine, you automatically attract boat bunnies, the kind of young, attractive women you’ll find all over Florida. Yachts and speedboats attract these hangers-on by the bikini load.
Eric Clapton’s Cocaine was on the jukebox
People went around with gold coke spoons hanging from gold necklaces, chopping lines with gold razor blades. Clapton was a deity.
Cocaine poured into Miami like the biggest wave anyone ever saw
Decadence is unrestrained self-indulgence. The city became a cesspool of drug trafficking, violence, and money laundering. Colombian and Cuban cartels fought open drug wars. First juries and then judges were paid off. Then murdering witnesses became standard operating procedure. It’s no coincidence that Ronald and Nancy (“Just Say No”) Reagan declared the War on Drugs just one year after the Dadeland Massacre.
The Mutiny Hotel today
It’s a 4-star luxury hotel and resort, a part of the Provident Hotels & Resorts Group. Inside sources tell me all the bullet holes upstairs have been patched. The only reference to the Cocaine Cowboy days on their website is this:
When the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove opened its doors for the first time, it epitomized the party atmosphere prevalent in The Grove in the 1970s and 1980s. The Mutiny Hotel was the hotel of choice among the international jet-set, Hollywood celebrities, music industry icons, and sport legends.
Describing what went on at the Mutiny as a party atmosphere is one of the biggest sanitizing jobs you’ll ever see.
Bonus
This was all before Miami Vice first came along on television in 1984. The show’s one-minute opening title intro is still one of the best around. Grokipedia says the theme song was composed by Jan Hammer. It’s instrumental track was rooted in synth-pop and electronic music, characterized by its innovative use of synthesizers to evoke the high-energy, neon-drenched, Latin-infused atmosphere of 1980s Miami.”
There was only one performer in the recording studio because Hammer composed, performed solo, and produced the track by himself, all on electronic equipment with waveform displays and sequence patterns. The theme song hit #1 on Billboard’s Top 100 and won two Grammys. The raw, driving music track reminds some of ZZ Top’s Legs, including me. And who doesn’t love it when the boys spin those furry guitars?
In 1986 I ran a huge study for a Coconut Grove consortium that included the Mutiny Hotel, one of my clients
Back then decision-makers needed to figure out what to do now that the new hot spot (and there is always a new hot spot) was draining away their customers. That spot was Miami Beach, because that’s where celebrities and beautiful people were going in 1986. Our solution was something Miami Beach couldn’t duplicate and soon proved itself a vastly bigger success than any of the study sponsors had hoped for.
In 1987, I finished a year-long multi-method study for the Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Better Business Bureau
It cost a million dollars. My recommendation was for Miami and Miami Beach to stop competing with each other. The enemy isn’t across Biscayne Bay, I said. The enemy is the Mouse, which non-Floridians call Disney World. I advised them to pool their brains and money and promote Miami as the Gateway to the Caribbean and Latin America. Florida visitors already know Miami Beach is right next door.
