Mayor Alex Daoud and Princess Caroline of Monaco in the 1980s. Photo courtesy of www.sinsofsouthbeach.com

There was a time when Alex Daoud was the rock star of Miami Beach politicians. The ’80s were good to Daoud, who served three terms as a city commissioner and three as mayor from 1979 to 1991.

In fact, Daoud had such a good time in the ’80s, he was indicted while in office in 1991 as part of a huge federal corruption probe. In 1993, he began a five-year sentence for tax fraud, obstructing justice, taking bribes from constituents and money laundering. He served just 18 months.

Since then, he’s led a largely quiet life in South Beach, playing landlord to a modest apartment building on Michigan Avenue. The last time Daoud popped up in the news, in 2005, it was because former podiatrist Jordan Schwartz accused him of getting him drunk so he would sell his property for less than market value to Daoud’s daughter. The Miami Herald story portrayed Daoud as a mercenary preying on a confused elderly man. Whatever the case, Schwartz eventually did sell the property to Daoud’s daughter to settle a lawsuit she had filed.

Before that, there were a couple of retrospectives, one published by the Miami New Times in 1993 just before he went to prison and the other by the Herald 10 years later. Both pieces showed Daoud in all his flawed glory — charismatic, insecure, bitter and living in an impressive clutter that gripped both his apartment and his mind.

The one thing Daoud, now 64, felt he still had was a good story. After all, he was the golden boy of politics at a time when South Beach transformed itself from a decaying wasteland plagued by crime into the American Riviera. As the Beach’s fortunes rose, so did Daoud’s, at the price of his integrity.

Since at least 1993, Daoud has threatened to write a book exposing a lot of the people he felt were right there with him in his sleigh ride to hell. Now, some 14 years later, Daoud has finally done so with Sins of South Beach. One of the people he skewers in the book, who suggested his alleged sins should remain out of print on pain of a defamation suit, called it Daoud’s “get-even book.”

I got a copy and have to say it’s more like How I Turned to the Dark Side by Anakin Skywalker. You know, idealistic boy grows up, fights the good fight, and then gets seduced by power and the wiles of a politician smarter than he is.

Sins of South Beach reads like a long romantic novel of regret, one more concerned with municipal skullduggery than most. The prologue features Daoud in a hotel room getting taped up with an FBI wire and checking his gun as he contemplates whether he’s really going to rat out Abel Holtz, a banker and former friend for whom he’d once named his own son. History recalls he decided to take Holtz down with him.

Holtz, former chairman of Capital Bank, pleaded guilty in 1994 to lying to a federal grand jury about his monthly payments to Daoud for seven years in the ’80s. He spent six weeks in prison, 4 ˝ months on house arrest, was barred from banking and his family lost control of Capital Bank.

I met with Daoud recently, along with his longtime friend J.P. Morgan, with whom he formed Pegasus Publishing House to protect the printer from any lawsuits that may or may not arise from allegations in the book. Morgan, a conservative-minded blond with the pipes of Wolfman Jack, was once a bar owner and newspaper publisher on the Beach, and now publishes the community Web site citydebate.com.

Today, Alex Daoud is a lumpy shadow of his former charismatic self. He’s a big guy, his once athletic 6-foot-4-inch frame gone soft. His blue eyes project the half-abashed query of a former star who hopes he still looks familiar. He’s still quite gregarious, flirtatious even, and makes an effort to learn people’s names.

In his youth, Daoud trained with Muhammad Ali at the Fifth Street Gym and later got one of the halls of the convention center named for him. As mayor, he wrangled himself bit parts in two Miami Vice episodes. He writes with gusto about romancing countless women, jet-setting with the rich and famous, participating in police beat-downs and descending into the most abject political corruption imaginable.

I actually think the book works better as a novel than as history. That’s because it’s all told from Daoud’s perspective, which is larded with a considerable amount of personal mythology. Some of his allegations can be supported by public documents, media accounts or witnesses. Others are simply unprovable. Regardless, it’s an entertaining read for anyone interested in one insider’s view of Miami Beach politics in a unique era.

Lucia Dougherty, who spent a couple of years as Miami Beach’s city attorney in the early ’80s, is one of many prominent Miamians to make a brief appearance in the book. She hasn’t read it, but told me “it’s probably got a lot of fiction in it. [Daoud is] the kind of person who wouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

“Anything he’s written is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” spat attorney and former lobbyist Chris Korge, an estranged cousin of Daoud’s.

Harold Rosen, a Miami Beach attorney and lobbyist, who was once mayor himself, had a similar reaction when I called him about his starring role in Daoud’s book (Daoud claims he steered people who wanted to do business with the city to Rosen’s law firm and split the fees with him). “You gotta be kidding,” he began with extreme distaste. “This lying son of a —,” Rosen paused, considering his words, before adding, “He’s a snitch, a liar and every other god-darned thing.”

Rosen then went on to explain that he once considered Daoud a friend and a talented politician with enormous potential. Then, when Daoud got in trouble, he turned on many of his friends and tried to get some of them, including Rosen, in trouble so the feds would knock time off his sentence. “I used to take his kid down to see him at the jail on weekends,” he said. “And then the guy turned on you like an asp. I wouldn’t read the book.”

When I told Daoud about Rosen’s reaction, he said, “Tell him I’ll take a polygraph! See if he will.” This is pure Daoud theater. He once challenged Herald reporter Luis Feldstein Soto to a boxing match. He also called him a “rat-faced weasel,” and even takes a couple of potshots at him in his book.

The former reporter, now a lawyer in Houston, described Daoud’s back-slapping, larger-than-life persona with an ex-reporter’s nostalgia. “That was the great magic of Alex Daoud,” he said. “He elevated style over substance to such a degree that substance went out of style. I yearn for the old days when we had Alex to kick around. He was easy prey. He wasn’t very careful with everything he did.”

Bonnie Weston, a former Herald reporter briefly famous for having then-Commissioner Abe Hirschfeld spit on her when he didn’t care for her coverage, also has wistful memories. She covered city government at the end of the Daoud era, just as the insular old boy’s club that had controlled Beach politics for decades was beginning to loosen its grip. “I strongly suspect there were people who had a very good idea what Mr. Daoud was up to, whether or not they participated,” she said.

Still, there were many people Daoud helped over the years who were loyal to him even after he was convicted. Others were afraid he’d rat them out. “Even when it was clear he was going to go down, you couldn’t get people around the city to comment on him because they were afraid he was somehow going to duck,” Weston said.

Then there are the Daoud loyalists. I spoke to two former Miami Beach police officers, both with 29 years experience, who had nothing but praise for the former mayor. They recalled that Daoud used to ride with them on the midnight shift in the early ’80s, when the Mariel boatlift turned South Beach into a war zone. Daoud fought for supplies and police pay raises.

Daoud wrote that he and some of these cops routinely indulged in “attitude adjustment sessions” that consisted of rounding up Marielitos who were known perps, beating the hell out of them and dumping them across the bay.

“It was wild times with the Mariel boatlift,” remembers Dennis Ward, a former cop who is now a public defender in the Keys. “Little old ladies being raped, their fingers cut off to steal their engagement rings. The Beach was under assault. Whatever we needed, he would get it for us.”

Ward said Daoud cared about the city’s residents. “I know what he did for us,” he said. “I was sorry to see how he ended up. He just made a bad judgment there and it ruined a great thing.”

Charlie Seraydar, who patrolled the Beach from 1973 to 2002, said the “sessions” happened because the small police force was overwhelmed with a sudden 600 percent increase in violent crime. “Those were the years we were put to the test trying to protect the Beach,” he said. “No one ever got hurt that didn’t deserve it.”   

Seraydar calls Daoud at his peak, “the prince of the city” who wanted to make Miami Beach an international name. But like many others, he made bad decisions. “Power corrupts and money corrupts,” he said. “It’s unfortunate he went through what he did. But he’s done his time, paid his debt and is moving on. More power to him.”