The real nightlife of Vice City

This free story is the first in our new series The Real Vice City, a four part series on the people and places that shape modern Miami culture. Join Club Huck+ to have the rest land in your inbox when they drop.

For a certain generation of young men, Miami was a place first encountered through the screen of a PlayStation. Teenage boys who spent their evenings stealing cars, beating up hookers with baseball bats and hurtling around the streets with five stars’ worth of police in hot pursuit.

Or, rather, the lurid, fantastical world of Vice City, Rockstar Games’ barely disguised rendering of the Florida metropolis, first released in 2002. An impossibly glamorous playground of gangsters, strip clubs, pastel suits, fast cars and faster women. Its influences were hardly subtle: Scarface, Miami Vice and the great American tradition of Floridian insanity.

Almost a quarter of a century later, Rockstar is returning to Vice City with Grand Theft Auto VI. Rockstar has spent years studying the real Miami, investigating its clubs, neighbourhoods, music and assorted local eccentrics. The result is a contemporary Vice City populated by rappers, gangsters, strippers, aspiring internet celebrities and the kind of people who might reasonably be mistaken for video-game characters in real life.

And so, in anticipation of the game’s seismic November launch, we thought it would be fun to send me and photographer Lex Barberio into the heart of darkness in search of the Real Life Characters of the Real Vice City.

Because you better believe it: life imitates art.

Daniel Nelson is a New York-Miami transplant of indeterminate age and incalculable means. Vampiric, stylish, rakish, he possesses a closet of custom clothes and a garage filled with wildly rare cars, among them a DeLorean – in which he arrives. He owns and operates a transcontinental empire of bars, restaurants and real estate. Ask him what he does for a living, and he gives you his favourite stock reply: ​“I do my best.”

We have arranged to meet at Mac’s Club Deuce, a legendary South Beach dive bar, where Daniel arrives with a selection of outfits for a photoshoot. There is a great deal of posing, jacket changing and general theatricality. I suggest that he is remarkably committed to the look.

“It’s not a fucking costume,” he tells me.

Daniel is a student of Miami, and something of a connoisseur of America’s more flamboyant cities. He moved here shortly after Covid, having grown tired of the performance of LA and the cold of New York, and now divides his time between Miami and the other great American neon-fest of sin: Las Vegas.

“Miami is like if LA and Las Vegas had a tropical love child,” he explains, posing in leather beneath the neon.

He is precisely the sort of moth drawn to the flame, but is also acutely aware of its absurdities. Daniel understands that Miami is, to some extent, engaged in an elaborate act of make-believe. He has simply decided to participate with more enthusiasm than most. Miami has always been a dream selling a dream, a Floridian fantasy of sunshine, sex and limitless possibility. 

“Miami is one big performance,” says Daniel. ​“The trick is knowing when you’re on stage.” 

And nowhere is the relationship between the real Miami and its fictional counterpart more apparent than in the city’s nightlife.

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The neon, for starters. Great ribbons of pink and turquoise illuminate the Art Deco facades of Ocean Drive, where palm trees sway above passing Lamborghinis. The hotels look like confectionery, their pavements crowded with tourists drinking margaritas from vessels the size of goldfish bowls, while waiters physically block your path to explain the happy-hour margarita offer. 

Miami Beach has always been a playground for wealthy Americans looking for somewhere warm to behave badly. In the 1950s, Sinatra performed at the Fontainebleau and feathered showgirls strutted across hotel stages. By the 1970s, much of the glamour had evaporated. South Beach had become a rather dilapidated retirement community, its once-fashionable Art Deco hotels falling into disrepair.

Then the cocaine arrived. In the late 1970s and 1980s, eye-watering quantities of drugs and money poured through South Florida, bringing gangsters, smugglers, fast cars, spectacular parties and a legendary murder rate. When Miami Vice appeared on television 1984, it performed a neat trick, turning a city notorious for crime and corruption into somewhere everybody wanted to be. Local preservationists had already begun rescuing its crumbling Art Deco buildings, repainting them in tropical pastels inspired by the colours of the ocean. Suddenly, the whole place looked like a film set.

By the late 1980s, South Beach was one of America’s great party capitals, led by its decadent gay nightlife scene. Madonna danced at Warsaw Ballroom, Prince opened a nightclub and Gianni Versace bought a mansion on Ocean Drive. The clubs attracted the beautiful people, the beautiful people attracted the cameras, and the cameras attracted the money. Property developers soon followed. Nightlife was not simply something that happened in Miami. It was one of the things that made Miami worth coming to. And the city discovered that there was almost as much money to be made selling the image of vice as there had been in vice itself.

Miami has commodified partying like nowhere else in America, except perhaps Las Vegas. But there is a lush, sultry glamour to it that Vegas lacks, a Latin American fiesta spirit that crackles in the muggy Floridian air. The best thing about Miami, the line goes, is how near it is to the United States.

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Miami rewards a certain kind of delusion, and the odd thing about the delusion is that it can be load-bearing. The towers go up, the money flows in, the yacht is real even when it belongs to someone else. Where delusion ends and reality begins is the question the whole city seems to be built on.

Lil Draco, real name Frankie, is a 22-year-old Miami rapper, who emerges from the woodwork with almost prophetic timing after hearing that we’re in town. We photograph him in Wynwood, beneath an enormous pink VICE CITY sign, installed by Rockstar.

He arrives in a white Corvette, sporting a mouthful of diamond grillz, with a fake rocket launcher over his shoulder and a boot full of plastic Kalashnikovs and three-litre bottles of Hennessy. Born and raised in Hialeah, Draco makes his designing custom jewellery, with music on the side. ​“Not a lot of money in music,” he says, ​“unless you blow up.” 

Miami has a distinguished history of musical excess. In the 1980s, while New York was perfecting the art of lyrical hip-hop, Miami was developing something much less cerebral. Miami bass, popularised by Luther ​‘Uncle Luke’ Campbell and 2 Live Crew, was a filthy concoction of drum machines, soul-shaking basslines and anatomically explicit lyrics, designed to be played at tremendous volume from car stereos and strip-club speakers. Trick Daddy and Trina brought a harder, grittier sound in the 90s, before Rick Ross turned the city’s cocaine mythology and conspicuous consumption into a musical empire, rapping about yachts, fast cars and unimaginable wealth. Miami’s rappers have always understood the commercial possibilities of showing off.

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The hype today, Lil Draco reckons, is in Miami, and increasingly online. ​“All the content creators,” he says. ​“You go down to Brickell, they’re all streaming and recording.” He’s thinking of getting into streaming himself, ripping round the local rap scene at night and plastering it all over Instagram.

More recently, South Florida produced a generation of internet-born rappers, XXXTentacion and Lil Pump, who proved that you no longer needed a major record label to become a star. The internet could do the work for you. For a young man like Draco, the appeal is obvious. Miami offers not just a thriving musical culture but an almost inexhaustible supply of clubs, cars, beautiful women and people desperate to be famous. He can make music, cultivate an entourage and broadcast the whole business to the world. The record deal, should it ever materialise, is almost beside the point.

With him are two of his ​“honies”, Patience and Asia, who have recently moved from Omaha, Nebraska, to make it in Miami. They want to get into social media. ​“We love it here,” Patience says. ​“We thrive here. We can actually be ourselves here.”

As for Draco, he has no particular theory about the city’s appeal. ​“Bro, I love everything about Miami,” he says. ​“I love the people. I love the culture. It’s just home.” 

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Strip clubs occupy a unique position in Miami’s cultural imagination.

For the teenage boys playing Grand Theft Auto, strip clubs represented a tantalising part of the forbidden adult world. In the real Miami, they are a major component of the city’s nightlife, and an institution with unusually deep connections to its music industry.

Strip clubs are not the same thing culturally in Britain. It’s just not the done thing to go with your boys to a glamorous joint and throw a few hundred quid at gyrating women, and our strip clubs tend towards one of two moods: a Mayfair, oligarch-and-petrodollar loneliness, or the graveyard shift in a decaying seaside resort. Here the strip club sits at the heart of the nightlife culture. It is where local records were released, where rappers went to network, where athletes, businessmen and film stars rub shoulders and empty their wallets. 

King of Diamonds opened in Miami Gardens in 2008 and closed 10 years later. It became perhaps the most rapped-about strip club in America. Drake, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj all immortalised it in their lyrics. It became so closely associated with Miami hip-hop that its influence is barely disguised in the new GTA. 

One of the strip clubs featured in the game is the Jack of Hearts. Its proprietor is Boobie Ike, a former street hustler turned entertainment mogul who operates a record label and recording studio alongside his strip club. Rockstar has spoken about the enviably exhaustive research missions its designers took: house parties, bottle-service establishments, and the strip clubs of Miami Beach. 

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One club mentioned by name is Booby Trap. So, naturally, we decided to investigate.

It is located about 45 minutes north of South Beach, in Pompano Beach, is another branch of Booby Trap, part of a small constellation of strip clubs that local letches have taken to calling the Pompano Triangle. It is Halloween weekend, and the car park is filled with trucks. 

A valet with a magnificent porn-star moustache has spent fourteen years watching customers come and go. He has the implacable expression of a man who has seen absolutely everything. ​“Yeah, it gets pretty wild out here,” he tells me.

Inside, the club is a clean, fluorescent, wipe-down affair, busy with dancers circulating between stages and customers. There is none of the sepulchral gloom I associate with British strip joints. Most of the girls, I’m told, don’t speak much English. Fortunately, Jax, a dancer in her early 30s from Pennsylvania, does. Heavily made-up, energetic and chatty, she has been dancing for almost a decade, from Pittsburgh to New York and now South Florida.

“It’s the best place to dance in the country,” she tells me, shaking her arse in the air for the camera. There are countless clubs to choose from, customers with serious money and a revolving cast of athletes, businessmen and tourists who have come to Miami with the express intention of spending it. ​“It’s not uncommon for someone to leave 30 or 40 grand on the dancefloor,” she says. ​“People come to Miami to party.”

Anything goes in here, the roided-up Jeff Bezos lookalike on security tells me. ​“Within reason, we look the other way.” 

The laws governing the whole business are comically Floridian. Miami Beach has long prohibited the combination of full nudity and alcohol sales, while across the bay, North Miami Beach spent decades turning a blind eye to three clubs offering both in defiance of a city ordinance: Dean’s Gold, G5ive Lounge and Swinging Richards, a male strip club. In 2012, Swinging Richards sued the city for discrimination, arguing that the authorities had only started enforcing the law when men began taking their clothes off. Rather than fight the case, the council simply voted to legalise what it had apparently never got around to preventing.

Jax is refreshingly practical about her profession. She likes Booby Trap, where the competition between dancers is friendly and the atmosphere considerably calmer than some of Miami’s rougher establishments. But after 10 years in the business, she is thinking about retiring. She is sober now, and has seen too many girls relying on alcohol and drugs to get through their shifts.

There is good money to be made selling Miami nightlife’s fantasy. Living it, it turns out, is another matter.

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At the other end of the fantasy for sale is Elena Lee and her showgirls, performing that weekend at the Faena. Lee grew up between Barcelona and Ibiza, danced in Miami, found burlesque in New York and came back to build Iconique by Lee, a company that stages dance, burlesque and fashion for hotels, private parties and luxury brands. What her dancers sell is another kind of sensuality: feather boas, continental Moulin Rouge faux-elegance and the suggestion of class.

The setting could hardly be more apt. The Faena occupies the old Saxony on Collins Avenue and was dressed for the Argentine developer Alan Faena by Baz Luhrmann. In the garden a Damien Hirst woolly mammoth, its very-real skeleton gilded in gold leaf and sealed in a glass case, stands as a portrait of the clientele. This is where the Botoxed men and the lifted women of Miami come, the white Rolls-Royces idling outside and the afterparty address passed round by text.

The dancers are superb, talented, elegant, beautiful. But there is an edge missing, a grit that extreme wealth can iron out. In the game’s terms, they’re best described as NPCs, the non-player characters who loop through their animations at the edge of the screen while the player gets on with spending his money. 

What Elena sells is the night with the risk taken out. And increasingly, that is what Miami’s money wants. Since the pandemic, the city has acquired a new plutocracy. Ken Griffin announced the relocation of Citadel’s headquarters here in 2022, Jeff Bezos (the real one) followed in 2023, buying a home on Indian Creek, the private island in Biscayne Bay known locally as the Billionaire Bunker. In their wake came a small army of hedge fund managers, financiers and the assorted über rich, who are accustomed to getting exactly what they want. 

And what they want, it turns out, is for the party to come to them. Miami has perfected a hellish hybrid of fine dining and nightclub known as the clubstaurant, in which dinner will spontaneously burst into a cabaret or twerk-fest at any moment. At Sexy Fish in Brickell, sequinned dancers weave between the tables; at Papi Steak, a $1,000 tomahawk arrives with sparklers and whooping; at Delilah, showgirls in feather fans and faux-fur boas circulate among the diners. There is an entire industry devoted to supplying these spectacles, and companies like Elena’s are doing a roaring trade. The showgirl, once the preserve of the nightclub stage, might now make entrance between the starter and main course.

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If Miami is a city engaged in a constant process of reinventing itself, the Deuce is one of the very few places that has stubbornly refused to participate.

The bar has just celebrated its hundredth birthday. Opened in 1926, it was acquired in 1964 by Mac Klein, a Brooklyn-born Second World War veteran who ran it with his wife Mary until his death in 2016, aged 101. It has outlived the cocaine boom, Miami Vice, several generations of nightclub fashions and the wholesale transformation of South Beach into an expensive tourist resort.

The place is a cool, dark den of daytime depravity, the air thick with cigarette smoke and chesty laughter from patrons propping up the bar. There is a pool table, a jukebox, a curved counter. ​“There’s one rule here,” Daniel warns me. ​“Do not touch the blinds.” For the day-drinkers of Mac’s, a crack of Florida sunlight would be a punishment too grim to bear. 

It opens at eight 8am and closes at 5am the following morning. For 21 hours, Miami’s drinkers, degenerates, hospitality workers, night owls and papery lost souls can find refuge in one of the last community spaces left in Miami. Come in at any hour, sit next to anyone, and you are likely to leave with a life story, a business proposition or both. Best of all is the happy hour. Before 5, it’s two for one, a deal administered by red poker chip: one is laid down beside whatever you order, and when you set it next to your empty drink, both are whisked away and replaced, wordlessly, as if by magic. 

Miami Beach has traditionally allowed bars to serve until 5am, but even this has become contentious. In 2021, residents voted to bring last orders forward to 2am, triggering years of wrangling between politicians and the city’s powerful nightlife industry. Restrictions have since been imposed in parts of South Beach, but Mac’s carries on much as before. And no one seems much to care. In a state only 180 years old, a century of bad behaviour practically grandfathers you in. 

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mac’s is its lighting. The pink-and-green neon strips illuminating the bar were installed by Miami Vice, who filmed an episode here in the late ​’80s. Mac was initially reluctant to let them interfere with his establishment, until Mary persuaded him to accept, on the condition that the neon remained after filming. It has been here ever since. The cast even threw their final wrap party at the bar in 1989, with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas serving drinks.

“I love neon,” Daniel says. ​“It’s kind of sad that so many of the new signs are going up LED. It really changes the temperature and the mood.”

In a week several million people will be driving through a perfect digital Miami lit entirely by pixels. Daniel would rather have the gas. ​“Neon really suits a city like Miami,” he says. ​“It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s gases going nuts.”

Jack Burke is a freelance journalist and sometimes chef. Follow him on Instagram.

Lex Barberio is a photographer based in Miami. Follow them on Instagram.

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