Midnight Miami, the first book in the Grits & Gravy Mysteries, is available now!
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere you like to buy books.
Click here for the first installment in Tales from The Mutiny.
There was once a hotel in Coconut Grove where cocaine traffickers, FBI agents, rock stars, politicians, movie stars and undercover cops could all be drinking in the same bar on the same night.
It was called the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay.
Roben Farzad’s Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami introduced me to a menagerie of characters from Miami’s underground world of the 1970s and ’80s. I used many of them as inspiration while writing Midnight Miami, which takes place during the chaotic summer of 1981. These were real people whose true stories would probably be rejected by an editor as implausible.
For instance…
The man is dressed entirely in white. White shirt. White pants. White shoes. White socks. Even a white top hat. What is his wife wearing? White too.
His usual car is a white Rolls-Royce. In the backseat, a man named Sunshine Sammy plays keyboards. But tonight the man is thinking about taking his new Cadillac limousine, a custom job with bulletproof paneling that was originally built for the King of Spain. It has a color television and, because this is 1978, shag carpeting.
The only exception to the dominant color is the man’s beard, which has been dyed red.
At least until the flashing red lights from the police cars arrive.
Welcome to the true story of Rodolfo “Rudy Redbeard” Rodriguez Gallo.
Before the Cocaine Cowboys
One of the problems with looking back at Miami’s cocaine era is that everything tends to get compressed into a few crazy years around 1980. The Dadeland Mall massacre happened in 1979. The Mariel Boatlift arrived in 1980. Miami set a record for murders in 1981. Scarface arrived in 1983. Add Crockett and Tubbs a few years later, and eventually it all becomes one big neon-colored memory of Miami in the 1980s.
Except the cocaine trade didn’t suddenly appear in 1979.
Rudy Redbeard and his literal partner in crime, Carlos “Carlene” Quesada, belonged to an earlier generation. Childhood friends from Cuba, they were part of a generation of Cuban exiles who arrived in South Florida during the upheaval surrounding Fidel Castro’s revolution. Cuba remained right across the water. Politics, exile, organized crime, intelligence operations and eventually the drug trade existed in a world where the lines between them could become remarkably blurry.
Rudy and Carlene were already involved in Miami’s drug trade before cocaine turned South Florida into an international punchline. Their business wasn’t limited to cocaine. Marijuana was also part of the operation, reflecting an era when South Florida’s smuggling economy was evolving from pot into something vastly more profitable.
By the time Colombian traffickers began transforming the cocaine business in the 1970s, Rudy and Carlene weren’t newcomers looking for a piece of the action. They were already established smugglers.
Table 14
By the late 1970s, Rudy and Quesada were established figures in Miami’s cocaine trade. They were also regulars at the Mutiny.
If you’ve been following Tales from the Mutiny, you already know that the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay was not simply a nightclub. Located inside the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove, it became the unofficial clubhouse for an assortment of drug traffickers, lawyers, businessmen, celebrities, informants, undercover cops, intelligence operatives and people who probably preferred that nobody ask too many questions about exactly what they did for a living.
Rudy and Quesada were associated with Table 14, located on a private raised deck. Police watched the place for good reason. A narcotics officer could sit inside the Mutiny and learn something simply by watching who was drinking with whom. Who was suddenly friendly? Who wasn’t? Which trafficker was meeting with which lawyer? Which familiar face was now sitting with someone new? It was almost a living organizational chart of Miami’s cocaine business.
And Rudy Redbeard wasn’t particularly difficult to notice.
There are people who make a conscious effort to avoid attracting attention while trafficking large quantities of narcotics. Rudy does not appear to have been one of those people.
According to one Miami narcotics detective, police sometimes didn’t even have to see Rudy to know he was at the Mutiny. They could smell him.
Rudy’s cocaine preference was known as basuco, a crude form of cocaine that produced a particularly distinctive odor when smoked. Rudy would allegedly remove the tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes, replace it with basuco and put the cigarettes back into the package. According to the detective, the smell was distinctive enough that officers at the Mutiny sometimes knew Rudy Redbeard was somewhere in the club before they actually spotted him.
Rudy also had his own personal piano man, the aforementioned Sunshine Sammy. According to Hotel Scarface, Sammy lived in a $5,000 suite at the Mutiny and accompanied Rudy on his nights out, sometimes playing keyboards from the backseat of Rudy’s Rolls-Royce.
Apparently arriving at the Mutiny in a white Rolls-Royce wasn’t enough.
$913,000
By 1978, law enforcement was paying considerably more attention to Rudy than simply sniffing around the Mutiny. Miami police launched a major narcotics investigation using court-authorized wiretaps. The investigation ultimately produced seizures of 70 pounds of cocaine and thousands of pounds of marijuana.
A search of Rudy’s residence produced 56 pounds of cocaine and $913,000 in cash.
Rudy reportedly explained that the money came from his seafood business. Apparently the late 1970s were an excellent time to be in seafood.
The IRS was unconvinced. The government placed a lien against the money, and the IRS eventually took $513,948. That still left roughly $399,000, and a court ordered that money returned to Rudy.
According to a government account of the case, Rudy responded with a comment to the effect that only in America could a man make money like that. For a Cuban exile who had come to the United States, it was certainly one way to experience the American Dream.
But Rudy wasn’t finished. According to the narcotics detective who later recounted the story, after Rudy recovered his money, he went back to the Mutiny and bought a bottle of Dom Pérignon for every table.
According to Hotel Scarface, Rudy would also bribe the DJ at the Mutiny to play his favorite song: “Life’s Been Good” by Joe Walsh.
But as the chorus alludes, the good times can’t always last forever.
“Life’s been good to me so far.”
Actual picture of Rudy Redbeard from 1978. Color of beard added by me
The Check Comes
Despite their shared success in the “seafood industry,” the 1978 investigation helped drive a wedge between the childhood friends. Business problems weren’t the only issue. According to Hotel Scarface, rumors circulated that Rudy was sleeping with Carlene’s ex-wife. Even better, or worse depending upon where you’re sitting, Rudy had allegedly made a sex tape with her.
Then somebody tried to kill Carlene.
Quesada and his girlfriend were injured in a machine-gun attack. Afterward, Rudy’s longtime partner made a decision that would have been considered particularly unhealthy in Miami’s cocaine business.
Carlene started talking.
Quesada received immunity and began providing information about his former associates. Prosecutors suddenly had something extraordinarily valuable: someone who could explain how the upper levels of South Florida’s drug business actually worked. Rudy’s childhood friend and longtime business partner was now cooperating with the government.
The cocaine trade Rudy and Carlene had entered years earlier was also becoming something considerably more dangerous. The enormous profits generated by cocaine attracted increasingly powerful organizations, while machine guns and murder became increasingly common tools for settling business disagreements.
Rudy eventually went to prison. The precise details of his conviction and sentence are surprisingly difficult to reconstruct from readily available public records, but Hotel Scarface picks up his story again in 1998, when Rudy was finally released.
And waiting for him was Carlene Quesada.
Maybe that’s the strangest part of Rudy Redbeard’s story. Not the red beard. Not the white Rolls-Royce. Not Sunshine Sammy playing keyboards in the backseat, the cocaine-filled Marlboros, the $913,000 seafood fortune or buying Dom Pérignon for everyone at the Mutiny. After the cocaine, the arrests, the machine-gun attack, the accusations involving an ex-wife, Carlene becoming a government witness, and Rudy going to prison, somehow the two childhood friends made it to the other side.
According to Hotel Scarface, when Rudy walked out of prison in 1998, Carlene was there waiting for him.
Life had been good to Rudy Redbeard.
So far.