Miami, May 8, 2024 – From the bottle of Gray Goose, instead of French vodka, a sort of warm water with an indefinable taste that tastes little of alcohol is poured into the glass. Nathifa, the bartender, serves drinks absentmindedly. Coca Cola with rum seems like an undrinkable medicine, designed to force you to have a second drink. It’s almost midnight and the Dean’s Goldthe nightclub at 2355 NE in North Miami Beach where Matteo Falcinelli was first expelled and then brutally arrested by the police, with his head crushed on the asphalt of the parking lot, stands behind a blinding red neon light that filters through the surrounding palm trees. The writing says “the ultimate gentlemen’s club” i.e. the gentleman’s club of excellence. The bouncer at the door strangely has a tie, a belly and little muscle. Immediately indicate where to pay the 20 dollars in cash that a smiling young lady, looking at you complicitly in her eyes, throws into a plexiglass tray that is not yet full.
Matteo Falcinelli tied to the ground by policemen
Dean’s Gold is less than as the crow flies a mile from the Fiu campus, the Florida international university where the 25-year-old from Spoleto was studying. On the night of the arrest and the torture she suffered in prison, she had spent 4 dollars on an Uber to go to that nightclub alone. Two months later and with his mother always by his side, he passes the place again on his way back from the restaurant. But the student is still shaken and turns his gaze away, towards the huge BP petrol station. This time he doesn’t enter and prefers to return to the welcoming campus residence, apartment 822.
With Vlasta Studenicovawhich in Florida now fights against the brutality of the agents and has now entered the role of “mother detective”, we return to Dean’Gold to consume exactly the same cocktails drunk by his son. We also search Giselle the mysterious ‘part-time’ brunette in the little black dress who had stopped with the Spoleto student to talk on the sofas and red armchairs under the striptease stage for over two hours, continuing to ask him after the second Red Bull Vodka: ” But you feel good… but you feel good… your eyes are red…”. Giselle wasn’t there the other night. AND no one claims to know her. Outside the club there aren’t even the officers who, with their bodycams pointed at Matteo while he screamed in pain, effectively allowed the images of the atrocities of the North Miami police on the young Italian to become public and viral.
That evening, according to the 25-year-old’s version, it was Giselle who took Matteo’s credit card to pay the bill that had made the boy go mad: 500 dollars. Money listed in the police report as equivalent to 30 minutes of sexual companionship at Dean’s Gold, but which does not appear to have left the student’s account. With the ‘mom detective’ we almost always remained at the bar drinking our four terrible drinks, while the strippers writhed listlessly at the four shiny metal poles on the stage.
No one came to offer us multiple services or any extra company. But at the moment the bartender Nathifa, in addition to American Express, is also asking for a driving license. He moves a curtain behind him and disappears for 10 long minutes into a trap door under the counter. When he reemerges, in addition to the documents, he has two receipts in his hand. I sign the electronic one and keep the copy, but the bartender also gives me another one with a blank stripe saying that “it’s for the club in case the technology doesn’t work…”. We reset it by putting the same amount as the other for the four drinks: 50.75 dollars in total. Matteo Falcinelli, on that second receipt left blank, must have read a figure very different from the cost of the drinks which did not reach 80 dollars. The mysteries of Dean’s Gold remain, but the “mom detective” wants justice and she is gathering evidence to bring the North Miami Beach cops to justice.
Learn more:
What doesn’t add up in the case of Matteo Falcinelli. From the muted audio in the bodycams to the yellow of the two phones
