After a federal conviction and time spent in prison, Monty Trainer redeems himself in the eyes of his adopted hometown.
Thirty-five years ago, Monty Trainer settled into the front seat of a brown Cadillac Eldorado and headed off on the long drive from Miami to Pensacola.
He took with him a couple of fresh shirts, a brand-new tennis racket he had been given three days earlier at a farewell dinner, and more than a few doubts that he would ever again enjoy life as a respected Coconut Grove restaurateur and community leader.
Trainer, then 53 years old, was going to federal prison.
Upon his release, “I didn’t know what the reception would be when I came back,” he said recently, reflecting on the 133 days in 1989 and 1990 he spent in a minimum-security prison camp after pleading guilty to one count of making a false statement on his income tax.
“I felt like some of the guys from the Coral Gables country club, this very upscale crowd… would be resentful if I were put in the same position I had before. I was a little apprehensive.”
Next week, the fears that once haunted Trainer’s jailhouse dreams will be scattered to the bayside breeze as City of Miami officials unveil the street sign officially changing a section of Aviation Avenue into Monty Trainer Way.
Renaming the street, just feet from Monty’s, the landmark waterfront restaurant that still bears his name, serves as the apotheosis of Trainer’s long and nonpareil career as a Grove activist and booster.
“I never thought I’d see this day,” Trainer told the Miami City Commission in September when the renaming was announced. He thought back to the early 1970s when he was a persistent presence at City Hall, pulling the permits that allowed him to create the sprawling restaurant and marina complex where he once held court. “And now,” he marveled, “they’re naming the street after me!”
In the modern history of Coconut Grove, perhaps no one who never sought or held elective office has wielded more influence, orchestrated more connections or made more friends than Trainer.
For years, operating from a back table at his popular restaurant on South Bayshore Drive, he brokered agreements, made introductions and floated ideas that others could turn into policy. In the game of getting things done, Trainer was a master.
“He’s always been a connector, a big promoter, and his fingerprints are on a lot of things that happen in this community,” says lobbyist and businessman Rodney Barreto, an ex-Miami cop and longtime Trainer confidant who drove his mentor to prison in that Cadillac. “He had a name, an image, and he created that image, of someone who was a mover and shaker. He loves that. He thrives on it. He is bigger than life.”
Prison, Trainer acknowledges, “changed my life, that was the big thing,” redirecting him down a path of community involvement. (As a part of his sentence, Trainer was ordered to perform 2,500 hours of community service work.)
That path meant that his social life and his circle of friends changed, too. “I became involved with other people working on not-for-profits, and that made me aware of what was going on in the world, what these different organizations needed. That has made a tremendous impact on my life.”
Was life better, he was asked.
“Oh, much.”
Yet Trainer’s tireless post-prison community work is not purely about redemption; he seems to genuinely care about the people he helps and the causes he embraces. Yet those who know him best say that his days as inmate 33569-004, ordered to get up at 3 a.m. and begin prep work for the mess hall salad bar, are never far from mind.
“Before prison, Monty was more focused on self-leadership than on servant-leadership,” says Joe King, another longtime friend. “Now he’s focused on doing good.”
A listing of Trainer’s community leadership positions and accomplishments, spanning the nearly 60 years he has lived in the Grove, reads like a booster club roll call.
For nearly 20 years he headed the Coconut Grove Arts Festival; he is now president emeritus. He is a founding member of, and still sits on, the Coconut Grove Business Improvement District. He chairs two committees on the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council. He has led the Coconut Grove Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Miami Host Committee, through which he brought two Miss Universe pageants and a Miss USA pageant to Miami and championed the Big Orange ball drop at downtown Miami’s New Year’s Eve celebration.
Trainer has served on the Virginia Key Advisory Board. He has worked to support the next generation of artists through the New World School for the Performing Arts. He has been on the board of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, and is working to preserve it. He heads Dade Days in Tallahassee, where he ties on an apron and cooks paella for thousands. He plans to do it again in April.
He is a longtime benefactor of the University of Miami, and was instrumental in raising $1 million to bring basketball back to UM in 1985 after a 14-year absence. He is a member of the Golden Canes Club and Iron Arrow Honor Society. For years his food truck, emblazoned with a big Monty’s sign, was a fixture in the endzone at the now-gone Orange Bowl.
He has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for various causes, including the nonprofit volunteer organization Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, and given generously of his own money.
“I first met Monty when we were at the University of Florida six-plus decades ago,” said David Lawrence Jr., retired Miami Herald publisher and chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida. “Always a special person – a larger-than-life person – and (one who) has done much good in our community.”
At 89, Trainer remains fully engaged. He shows up for meetings, works the phone to solicit sponsorships, arranges introductions over lunch. He amazes others with his ability to remember names, dates and phone numbers. “He’s a wealth of information for the Grove, and he doesn’t seem to be tiring at all,” said Sue McConnell, who serves on the Chamber of Commerce with Trainer. “He does so much for the community.”
He has been plagued by a series of health problems, however. In the last two years he has been hospitalized four times, been treated for a heart ailment, and recently took a fall at home that injured his back.
But nothing has dampened his enjoyment of the elder statesman status he commands in his Coconut Grove bailiwick, which includes Miami City Hall and its changing cast of politicians and lobbyists.
Moving slowly, and on a walker, people clear a path for Trainer as he makes his way around town. People recognize him, and treat him with impressive deference and respect. Those who know him well make sure he has a fresh cup of coffee, and ask if he needs a snack or another cushion for his back. Francis Suarez, who is the elected mayor of Miami, addresses Trainer as “Mister Mayor.”
Strangers often approach for a photo, a starstruck response which he says he finds baffling. “At City Hall, people were waiting to see me. Everybody taking pictures,” he said, referring to the September council meeting. “Most of them just want to take pictures of me, in a golf cart, in a chair. I was trying to figure out why. They think maybe I’m leaving.”
“You’re like a phenomenon,” King, who heads the Grove non-profit Collaborative Development Corporation, told him recently at his Grand Avenue headquarters, where he has provided Trainer with a small office. “You’re a legend, so everybody wants to have a picture of Monty. You’re a big fish in a little water.”
To understand how Trainer became the “Grovefather” – the title he uses as his Instagram handle – it helps to know of his rise, his fall, and his rise again.
Mont Perry Trainer was born in Rockland, Maine, his father’s home state, in 1935. When he was still young, his parents moved to Key West, his mother’s hometown, where his father operated an open-air laundry on the corner of Margaret and Southard Streets. The family lived upstairs.
As a young teen Trainer went to Suwanee, Tennessee, to attend St. Andrew’s, a small, Episcopal boarding school, where he played guard on the football team. In 1957 he enrolled in the University of Florida, joined theSigma Nu fraternity, and eventually became president. While still a student, he began working in local motels, first as a bellhop and later as a manager. There, he says, he learned what he calls “the trick of politics” – remembering names. “People only have their name,” he says. “So, if you can recall their name, that is the most precious thing to people. “
By the time he finally earned a degree in the mid-1960s, he had worked on two Democratic gubernatorial campaigns and realized his talent for what became his life’s work in politics and hospitality. Settling in Miami in 1968, Trainer hung out with friends at the Bayshore Inn, one of several small businesses – including a gas station and a bait shop – on the site of what is now Monty’s. He eventually acquired from the city the leases of all of them, along with the rights to use the abandoned Coast Guard Air Station at Dinner Key.
“Being political, I was able to get some things done,” he remarked in an understatement that only suggests the persuasive prowess that would serve him well over the next 50 years.
Indeed, that ability “to get some things done” was Trainer’s secret power. Monty’s Bayshore Inn opened in 1969, and as it morphed into Monty’s Conch, Monty’s Raw Bar and then just Monty’s, the restaurant became a popular meeting spot for tourists, beer-drinking college students and politicians looking for a bit of tiki bar ambiance and live music, all tucked between Biscayne Bay and one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Jimmy Buffett played there.
By the early 1980s, Trainer’s plans for the future were as wide open as the collars of the coral-colored shirts he favored. He owned or had a share in several restaurants, ran two private clubs, and announced a $14 million project that would transform the land next to Monty’s into a retail and entertainment complex to rival San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.Buoyed by prosperity, Trainer attempted to clone Monty’s by opening similar restaurants in Boca Raton, Key West, Orlando and Atlanta.
Over the years Trainer’s knack for getting what he wanted rubbed some the wrong way. In 1979 the Miami Herald published a story with the headline “Monty: Miami’s ‘problem child,’” referring to a characterization of him by a Miami zoning official upset by the way the restaurant owner courted politicians for favors – a commission vote to extend his dock, into the bay, for example – while ignoring warnings to carry sufficient insurance and pay his rent on time.
As Monty’s thrived, so too did Miami’s reputation as the drug-running capital of the Americas. The nearby Mutiny Hotel became local headquarters for rock stars, Hollywood celebrities and free-spending cocaine kingpins, and Monty’s benefitted from the Grove’s reputation as a world-class party venue.
Yet, while conversations about drugs took place at Monty’s – according to one published report, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration met with informants there to set up busts in Operation Screamer in the early 80s — the outdoor eatery was not the type of high-end place drug barons took their women, Trainer said.
To discourage criminal activity, he said he hired plenty of off-duty officers – including Barreto – to man the door and direct traffic.
Adds Trainer: “I never got invited to drug parties. Everybody knew that I was a stiff.”
Still, Trainer was living well and enjoying his reputation as a man about town and socially eligible, if not for marriage, at least for fun. He owned a house off Tigertail Avenue, a condo in Grove Isle, and two big boats, including a 65-foot Bertram yacht, Shadow M, that he docked at his own marina. He spent lavishly on ski trips in the winter and summered in Maine, where he and Barreto still own and operate an inn outside of Bar Harbor.
By the early-1980s, Trainer knew the Internal Revenue Service was auditing his finances. Fearing the government could seize his assets, Trainer said he decided to liquidate many of them. In 1986 he sold Monty’s — and the new 50-year lease that city voters had approved via a referendum — to developer Manny Medina for $6.16 million.
In 1988, Trainer was indicted on six counts of tax evasion for under-reporting nearly $1.7 million in restaurant receipts, a percentage of which were to go to the city under the terms of his lease. For his defense Trainer hired E. David Rosen, a top criminal tax lawyer who had represented mobster Meyer Lansky.
The following year, Trainer accepted a plea deal in which prosecutors agreed to drop five of the six charges. At his sentencing, more than 100 supporters, including several elected officials, packed the courtroom.
Many were eager to speak to Trainer’s character and charitable works. But when U.S. District Judge James Kehoe spotted UM baseball coach Ron Fraser in the crowd, the baseball-loving jurist turned the court session into an appreciation day for the coach, and few of Trainer’s fans got to speak, Trainer says.
Kehoe sentenced Trainer to six months in prison, the maximum possible under the plea deal, five years of probation, a $5,000 fine and 2,500 hours of volunteer work.
Trainer expressed remorse. “I’ve been under the gun for several years,” he told the court. “I feel like I’ve been sort of disgraced. I feel like I can put back into the community, and I’d like to be given that opportunity.”
Recalling that day before the judge, Trainer today expresses mixed feelings. “Everyone said it should have been civil,” he told the Spotlight. “But it went criminal. And I accepted it. I moved on.”
Trainer’s renown preceded him to the prison camp at Saufley Field Naval Air Station in Pensacola. On arrival the warden called him into his office, pointed to a newspaper article about his going-away party at a Coral Gables restaurant and the tennis racket, and warned the fresh fish that he could expect no special privileges.
Trainer was put in a dormitory pod with four other men and assigned a bunk and the kitchen job. He got along well with his fellow inmates, and knew some of them, including a man who used to work for him as a chef at Monty’s. He played tennis and ran on the track, until a bout of kidney stones sent him to the hospital, where he underwent lithotripsy, a shock wave treatment to break up the stones.
At Christmas, Trainer dressed up in a Santa suit and handed out checks and gifts that he had his staff send up from Miami. “What I learned in there is that there are a lot of people much needier than me,” he says. “I tried to be as helpful as I could.”
When he returned home – Barreto picked him up – Trainer says he was greeted like a five-star football recruit. “The reception was overwhelming; every organization wanted me to do community service for them,” he says. “Everyone embraced me. I don’t think anybody held anything against me. I had to go to prison, and I accepted it, and went about my business when I came back.”
After donating his food truck to the Miami Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center, where it was used for more than 20 years, Trainer began working with Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, a national organization. Trainer not only far exceeded the minimum hours required, he also became Florida chapter president.
These days, Trainer owns relatively little, lives modestly in a rented Grove cottage, and while he has more than enough money, is not a big spender. A life-long bachelor, he has one child, a 28-year-old son who lives in Miramar, and a year-old grandson. He also has many deeply loyal friends who look up to him and credit him with helping to shape their lives.
“The two most important people in my life have been my father and Monty,” said Barreto, who chairs the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “I am who I am today because of Monty. I went to the Monty Trainer School of Politics.”
Curtis Crider, president and CEO of the Greater Miami & Beaches Hotel Association, says Trainer taught him “to see the quality in a person, embrace it and elevate it.
“He saw a lot of potential in me, and helped advance my career,” said Crider. “We’ve become very close over the past 15 years, to the extent that I actually call him my second father.
“But he has a close relationship with a lot of people.”
Trainer recently journeyed down to Key West, where he saw the house he grew up in, rode the Conch Train for the first time in his life (“I kissed a girl on that corner over there,” he told longtime friend Venusmia Lovely during the ride), and made arrangements to one day join his parents in the family gravesite in the historic Key West Cemetery. “That’s the last condo I’ll move into,” he says.
But he is not finished yet. Trainer says he can imagine the West Grove becoming a thriving arts, retail and entertainment district known as Little Bahamas. He envisions the entrance to the area off of U.S. 1, with a big archway to welcome visitors.
“I’d like that to be part of my legacy,” he says. “I’ll do whatever I can do, whatever I can do to make it happen.”
Great piece, Mike!
Who’d’a thunk we’d be looking forward to the next act of an almost nonagenarian?