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“Try! If you even try to fucking come back.” “You know who you talking to?” shot back Morales, snarling. “Get the fuck out of here, Ricky!” he yelled to Morales, panting, almost hyperventilating. His rival bolted, but Gomez didn’t put away his revolver. But Morales rapidly tucked his semiautomatic back into his pants. He imagined his head in a puddle of blood. Gomez was still convinced the Monkey would blow him away with a flick of his wrist. Villaverde then carefully walked up to Morales and whispered something. “No police!” he pleaded, looking at Gomez. Willy Gomez now had his gun at Morales’s head. As the scene came into focus through his tinted glasses, the paunchy exile grimaced, bit a knuckle and took hesitating steps forward. Out walked Rafael Villaverde, Morales’s tablemate. “Police!” yelled Gomez, with renewed desperation. (“Or,” Willy Gomez thought, “if you keep thinking about all this, the Monkey will fucking turn around and kill you himself. Yes, many in Miami who hated Morales would send Gomez drinks an introduce the dapper caballero to their daughters and sisters.īut the Monkey had too many friends in dangerous places-spooks, arms dealers, mercenaries, soldiers of fortune-who would put a retaliatory hit out on his killer, justified circumstances or not. You didn’t just plug Monkey Morales and go on with your life like nothing happened. Gomez would then have to quit his job, assuming the Mutiny survived the shooting.

“I hired the guy that lit up the Statue of Liberty in ’seventy-six,” Goldberg would always boast to guests.

He had paid tens of thousands of dollars for Hollywood-caliber set lighting to showcase his art and orchids, micromanaging the scene down to the last lumen. Burton Goldberg, the Mutiny’s hard-assed owner, would throw the mother of all shit fits when crime-scene photographers captured the mess in his lobby. I was worried his brains would splatter on the artwork.” “Monkey was already dead, as far as I was concerned. “If I blink,” Gomez thought to himself, “this psychopath will kill me.”

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I got to ride, ride like the wind to be free again “Call the police.”īut the lobby had completely emptied out, save for the three of them. But tonight, for whatever reason, Monkey Morales felt the need to go apeshit a couple of yards from the hotel’s front desk. So, Willy Gomez, security conquistador, hardly ever crossed paths with this guy-and he was fine with that. And maybe a lobster or hog snapper that he had personally speared. He always snuck in the back of the hotel and in through the kitchen, where he’d hand Chef Manny-“Manolito!”-choice little briquettes of cocaine. The Mutiny was where Monkey Morales held court, his bloodstream coursing with cocaine, THC, Quaaludes, Valium, alcohol and caffeine. “If I blink, this psychopath will kill me.” The Miami Herald and the Miami News had filing cabinets dedicated to this mythical exile: informant, bomber, drug dealer, assassin, quoter of military histories. Morales had been featured in Esquire, and cover treatments by both Newsday’s magazine and Harper’s were in the pipeline. Which was seemingly the only publication that hadn’t profiled him.

Morales’s menacing appearance-dead gaze, gorilla-sloped back, huge ears and hands-resembled that of some early hominid you might see recreated in the pages of National Geographic. The domino tables of Little Havana echoed with cigar-smoked tales of el Mono (the Monkey) meting out and cheating death: about how once, in broad daylight, he emptied seventeen rounds from a machine gun into another exile how there was still shrapnel embedded in the busy Miami street where nine years earlier he had walked away from a car bombing that should have at least severed his legs how Morales, the lucky bastard, later survived a drive-by shooting that nearly blew out his brains by rolling out of his car and regrouping until he could kill his would-be assassin with gunshots to the face. 38 Colt revolver was downright Gunsmoke compared with the Monkey’s semiautomatic: “No way I could let him turn on me with that.” “I knew Ricky was a CIA guy-an informant,” Gomez said of Morales. So intense was the vitriol that spit was flying in the air. Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, a Mutiny regular, was pointing his gun at some other thug. “Fuck me,” thought Gomez, stifling the urge to piss himself.

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