Watch "Kings of South Beach" and know you are witnessing history being made. It is nothing less than a refutation of the Fundamental Law of Television Physics, which postulates that any show including dozens of half-naked bodies, massive dosages of cocaine and ecstasy, deviant sex, Russian mobsters getting the crud kicked out of them and a script by the guy who wrote "Goodfellas" and "Casino" cannot possibly be "dull."

	'Kings of South Beach' When: 9 p.m. Monday, A&E. Starring: Jason Gedrick.

Now we realize everything we know about TV is wrong. The implications are staggering. "My Mother the Car" may have been funny; David Caruso may be a talented actor; Paris Hilton may be the next pope. All the universe is rendered chaos, entropy and madness.

This fictionalized account of Chris Paciello, the mob punk who reinvented himself as a South Beach club impresario and celebrity magnet in the 1990s before being busted for racketeering, bank robbery and murder, should have had just about everything going for it: The taut suspense of police undercover operations. The tawdry voyeurism of the South Beach club scene. The inner-beast adrenaline rush of gangster violence.

Instead, it's a giant bore. Nick Pileggi's meandering screenplay offers neither the insight into the criminal impulse nor the visceral thrills of amorality that undergirded "Goodfellas" and "Casino." It's just a flat collection of cop-show cliches from which, eventually, even the capable cast -- including old "Boomtown" cop buddies Jason Gedrick as the Paciello character and Donnie Wahlberg as his mysterious new best friend -- seems to disengage. When Gedrick says of a business rival that "I wanna whack him so bad my teeth hurt," he sounds less like he's planning a murder than a trip to the dentist.

To be fair, "Kings of South Beach" will have at least one rapt audience: lawyers. To avoid the niceties of rights fees and libel law, the names of all the story's characters have been changed, including that of Paciello's business partner, who in the film is called "Olivia" and is portrayed (by Nadine Velazquez, the ditzy hotel maid of "My Name Is Earl") as a whiny name-dropper with a voracious appetite for cocaine. A&E's publicity materials, however, still identify the character as the very real South Beach mistress-of-hip Ingrid Casares, who may soon be instructing the network on the use of subpoenas as fashion accessories.

Casares, however, fares pretty well in "Kings of South Beach" compared to Miami Beach itself, which is depicted as such a festering cesspool of official corruption that even the murdering, bank-robbing, narcotrafficking, money-laundering Paciello is appalled.

"There's a line of a hundred people with their hands sticking out," Paciello complains. "Everybody thinks they deserve a piece ... sanitation, health board, fire marshals ..."

Wait until he sees the parking tickets.'Kings of South Beach'