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Crime, Wealth, And Power--A Dispatch From The Beach
Simon & Schuster
October 2009
On Sale: October 13, 2009
464 pages
ISBN: 1416576568
EAN: 9781416576563
Hardcover
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Historical
Here, in all its neon-colored, cocaine-fueled glory, is the
never-before-told story of the making of Miami Beach. Gerald
Posner, author of the groundbreaking investigations Case
Closed and Why America Slept, has uncovered the
hair-raising political-financial-criminal history of the
Beach and reveals a tale that, in the words of one
character, "makes Scarface look like a
documentary." From its beginnings in the 1890s, the Beach
has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During
Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging
and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach
was the training ground for half a million army recruits,
even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar
boom, the city's luck gave out. The big hotels went
bankrupt, the crime rate rose, and the tourists moved on to
Disney World and the Caribbean. Even after the Beach hosted
both national political conventions in 1972, nobody would
have imagined that this sandy backwater of run-down hotels
and high crime would soon become one of the country's most
important cultural centers. But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans
arrived by the boatload. The empty streets of South Beach,
lined with dilapidated Art Deco hotels, were about to be
changed irrevocably by the culture of money that moved in
behind cocaine and crime. Posner takes us inside the
intertwined lives of politicians, financiers, nightclub
owners, and real estate developers who have fed the Beach's
unquenchable desire for wealth, flash, and hype: the German
playboy who bought the entire tip of South Beach with $100
million of questionable money; the mayoral candidate who
said, "If you can't take their money, drink their liquor,
mess with their women, and then vote against them, you
aren't cut out for politics"; the Staten Island thug who
became king of the South Beach nightclubs only to have his
empire unravel and saved himself by testifying against the
mob; the campaign manager who calls himself the "Prince of
Darkness" and got immunity from prosecution in a fraud case
by cooperating with the FBI against his colleagues; and the
former Washington, D.C., developer who played hardball with
city hall and became the Beach's first black hotel
owner. From the mid-level coke dealers and their suitcases
of cash to the questionable billions that financed the
ocean-view condo towers, the Beach has seen it all. Posner's
singular report tells the real story of how this small urban
beach community was transformed into a world-class
headquarters for American culture within a generation. It is
a story built by dreamers and schemers. And a
steroid-injected cautionary tale.
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