A mansion featured in the 1983 cocaine crime thriller Scarface was itself built by a drug runner. It has connections to Richard Nixon. And now it’s up for sale. Standing in front of a vast window, Tony Montana, bloodied but unbowed, looks up at a blimp drifting across the evening sky. On the side of ... The life and times of a $237m Scarface mansion
A mansion featured in the 1983 cocaine crime thriller Scarface was itself built by a drug runner. It has connections to Richard Nixon. And now it’s up for sale.
Standing in front of a vast window, Tony Montana, bloodied but unbowed, looks up at a blimp drifting across the evening sky. On the side of the craft, an advertisement scrolls by in blinking lights: “Pan America: The world is yours.”
It’s the moment in 1983’s Scarface that sees Al Pacino’s ruthlessly ambitious anti-hero reach the height of his powers. He’s just executed his mentor turned drug trade rival, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), and now stands in his luxurious Miami mansion. Frank’s wife, Elvira (Michelle Pfieffer) has finally, reluctantly agreed to go out with him. And Tony’s drug-trafficking business is booming, thanks to a deal he’s struck with a lizard-like kingpin in Bolivia, Fernandez (Paul Shenar).
The house we see in this moment is one of several striking locations chosen by director Brian De Palma for the production. A few scenes earlier, Tony stood in the same mansion, watching as Elvira descended from the top floor in an absurdly out-of-place glass lift. The whole place is so opulent, in fact, that it almost looks like a set created specifically for the movie.
But no: Frank Lopez’s house is real, and still stands today. If the sale goes ahead, it’ll be the most expensive piece of real estate ever sold in Miami. And this luxurious, modernist pile has a fascinating history behind it – one that takes in Richard Nixon, a real-world drug runner, and some of the richest people on the planet.
In the 1960s, the house on Biscayne Bay, Florida was a more modest but still rather large bungalow. It was one of three other residences on the same line of coast which became known as the Winter White House during Richard Nixon’s infamous presidency; the story goes that Nixon and an associate of his, Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, managed to get the properties at a knock-down price thanks to Rebozo’s (alleged) connections to the Mafia. (Rebozo was later indicted for money laundering.)
Nixon then spent around $400,000 of taxpayers’ money building a concrete helicopter landing pad next to what had, by the start of the 1970s, become the President’s private compound. Nixon spent a considerable amount of time at the Florida retreat; when the whole Watergate affair blew up, he used it as a refuge for his brooding.
Nixon subsequently resigned in 1974, selling off the compound and the landing pad he’d used public money to build.
The compound, now broken back up into separate properties again, was gradually demolished over the next five years; a news report from June 1979 stated that a bungalow on 516 Bay Lane was the last to be cleared, and was making way for a mansion commissioned by “retired Colombian” Eduardo Ortega, who had paid $455,000 for the plot the previous year.
Ortega also acquired the helicopter landing pad at the same time, which Nixon had previously sold to a psychiatrist named Dr Sherwood Appleton for $390,000.
Not long after, a wealthy pilot named Roberto Streidinger began building his own mansion on another part of the former Nixon complex – its address: 485 West Matheson Drive.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the 13,000 foot pile, with its glass lift, gleaming white walls and two-storey windows, was completed in 1981. It has five bedrooms, views looking out on the bay, a private beach, and also includes that helicopter pad built by Nixon.
The house was still brand new when Brian De Palma and his production team used it as a location for Scarface when they shot the film in 1982. It was a fitting choice of mansion, too, since there was a reason why Streidinger was so wealthy: he was a drug smuggler for Colombia’s Medellin cartel.
After Scarface, the same mansion appeared again in TV and film. It can be seen in a couple of episodes of Miami Vice, and also pops up in the 1994 Sylvester Stallone action flick, The Specialist (in one scene, Sharon Stone can be seen stalking around the same tall windows Tony Montana gazed out of).
Unfortunately for Streidinger, his ownership of the house was comparatively brief. He was arrested in 1988; in court hearings, he admitted to flying drugs out of places like Panama, Colombia and Bolivia and into the United States. That money then went into funding the Biscayne Bay pad. After Streidinger’s conviction, the property was seized and sold to a couple named Frederick and Caroline Perkins.
By the 2000s, Miami drug trade that formed the backdrop for Scarface and Miami Vice had ebbed, and big business replaced it. Before the millennium, there were only five buildings taller than 150m in the Miami area; today, there are around 78 skyscrapers.
In a further sign of who owns much of the wealth these days, the Scarface mansion was eventually purchased by a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager in 2003. According to the WSJ, John Devaney was having a helicopter flying lesson over Key Biscayne when he looked down and saw a helicopter landing pad. Nixon’s landing pad.
Figuring he’d need somewhere to put a helicopter once he got his licence, he made a note of the location, landed, then made a beeline for the mansion. He knocked on the door and offered the Perkins couple $15m for the property. He also spent a further $15m on acquiring neighbouring parcels of land.
Six years later, Time magazine named Devaney, founder of United Capital Markets, on one of the “25 people to blame for the financial crisis.”
Devaney told the WSJ that he was proud to have made that list, which, he noted, also contained a number of US presidents.
Back in the present, Devaney has decided to put the Scarface house up for sale. His asking price: a staggering $237m. That figure is justified, according to one estate agent, by the size of the estate (2.8 acres) with its lengthy stretch of beach.
Journalists reporting on the sale suggest that mansion values have also been pushed up by other recent precedents; Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg bought a nearby Florida island for $170m. Google co-founder Larry Page is said to have bought two Miami estates for a combined $173.4m just a few months ago, in December 2025.
All of which suggests that Tony Montana would have been better off – and would have lived longer – had he taken his cocaine money and invested it in real estate.
There is a final detail in the whole Scarface mansion story worth pointing out, though. Although it’s only a computer-generated estimate, Zillow projects that the value of Key Biscayne house is closer to $40m, based on other five-bedroom piles recently sold in the area. So why are estate agents asking for more than six times that figure?
I there are enough billionaires kicking around Florida for whom money is no object, then it follows that they’ll sell properties to each other for whatever absurd sums they can think of. You could almost call it a kind of (legal) cartel. The world is theirs.
