For anyone who lived through the 1980s, the television series “Miami Vice” is the pastel-shaded, music-driven, drug-saturated image of the city forever seared into memory. At the center of this action in real life was the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay, a hotel and club in the city’s Coconut Grove neighborhood. Roben Farzad, whose family immigrated to the United States from Iran after he was born, grew up in Miami during those years. His new book, “Hotel Scarface,” is a raucous history of the cocaine boom as it played out at the Mutiny. (The 1983 movie “Scarface,” also set in this period in Miami, was filmed mostly in California.) “All roads led back to the Mutiny,” an undercover police officer who worked in Miami at the time told Farzad. “The druggies, the celebs, the crooked pols, spies, the informant, cops — good and bad — were all there.” Appropriately, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, the stars of “Miami Vice,” also were known to drop by. (Thomas even lived there for a time.) Below, Farzad talks about the haunting image that got him interested in the story, the filmmakers who inspired him as he tried to recapture a time and place, and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

I encountered the Mutiny as an abandoned property 23 years ago, just before I left Miami — I thought for good — to go to college up north at Princeton. I had a severe case of senioritis in high school, and I had a job selling frozen lemonade at a street fair in front of this abandoned building. It didn’t make sense. Coconut Grove is like the West Village of Miami. This was not a run-down part of town. Waterfront property gets snapped up. Back in the day, you had Richard Nixon and the Bee Gees docking their yachts in the marina there. People were staring at me from these collapsed balconies. Eddie Money was performing live across the street, singing, as if on cue, “I want to go back / And do it all over / But I can’t go back I know.”

I was really haunted. I’m not given to the supernatural, but later I kept thinking back to that tableau. I think if I didn’t get homesick, I wouldn’t have thought back to it. It became a talisman almost.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

Some really smart, ambitious and strait-laced people — class salutatorians, Federal Reserve Bank analysts — morphed into cocaine dealers in no time at all. The profit motive, you couldn’t resist it. Some very worldly people got a chance to get some cocaine for a few thousand dollars and turn it into much, much more money. And even if you tell yourself, “I’ll just do three or four kilos and let it go, it’s a victimless crime” — people couldn’t do that. It took over their lives.