A MIAMI MONEY LAUNDERING LANDMARK MAKES WAY FOR PROGRESS

Witness 4 by ALEX CEPPI

                                    

We note that the Denny's Restaurant, on Miami's Biscayne Boulevard at 36th Street, has been sold for $24m, and the site will become yet another new Miami high-rise building. The land, adjacent to the city's expanding pricey Design District, had become just too valuable to continue as merely a 24-hour eatery. Back in the day, this Denny's was a central part of the 1980s Miami Vice era; cocaine dealers would consummate sales late at night over coffee; drug shipments would be left in vans in the parking lot, with the keys turned over when the cash was produced, and the members of the "white powder bar," criminal defense attorneys who handled major narcotics cases, would meet with prospective clients, to arrange representation. Law enforcement agencies always gave the place their focused attention for these reasons. The place was also a prime spot for bulk cash to be delivered, having come in from other cities in America, the proceeds of drug sales in a period of major consumption during our national love affair with cocaine. The restaurant's location near the principal freeways in Miami, and its late night accessibility, made it a perfect venue to transfer cash to the Miami crew of money launderers. who would either move the funds directly into Caribbean offshore banks, as I did, sending some of it south, to sunny Latin American Cartels as payment, or clean them locally, and then make direct investments in the United States. As the city fathers prefer that this dark chapter in the economic life of Miami remain buried, these details won't appear on any historic building marker at the site, but we old Miami former laundrymen remember it somewhat fondly, as time moves on, and the scene changes once again, for progress.