Scarface’s Chainsaw Was Real. The Victim Wasn’t.

The chainsaw scene people have quoted for forty years has a documented real-world counterpart — and Hollywood reversed the roles. Mario Tabraue ran a seventy-five-million-dollar drug empire out of Miami and covered up the murder of a federal ATF informant named Larry Nash on his property in July 1980.

In Brian De Palma’s 1983 film, the man chained to the wall is the protagonist’s friend and the protagonist survives. In the documented record, the man who was dismembered was the informant trying to bring the ring down. The kingpin got out in under fifteen years and runs a public zoo in Miami today.

The federal case — Operation Cobra, named after Tabraue’s snakes — returned sixty-one RICO counts and a hundred-year sentence. It also swept up Orlando Cicilia, brother-in-law of Florida politician Marco Rubio. The Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove, where Tabraue was a fixture and every known narcotics trafficker in Miami came to celebrate incoming loads, turned down the Scarface production team’s request to film there.

Sources: AP wire coverage of Operation Cobra indictment (1988); New York Times, Richard Gregorie interview; Miami New Times; Miami Herald trial coverage (1989); Roben Farzad, Hotel Scarface (2017).

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