This backdrop provided the direct inspiration for the Babylon Club in Scarface, whose creators, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma, stayed at the Mutiny and sought permission to film there – although opposition from the local Cuban community persuaded them otherwise. The biggest drug lord of them all, Colombian Pablo Escobar, owned a pink mansion in Miami Beach and visited the Mutiny when he was in town. Frequent visitors kept cases of cash and cocaine in their suites. Internationally wanted mercenaries chilled at the Mutiny, which became a sort of criminal free-trade zone. Liza Minnelli would not shut up for a minute. Maybe like the mob’s favourite restaurant in New York, that’s what the Mutiny was to Miami.’ ‘All the movers and shakers of the underworld were at the Mutiny,’ recalls Miami detective June Hawkins. And the Mutiny was their favourite saloon. These were Miami’s ‘cocaine cowboys’, the Latin masterminds of the city’s booming cocaine trade. With bullets flying at all hours of the day, Miami was increasingly being called Dodge City, in reference to the lethal frontier town in the Old West. They were Miami’s Cuban-American drug lords who, just a few years later, would all argue that they’d been the chief inspiration for Al Pacino’s Scarface character, Tony Montana. In fact, the true players at the Mutiny had nothing to do with Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll or politics. Beautiful women would ooh and ahh at tabletop cascades of bubbly in stacks of flutes. ‘We can supply a Mutiny girl and ample provisions,’ touted an ad.ĭom Pérignon’s distributors visited the Mutiny at the turn of the Eighties in disbelief at the number of bottles the hotel was selling, only to find a suite at the hotel converted into a giant walk-in cooler. Members could rent the Tonga – a 72ft ketch once owned by Errol Flynn – or, if they preferred to fly, a six-seater twin-engine Aerostar or a turbocharged Beechcraft B60. The Mutiny’s celebrity guests were drawn by Miami’s balmy climate, paradise scenery and exotic Latin American connection, and the hotel in turn looked after them well. Owner Burton Goldberg drilled his employees to enforce a strict dress code, though at one of his own Halloween parties he walked among guests in two-inch eyelashes, a flowing blond wig and a long white gown, tapping guests with his wand – a fairy godmother pretending to sprinkle magic pixie dust. Rock star Neil Young, who wrote a song, Midnight On The Bay, on a Mutiny cocktail napkin in the bay-windowed booth atop the valet, was once mistaken for a hobo by the hotel staff. Ted Kennedy, fresh from conceding the Democratic presidential nomination, often drank there, once picking a fight with the DJ, who was helping Julio Iglesias, a Mutiny resident, hype his latest record. Both Tom Jones and Arnold Schwarzenegger would haunt the Mutiny
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