Hotel Scarface
  • Published: 7 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9780552171540
  • Imprint: Corgi
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $24.99

Hotel Scarface

Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami

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The extraordinary true story of Miami's violent cocaine trade, the establishment at its heart, and the real life cocaine cowboys that inspired the blockbuster film, Scarface.

Miami, December 31, 1979. Lock your doors. Watch your backs. Raise your glasses. Miami is about to blow, in a fiery explosion of cocaine, blood, bullets, torched cars, cash, immigrants, hustlers, dopers, informants, corruption, body bags and inner tubes.

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: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos—and bodies—began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement.

Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine—and the Mutiny—in Miami.
  • Published: 7 May 2019
  • ISBN: 9780552171540
  • Imprint: Corgi
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $24.99
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Praise for Hotel Scarface

Hotel Scarface is a journey into the surreal. The book sizzles with exquisitely detailed reporting and a fast-paced narrative that thrusts the reader right into the middle of Miami's cocaine-fueled madness. We’re all lucky that Farzad's deft story-telling captures one of the most outrageous moments in American history in such a vivid way.

Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author

Thought I was reading a Carl Hiaasen novel. Then I realized it was NON-fiction. Hotel Scarface is to Miami what 'Narcos' is to Colombia.

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, CNBC's Chief International Correspondent

Miami in the 1980's. It's one of the most exciting and dangerous stories in modern American history. Yet so little is known of this time and place other than a handful of oft-repeated legends. Enter Roben Farzad, whose Hotel Scarface will now and forever serve as the definitive record. You won't be able to put this book down!

Joshua Brown, author of Backstage Wall Street

Farzad captures the excess, decadence, and debauchery of the Mutiny in its heyday... a crucial piece to Miami's history as the era's cocaine epicenter. A gripping account of how the Mutiny's role in Miami's cocaine business changed not only the city, but America.

Kirkus Reviews

'Scarface' was inspired by this lavish, coke-fuelled hotel. The de-facto headquarters for Miami’s cocaine trade was a dangerous, opulent place where the underworld mixed it up with celebrities.

VICE

I can all but guarantee that this will be the most enjoyable and entertaining non-fiction book you’ll read this year.

BroBible

Stay up all night partying with the narcos and rock stars of Roben Farzad’s Hotel Scarface — you can check out anytime, but you can never plead.

Vanity Fair

Exhaustively researched... clean and precise. It’s an easy read; its implications, however, are profound. Tales of opportunistic, cutthroat men who made fast money at the expense of other people’s lives.

Miami New Times

A raucous history of the cocaine boom.

New York Times

Part biography of a hotel, part elegant true-crime thriller, this is the ideal read for a South Beach winter sun lounger.

GQ

Sensational. Farzad seems to have penetrated the minds, while discovering the habits, of cocaine traffickers and users.

The Spectator
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