www.miaminewtimes.com – Raul Quintana [pictured] skids his silver Mercedes C550 to a stop in the dirt parking lot outside the trailer housing the management offices of Fisher Island, one of the nation’s most expensive residential enclaves.
Quintana’s salt-and-pepper hair is a mess, his green eyes flicker wildly, and spittle foams from the sides of his mouth. The real estate speculator has just been officially informed he is banned from entering the Fisher Island Club — the lynchpin of society here. He is charged with allowing a hard-core porno flick to be filmed in his condo and on the club’s golf links, and then threatening the life of the island executive whose office he now barges into unannounced.
Fisher Island Community Association chief executive Mark James, a burly man in a blue sport coat, counters Quintana’s frantic hostility with exhausted candor. He tells the intruder there’s nothing he can do to reinstate him — and then expresses a sentiment that won’t be found in any of Fisher Island’s glossy catalogues.
“I wouldn’t live here for a million dollars,” James mutters sympathetically. “They tried to give me an apartment here and I told them I would rather shoot myself in the head. I wouldn’t do it because of all the fighting. I guess rich people like to fight with each other.”
James has strayed far from the company line, and he certainly would have chosen his words differently if he were aware that Quintana’s companion was a New Times reporter. (Indeed, he later denied saying it and threatened legal action.) But many people would feel the same way about living in this status-obsessed community had they suffered Quintana’s fate.
After unwittingly renting a condo to a porn crew, the longtime property owner has gone from island hero to pariah. He claims he is now unable to rent his three multimillion-dollar luxury condos, which are in foreclosure. He’s even contemplating bankruptcy. “When you first hear my story, you think, How could a porno flick really fuck this guy’s life up?” says the 42-year-old mortgage lender. “But it did. I feel like killing myself.”
“Everybody loved Raul,” says Ty, a Fisher Island resident and business owner who asked that his last name not be used. “But he’s lost everything. He’s been outcasted.”
Quintana first began buying condos in the 695-unit millionaires’ compound, located just south of South Beach and accessible only by ferry or helicopter, in 1997. The island has been home to A-listers such as Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi, Julia Roberts, and Ricky Martin. In the early days, Quintana was among the top investors, buying 15 condos and spending $45 million, by his estimation. Back then, he was the flashy socialite who drove a Ferrari, sponsored polo matches at the Fisher Island Club, and always arrived by chopper.
He sold six units, earning millions before the bottom fell out of the condo market last year. After an early-2008 divorce from his second wife, Maura Barbosa Lopez, Quintana was left with three units. But his troubles really began that October, he claims, when he was called by a woman who claimed to be a representative of a “modeling agency” and wanted to hold a “photo shoot” in unit 5143 — a 3,600-square-foot, three-bedroom, furnished condo with a balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay.
At the time, the apartment was worth nearly $3 million. Quintana had previously rented it for $25,000 to $35,000 a month to former Florida Marlins catcher Ivan Rodriguez and visiting relatives of tennis star Anna Kournikova.
The prospective renter offered $600 for a six-hour shoot, which Quintana says is equivalent to a “cleaning fee.” His assistant exchanged keys for cash, he says. There was no written contract. “I fucked up,” he admits. “I thought a photo spread might help rent the apartment. Who would have imagined that they would come in and film a porno flick?”
It turns out Quintana had rented his apartment to Bangbros.com, an online porn giant based in Miami. Its auteurs produced Sexy Golfing Experience, which sounds like an unauthorized Tiger Woods biography but is in fact a hard-core skin flick starring zeppelin-breasted actress Devon Lee.
The film is no innovation in cinema. In it, Tony, a ratty-looking dude with a thin beard and designer shades, commandeers a golf cart — clearly displaying Quintana’s apartment number — to rendezvous with Devon on a Fisher Island golf green. After the dirty-blond porn starlet does some butt-focused putting, the lovers drive to Quintana’s condo on a golf cart with a pudgy, bearded dolly grip riding on the rear.
Once in the apartment, they head to the balcony, where, in broad daylight and full view of any neighbor who might glance out a window, Tony applies baby oil to Devon’s buttocks for five minutes. They then go inside and run through the usual battery of positions, with only a thin white towel separating their carnal intermingling from Quintana’s brown suede couch and matching chaise lounge.
Other scenes involve possible staining of one of the homeowner’s throw pillows and his carpet. The 40-minute film is viewable for a buck at Bangbros.com, where online connoisseurs gave it a rating of 8.1 out of a possible 10.
Quintana didn’t find out about Sexy Golfing Experience until roughly three months after he rented out his apartment, he says, when a safari-helmeted security guard named Howard greeted him with: “Great film, Mr. Quintana!”
“The rumors always start with security,” says Fisher Island real estate agent and resident Claudia Campuzano. “Everybody on the island knows about Raul’s movie, and everybody’s watched it too.”
When the word first spread, Quintana was still embroiled in an ugly divorce that featured back-and-forth restraining orders. Raul says his ex spread the news of the porno after discovering he had taken a stripper girlfriend from Fort Lauderdale’s Solid Gold club on a helicopter trip to Marathon Key. “She was going around telling people that I was now in the porno business.”
That earned him a new nickname: “The Porn King of Fisher Island.”
Soon after, he says, the Fisher Island Community Association (which declined to comment) brought the hammer down. According to two November letters from the association, “certain of Mr. Quintana’s access and use privileges have been suspended.” Among the punishments listed: In the lineup to place his car on the ferry, he’s relegated to “Lane 3 and 4,” the dreaded employee slots. He must gain “clearance” in person for all “guests and invitees” at the public safety office and pay $50 per person when he brings somebody in. Most damaging, the association declared it “would not be entering into any rental exception agreements” with Quintana, effectively banning him from renting his condos.
In short, Quintana went from Brahmin to untouchable. The letters do not mention the porno but cite “disruptive and noncompliant behavior.
The restrictions cost him “in excess of $100,000 a month,” he would later claim in court. So he stopped paying condo fees and now owes the association $250,000, he says. He was banned from the Fisher Island Club, and his new girlfriend, a Telemundo anchorwoman who lives on the island, was recently informed she could not bring him to the club as a guest.
The public shaming reeks of hypocrisy, Campuzano says. “You know how many hookers come onto this island every night?”
On October 8, Quintana filed suit in Miami-Dade Civil Court against Bangbros.com, claiming the porn outfit “knowingly made false and deceptive representations,” “caused [Quintana] ridicule,” and hurt his business. Bangbros.com has not yet responded to the suit. An attorney representing the company, Amanda Frazer, says only that Quintana’s allegations “are patently untrue, and we look forward to addressing them in court.”
On a recent Tuesday morning, Quintana received a phone call from club CEO Larry Brown. According to Quintana, Brown attributed the banning to the porno filming and his subsequent threatening of James. (Quintana denies making a threat.)
Indeed, it was that call which prompted Quintana to burst into James’s office with a New Times reporter in tow. After Quintana complained, the community association CEO tried to calm him by terming the reasons for his club-banning “political.” “I think [residents] are tired of the Quintana-Lopez drama,” James said, referring to the couple’s nasty divorce. “And I think they’re tired of being held back because Raul Quintana hasn’t paid his association dues.”
Contacted later, James declined to answer specific questions concerning Quintana and called his quote trashing Fisher Island residency as worse than suicide “totally inaccurate.”
Quintana, meanwhile, is in trouble. His three remaining luxury units are now worth $5.6 million — almost $3 million less than their purchase prices. Banks might soon take them over. Fisher Island, he says, is his “Alcatraz.” Then his voice breaks as he remarks, “Bang Bros really banged my life.”