Years from now, when history students look back on the presidential election of 2000, they will remark: “Boy, was that ever historic!”
They will be using the word “historic” in the sense of “stupid.” They will find it hard to believe that the official procedure for filling the world’s most important job involved, at one point, low-level Florida politicians sitting around squinting at pieces of cardboard, trying to figure out what on earth the voters were thinking when they did whatever they did in the voting booth.
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL (holding up a ballot): This one looks to me like it has a dimple. See? Next to Gore’s name?
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL (squinting): I wouldn’t call that a dimple. It’s more of, like, a spot.
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL: OK, but it could very well be an intentional spot, and it’s definitely next to Gore. I think it’s a Gore spot.
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL: I don’t know that I would go so far as … wait! It’s moving!
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL (looking closer): My God, it is! It’s … it’s some kind of bug!
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL: It’s crawling toward Bush! It’s a Bush bug!
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL: Wait a minute! Now it’s crawling toward … Buchanan!
(The two officials exchange meaningful looks. After glancing around to see if anybody is watching, the Democrat brushes the bug off the ballot, onto the floor. The Republican stomps on it.)
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL: So that’s one vote for Gore …
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL: And one for Bush.
(They nod, then pick up the next ballot.)
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL: Now on this one, when I hold it at a certain angle, I’m definitely seeing a shadow. See it? Next to Gore?
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL: You’re making that shadow with your finger.
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL: Yes, but it’s an intentional shadow.
And so on. The ballot mind-reading was just part of the bizarreness of the 2000 election. While these people were trying to discern the deep electoral significance of semipregnant chads, dandruff flecks, blobs of denture adhesive, semen stains,1 etc., the streets outside were filled with irate protesters, winning converts to their viewpoints via the always effective tactic of shouting mindless slogans until their shirt fronts were drenched with spittle.
Needless to say, these protesters included the Reverend Jesse “Love Child” Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, both of whom become filled with righteous anger pretty much whenever anything happens anywhere. If a meteorite swarm crashed into downtown Cleveland, Jesse and Al would be there within hours, proclaiming that (a) a disproportionate number of the meteorites landed on minorities, and (b) this was clearly deliberate.
But what was weird in the Florida election quagmire was that a bunch of the protesters were Republicans. Yes! The downtrodden oppressed GOP masses! They were out there marching in their active leisurewear, carrying signs and yelling traditional Republican protest chants such as:
Give us what we want, y’all
Or else we’ll make the Dow Jones fall!
And:
What do we want?
JUSTICE!
When do we want it?
BEFORE OUR 3:45 P.M. TEE TIME!
Oh, it was a zoo, all right, and it quickly turned the United States political system into an international laughingstock. We were being mocked not only by traditional American-bashing nations such as France, but also by primitive third-world nations that elect their leaders by determining which of the candidates can lift the heaviest pig.2
The question is: How did we get into this mess? And what should we do about it?
One thing we obviously need to do—I have been advocating this for years—is fire a couple of medium-size missiles at France. But that will only make us feel better. It will not eliminate the underlying causes of the 2000 election mess. To do that, we need to take some serious, practical steps. Step one is:
I don’t say this lightly. I personally live in South Florida, and if we got kicked out of the union, I would no longer enjoy the many benefits of United States citizenship, such as …
OK, here’s one: When I purchase a food item at the supermarket, I can be confident that the label will state how much riboflavin is in it. The United States government requires this, and for a good reason, which is: I have no idea. I don’t even know what riboflavin is. I do know I eat a lot of it. For example, I often start the day with a hearty Kellogg’s strawberry Pop-Tart, which has, according to the label, a riboflavin rating of 10 percent. I assume this means that 10 percent of the Pop-Tart is riboflavin. Maybe it’s the red stuff in the middle. Anyway, I’m hoping riboflavin is a good thing; if it turns out that it’s a bad thing, like “riboflavin” is the Latin word for “cockroach pus,” then I am definitely in trouble.
But the point is that I would not have this helpful nutritional information if I lived in some lawless foreign country that does not have strict food-labeling laws, or carelessly allows dried plums to be marketed under the name “dried plums.” And that is only one advantage of living in the United States. There are many more, but I am not going to go into them, because I have already almost forgotten my topic here, which is: If we want to avoid having another weird presidential election, we should kick Florida out of the union.
As long as South Florida is part of the United States, weird things are going to happen to the nation. Because South Florida is a nuclear generator of weirdness. For one thing, it’s a swamp. The entire lower end of the state is about the same height above sea level as Dustin Hoffman. All the people are squeezed onto the coastlines on either side; in the middle is the Everglades, a vast expanse of oozing muck populated by a small tribe of casino-dwelling Native Americans and at least 300 billion mosquitoes, many with the wingspan of a mature osprey.
This means that if you move to South Florida, you are settling down smack-dab in the ancient stomping grounds of a teeming mass of swamp and marine life, which apparently was never notified that this area is now supposed to be zoned for humans.
The first thing I noticed when I moved to the Miami area in 1986 was that I had crabs on my lawn. At my previous residence, in Pennsylvania, I had dealt with crab grass, but in Miami, when I went outside in the morning to pick up the newspaper I was confronted by actual crabs, dozens of them, scuttling around. And these crabs were hostile. It was crab mating season, when the male crabs defend the females fiercely. I’d be half asleep, stumbling back into the house with the paper in my hand, and my path would suddenly be blocked by an irate male crab, lunging at my bare toes with his pincers to keep me from having sex with his woman.
“I don’t want to have sex with your woman!” I’d yell at him, leaping backward. “Your woman is a crab!” But that only made him angrier, because deep in his heart3 he knew it was true.
My neighborhood was also the world convention headquarters for the International Association of Big Hairy Spiders. They looked like severely mutated Yorkshire terriers that had developed extra legs and eyeballs, and they were all over the place, in every tree and bush, spinning trampoline-size webs that could stop an NFL fullback. It goes without saying that South Florida also had active populations of ticks, gnats, psychotic fire ants, and these scary huge mutant grasshoppers that could, without any special effects, be cast as major villains in Jurassic Park III.
On the amphibian and reptile front, South Florida is semi-infested with large, hideous toads that secrete a deadly venom, which means they feel free to saunter onto your patio and sit there for hours, looking insolent, as if they expect you to make them a cheeseburger. And everywhere you look, indoors and out, you see lizards, scampering around and engaging in acts of wanton lizard sex. Many a morning I’ve awakened to the sight of a lizard on the bedroom ceiling, hanging casually upside down via his suction feet, looking at me with an expression that says: “Perhaps, while you were snoring, I pooped in your mouth.”
I personally have encountered only a few smallish alligators, but there are plenty around; Florida’s alligator population is currently estimated at over a million.4 Every now and then the newspapers carry stories about alligators chomping on people’s dogs, or, on occasion, actual people. It is not at all unusual for a Floridian in a nice suburban neighborhood to walk out onto the patio and discover an alligator in the swimming pool.
Or a major snake. People down here routinely find huge members of the constrictor family in their pools, or lounging on their patios. These are, believe it or not, escaped pets. That’s right: As if there weren’t already enough local snakes, some Florida residents5 choose to import, both legally and illegally,6 immense carnivorous snakes,7 which are always getting out of their cages, causing the owners to become very worried about what might happen … to the snakes.
“Her name is Midge,” they’ll tell reporters, referring to a seventeen-foot escaped python capable of consuming a water buffalo whole. “She hasn’t eaten in days! She must be terrified!”
Some of these escaped snakes are later found, wrapped around a tree, or a lamppost, or a slow-moving citizen. But many of them are never found, which means they’re still out there somewhere, slithering around and feeding on God knows what. Perhaps cougars. You may think I’m kidding, but a surprising number of Floridians keep large, predatory, extremely nonvegetarian jungle cats as pets. A while back, the commissioners of Pompano Beach were forced to consider an ordinance requiring residents to keep their pets on their property after, in the words of The Miami Herald, “a cougar escaped from a private home and briefly chased a small boy.”
So you do not want to randomly wander onto a residential Florida property. A painting contractor once told me that one of his men, while attempting to do a job, got chased out of a backyard by an extremely angry emu.
“He was on the radio, scared to death,” the contractor said. “He was shouting ‘THERE’S A GIANT CHICKEN IN THERE!’ ”
Did I mention the monkeys? When Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in August of 1992, hundreds of monkeys and baboons escaped from residences and research facilities and roamed loose in southern Dade County. Two months after the hurricane, the state game commission reported that more than 450 escaped primates (not to mention more than two thousand escaped reptiles) were still at large. This total included fifty to one hundred baboons.
The game commission warned residents not to approach the primates; unfortunately, nobody was warning the primates not to approach the residents. One day shortly after the hurricane, I was waiting in my yard for a contractor, who arrived late in a pickup truck with one of his employees, both of them looking upset. They told me they’d been delayed by an irate baboon that jumped into the bed of the pickup and started pounding on the rear window so hard they thought it was going to break. The contractor, taking charge, told the employee to get out and scare the baboon away; the employee, not being an idiot, said to the contractor, “Hey, it’s your truck, you get out there.”
So they both wisely remained inside the truck and drove around randomly for a while, with the baboon pounding away on their window, a hitchhiker from hell. Finally it jumped out of the truck and they sped off, leaving the baboon shrieking and making obscene primate gestures at them.
You had to feel sorry for the baboon. During the post-Andrew chaos there was a widespread rumor, which turned out to be false, that the escaped baboons and monkeys had the AIDS virus. As a result, many of them were shot by South Florida residents, who own as many guns as the North Korean army, although ours are generally of a higher caliber.
People often ask me: Why do people down there have so many guns? The answer is: Shut up or I’ll kill you.
No, seriously, South Floridians need guns for many valid reasons. For example, when South Floridians drive, they routinely fire their weapons at or near other motorists to convey important messages, such as “I would like you to get out of my way,” or “I have a gun.”
If you think I’m exaggerating, it’s only because you never lived in South Florida. Since I moved here, I have personally seen two guns pulled in traffic, and at least a half-dozen cars with bullet holes in the driver’s side. In other parts of the country, when you teach your child how to drive, you say things like: “This is a four-way stop, so you have the right-of-way over that man to your left.” Here in South Florida, we tell our children, “Let that man go first, because he is brandishing his Glock.”
Another reason why many South Floridians have guns is of course for self-protection. My personal favorite example of this is a Broward County case in which a lawyer named Frank Furci was walking his Doberman pinscher, Ginger, through his affluent Broward County neighborhood, when he was approached by another dog, named Claude. Furci later claimed he thought Claude, an aging sheepdog, was attacking Ginger. This was disputed by the person who was walking Claude, a woman named Jan Bongers, who claimed that Claude was just being friendly and merely “waggled up to” Ginger.
In a normal place, the two dogs would have fought, or sniffed each other’s butts, or the two owners might have separated them. Or perhaps even the two owners would have sniffed each other’s butts. The one thing we know for sure is that, in a normal place, what would not have happened is what happened in this case, which is that Mr. Furci, a lawyer in an affluent neighborhood, shot Claude the sheepdog with a .45-caliber revolver. The reason he was carrying a .45, he later said, was that his law firm had received threats related to a recent case. There was no indication whether any of these threats had come from sheepdogs. But you can’t be too careful.
Mr. Furci was charged with cruelty to animals and aggravated assault. But there is more to this story. (In South Florida, there is always more to the story.) It happened that Mr. Furci’s partner was Roy Black, the well-known Miami defense attorney who later successfully defended William Kennedy Smith when he was charged with rape in Palm Beach after going out drinking with national role model Edward M. Kennedy.
Mr. Black put on what I would venture to guess was the most elaborate courtroom defense ever mounted on behalf of a person charged with shooting a sheepdog. I quote here from a Miami Herald story, written by Neely Tucker:
Aerial photographs of the scene were developed. An autopsy was ordered. Claude, who had been frozen, was thawed to room temperature. No less than Dr. Ronald K. Wright, Broward’s chief medical examiner, handled the post-mortem. Eight by 10 glossies of Claude’s jugular vein, ripped apart by the exploding bullet, were printed. X-rays were made. Bullet fragments were analyzed. Black filed 43 motions and took 17 depositions. In the end, Furci pleaded no contest to a cruelty to animals charge, paid $4,000 to charities and donated 50 hours to community service. Claude did not die in vain. As far as can be determined, not a single lawyer has since blown away a single sheep dog in Broward County.
But I digress.8 The point I was making is that many South Florida residents feel the need to have guns for self-defense. But guns are also traditionally used down here for happy reasons. In parts of Miami, it is traditional to celebrate festive occasions—particularly New Year’s Eve, but also July Fourth, Halloween, and sometimes just the fact that the sun has gone down—by getting drunk, going outside, and shooting guns into the air. On New Year’s Eve, parts of Miami sound like a war zone, only louder. Unfortunately, the law of gravity—one of the few laws observed in Miami on New Year’s Eve—causes many of the bullets to come back down, which is why police and firefighters do not venture into these areas until the rain of lead is over.
But we do not use our guns only on joyful occasions. In 1997, in Little Havana, a gun battle, involving semiautomatic weapons, broke out in a funeral home, during a wake.
At this point you are wondering: Do South Floridians ever use their guns to fight crime? They surely do. I know this because of the following true anecdote that was told to me by a friend of mine named Penny Gardner, who used to operate a VIP hosting service. Several years ago, she went to Miami International Airport to pick up Cleveland Amory, a distinguished author who had come to South Florida to promote a book.
Penny had rented a large car for Amory. She ushered him into the passenger seat, and she had just opened the driver’s-side door when a man came sprinting up, grabbed her purse, and leaped into a getaway car, which raced off with Penny running after it.
So far this is a normal anecdote, the kind of thing that could happen in front of a distinguished visiting author in any big city. But what happened next, I contend, would happen only in Miami: A passing motorist, having seen the crime, stopped his car in the middle of the street, leaped out, pulled out a gun, and started shooting at the fleeing car. He fired four or five shots, all of which apparently missed. Then, without a word to Penny, he got back into his car and drove off. The Good Miami Samaritan.
Penny, seriously shaken, rushed over to the rental-car agency, whose employees, in heartwarming we’re-all-in-this-together South Florida fashion, had locked the door and were informing her, through the glass, that this incident had not occurred on their property. Meanwhile, distinguished author Cleveland Amory was lying sideways on the car seat, possibly wondering if this was, in fact, the kind of community where people purchase a lot of books. Welcome to Miami, sir! Anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable? Bulletproof vest? Change of underwear?
When you live here, you eventually get used to the fact that a certain amount of criminal activity is always going to be part of the environment, like palm trees, or retired ladies who think their hair looks natural dyed the same tint of red as a fire truck. I was once about to enter a Burger King on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami when a man holding a gun came racing out, knocked down a pedestrian, jumped into a car, and drove wildly out of the parking lot, barely missing me and several other people.
Going into Junior Crimestopper mode, I alertly observed the car’s license plate number and then raced into the restaurant, prepared to find a scene of shock and panic. Instead I found that the customers had calmly resumed chewing their Whoppers. I went up to an employee behind the counter, who told me that yes, there had been a robbery, but it had been reported. He was not interested in writing down my clue. Ho-hum, another armed robbery.
In the first neighborhood where I lived down here—a nice, upscale area—the large house at the end of the street was occupied by drug dealers. That’s what all the neighbors said, and I believed them, because the people who lived in the house never seemed to do anything to support themselves except wash their own cars, and there was a stream of unfriendly, secretive people entering and leaving the house at all hours.
This was viewed, in the neighborhood, as vaguely noteworthy, but not particularly uncommon; the house was simply another neighborhood landmark—the Liebmans’ house, the Williamses’ house, the Drug Dealers’ house, etc. My son would ask if he could ride his bike, and I, being a responsible South Florida parent, would say, “OK, but don’t go beyond the Drug Dealers’ house!”
Once I was having a beer at the bar of a small restaurant on Miami Beach, and a man recognized me from my picture in the newspaper. Here, without embellishment, is how our conversation went:
MAN: You the one who write for the newspaper?
ME: Yes.
MAN: You should write about Colombia! A lot of humor there! You ever been to Colombia?
ME: No.
MAN: Hah! I am from there. Let me be honest. I am a narcotics trafficker.
I swear that’s exactly what he said. There were two police officers eating dinner maybe ten feet away, and he said “I am a narcotics trafficker” in the same open, friendly voice you might use to say “I am a claims adjuster.” I half expected him to give me his business card.
The drug trade is definitely part of the economy down here. Law-enforcement agents are always seizing heroin and cocaine shipments the size of major geological formations; these stories are so routine they almost never make the front page. Occasionally, tourists walking along the beach encounter bales of marijuana or cocaine—sometimes worth millions—that washed ashore after being tossed overboard by smugglers fleeing the Coast Guard. This kind of thing probably happens more often than is reported to the police. (“Where are the kids, dear?” “They’re at the beach again.” “But it’s raining!” “I know! They really love that beach!”)9
Down here, drugs turn up in the darnedest places. In 1999, dozens of workers at Miami International Airport10 were charged with smuggling guns, hand grenades, and drugs onto passenger jets. One of the hiding places used for the drugs was in the airplane coffee filters; this was discovered when—I swear I am not making this up—a pilot was mistakenly served coffee laced with heroin. Fortunately the pilot realized something was wrong with the coffee and did not drink it; otherwise, God only knows what kind of flight it would have been. (“This is the captain speaking. We’re gonna see if this baby can do a loop.”)
But even that is not the best example of a South Florida Unexpected Drug Encounter. That distinction, in my opinion, belongs to the surreal July evening in 1992 when a neighborhood Crime Watch group held its first meeting out on the patio of a nice house in a nice suburban neighborhood of the city of Homestead.
The Homestead chief of police, a man named Curt Ivy, was addressing the group, talking about the kinds of things the citizens should be on the lookout for, the clues that might indicate possible criminal activity. Chief Ivy was saying that it was a pretty quiet area, with not much illegal activity. But the chief was having trouble making his point, because of the engine noise from a low-flying plane.
“So I look up,” Ivy later told me, “and this plane is coming, and it’s low. It’s very low. Then I see a package come sailing down.”
The package, as you have surely guessed by now, was: the frozen body of Claude the sheepdog.
No, seriously, it was a seventy-five-pound cocaine bale. That’s correct: A bale of cocaine fell from the sky onto a Crime Watch meeting. This was one of an estimated twenty cocaine bales, weighing a total of half a ton, that were frantically shoved out of a twin-engine plane being pursued by a U.S. Customs jet. Another bale narrowly missed a church and slammed into a car. Imagine trying to explain that to your insurance agent. (“Were drugs involved in this accident?” “Well …”)
This was not the first instance of drugs falling from the South Florida skies. In 1981, a man was sleeping on a sofa in a Broward County trailer, and he got up to go to the bathroom. This was very fortunate, because moments later, a hundred-pound bale of marijuana came crashing through the roof of the room he had just left.
“If I had stayed where I was,” the man said, “I would have been wiped out.”
So in South Florida, it is not always enough to “just say no” to drugs. You may also need a bomb shelter.
My point is that there is a lot of drug trafficking down here, duh. Naturally you are wondering what we, as a community, have done about it. Here’s one thing we did: We named a street after a major drug dealer. I am serious. Dade County commissioners—who are always naming streets after themselves, their friends, their dogs, etc.—named a section of West 132nd Avenue the “Leomar Parkway” in honor of Leonel Martinez, who had gone very rapidly from being the debt-ridden owner of a small, struggling garment business to being a wealthy developer. In addition to naming a street after Martinez, Dade County issued a proclamation citing his “fantastic accomplishments.”
A few months later, law-enforcement authorities announced that the key to Mr. Martinez’s fantastic accomplishments was that he was, um, running a large narcotics operation. As you can imagine, everybody was shocked, shocked. In response, the commissioners took harsh punitive action: They changed the name of the street back to 132nd Avenue. This bold move was proposed by then-commissioner Larry Hawkins, who, in one of my all-time favorite South Florida quotations, had this to say about “Leomar Parkway”: “I think it sends the wrong message, not only to kids in our community, but to drug dealers.”
Damn straight it does! Let this story serve as a chilling warning to anybody who thinks he can get away with dealing drugs in South Florida: If you get caught, mister, we will take your name off your street.
Sometimes we take even harsher measures against alleged drug dealers. Sometimes we actually arrest and prosecute them in court. Unfortunately, since these courts are located in South Florida, things do not always turn out the way the forces of law and order had hoped. For an excellent example of this, let us consider the legendary case of Augusto “Willie” Falcon and Salvador “Sal” Magluta, or, as they are known in Miami, Willie and Sal.
Willie and Sal were offshore powerboat racers who were charged by the federal government with smuggling into the United States seventy-five tons of cocaine, worth $2.1 billion. Yes, you read that correctly: seventy-five tons of cocaine. To give you an idea how much cocaine that is: It would meet the needs of an NBA team for nearly a week.
No, all kidding aside, that is a lot of cocaine. The feds thought they had a pretty good case, even though two of their potential witnesses were unable to testify because somebody—and I am not for one second suggesting that this is anything other than sheer coincidence—murdered them.
In their Miami trial, Willie and Sal were defended by a team of big-name, high-priced lawyers. The defense allowed as how, OK, maybe at one time Willie and Sal dabbled in the drug trade, but that was years earlier, and they had retired. The feds argued, among other things, that Willie and Sal were still living very high on the hog, with millions of dollars’ worth of real estate, plus their powerboat-racing team, and that they probably were not paying for this lifestyle by doing yard work.
One of the defense lawyers, it goes without saying, was Roy Black, of Claude-the-Attack-Sheepdog fame. In his closing remarks, Black—and this is the kind of classy defense you get when you pay millions of dollars—not only invoked Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., but also quoted the eighteenth-century English statesman Edmund Burke as saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (For the record, most scholars believe that when Burke said this, he most likely was not specifically referring to either Willie or Sal.)
Nevertheless, the consensus was that the feds, who produced tons of witnesses, had nailed Willie and Sal good. So everybody was very surprised when the jury came back and acquitted them of all charges.
The feds were stunned. As U.S. attorney Kendall Coffey put it: “Certainly, this is a dark moment for us.”
Coffey was not just whistling Dixie. He really was depressed. And so he did what so many of us do to pick ourselves up when we’re feeling down in the dumps: He went to a strip bar called “Lipstik,” bought a $900 bottle of Dom Perignon champagne, and bit a topless dancer on the arm. That is correct: South Florida’s top federal law enforcement official bit a stripper. She was a former head bank teller who danced under the name of “Tiffany,” although her actual name was “Tammy.” (I realize that you think I’m making this up, but trust me, my imagination is nowhere near creative enough to come up with stuff this good.)
When word of this incident got out, Coffey announced his resignation (to his everlasting credit, he did not drag Edmund Burke into it). But of course that was not the end of the story (as I mentioned earlier, in South Florida, the story never ends). Coffey went into private practice and ended up being a member of the legal team representing the Miami relatives of Elián Gonzalez, the little boy who, for a while, served as the rope in the ongoing insane tug-of-war between the United States and Cuba (more on this later). After losing that particular fight, Coffey became a major part of the legal team fighting for Al Gore in the Florida presidential-recount battle, which as you may recall (although I doubt it) is the subject of this chapter.
But getting back to Willie and Sal: As I said, everybody was stunned when they were acquitted by the jury on all charges. See if you can guess the next major legal development in this case.
If you said: “The jury foreman was convicted of taking nearly half a million dollars in bribes to throw the verdict,” then you are definitely getting the hang of South Florida. (In case you were wondering: Yes, the jury foreman worked at Miami International Airport.)
The feds suspected that the bribes and at least some of the $25 million that Willie and Sal and their codefendants paid to defense lawyers came from—prepare to be astonished—the sale of illegal narcotics. Eventually, the government brought bribery and money-laundering charges against some alleged members of the Willie and Sal operation. (One of these was a guy who was making $43,000 a year as a refrigerator mechanic with the Miami-Dade County school district; he apparently was very frugal, because agents found $6 million cash in his attic.)
As you can imagine, the defense lawyers were extremely indignant about the suggestion that they should have suspected that drugs had anything to do with the millions of dollars, much of it in cash, that they were paid by alleged drug dealers. They strongly criticized the government’s efforts to trace the source of their legal fees (“We’re halfway to fascism,” said Roy Black).
The resulting legal proceedings produced a fascinating look into the financial dealings of big-time South Florida defense lawyers. Frank Rubino,11 who represented a codefendant of Willie and Sal, testified that he received eight payments of $50,000 in cash from a man he knew only as “Baldy.” Rubino said he did not see a problem with this, because his client told him that “the money was from a legitimate source of income.”
Makes sense to me! I know that whenever a guy whom I know only as “Baldy” regularly gives me $50,000 in cash, my immediate and natural reaction is: “Well this is surely from a legitimate source of income!”
Attorney Ed Shohat, who also represented a Willie-and-Sal codefendant, testified that one day a man he did not know came into his office, dropped a briefcase containing $150,000 cash on the floor, and ran out.
Now, to me, this does not seem at all suspicious. Hardly a day goes by when somebody doesn’t drop a briefcase containing a very large quantity of cash on my floor and sprint from the room. But attorney Shohat was concerned enough about the source of this money that he took the precaution of checking with his client to make sure it was legit. Shohat testified that his client “assured me after several discussions that the source of the funds was a loan to him from people unrelated to Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon.” Well OK, then! That clears that up!
I could go on and on about the Willie and Sal case, which itself is still going on and on as I write these words. Perhaps someday, when it’s all over, it will be made into a great comedy movie, starring Jim Carrey as both Willie and Sal, with Jennifer Lopez as the topless dancer who gets bitten on the arm, and Keanu Reeves as Claude the sheepdog.
But I want to move on here, because I don’t want you to get the impression that South Florida is just a bunch of criminals who run drugs. Not true! Some of them also run our government.
I am not saying that every South Florida politician is corrupt. Some are merely insane. As I write these words, the popular nicknames for the current and previous mayors of the city of Miami are, respectively, “Crazy Joe” and “Mayor Loco.”
“Crazy Joe,” the current mayor, is Joe Carollo, who got his nickname from the fact that he is known to have quite a temper, and he generally has the facial expression of a very tightly wound, possibly paranoid person whose head is filled with small but very violent animals—ferrets, maybe—that at any moment are going to explode out of his skull directly through his eyeballs and attack you.
“Mayor Loco” was the nickname given to Crazy Joe’s political archenemy, Xavier Suarez. He was widely considered to be sane when he defeated Crazy Joe in the 1997 mayoral election, but this perception changed almost immediately when Mayor Loco took office and began behaving as though he were (to put it in technical psychological terms) a few forks short of a fondue set.
For one thing, Mayor Loco went around loudly insisting that Miami did not have a financial crisis, when it was a well-established fact that the city was way beyond flat broke, thanks to years of being run by politicians who have consistently displayed a degree of fiscal prudence and foresight rarely seen except among crack addicts.
But the big reason why Mayor Loco was nicknamed “Mayor Loco” was that he tended to be, as the newspapers put it, “erratic.” For example, when Mayor Loco got a critical letter from a Miami resident named Edna Benson, the mayor decided to respond by personally visiting her house, unannounced, at 10:30 P.M., on a weekday. Mrs. Benson, a retired city employee, was home alone, with her hair in curlers, when she heard the doorbell ring. Now that you’re familiar with life in South Florida, see if you can guess what happened next. Here are two scenarios:
Scenario One: Mrs. Benson and the mayor talked, and, after hearing his side of the story, she changed her mind.
Scenario Two: Mrs. Benson and the mayor talked, and although she appreciated hearing his point of view, in the end she still disagreed with his actions.
If you think Scenario One is correct, you are wrong. This is also true if you think Scenario Two is correct. The correct, only-in-Miami answer is:
Scenario Three: Mrs. Benson picked up her five-shot, .38-caliber revolver (“It’s got those bullets that do damage,” she later told The Miami Herald). Then she went to the window and peeked out, fearing that there was a burglar outside. When she saw that it was in fact the mayor—the city’s highest official—she naturally … refused to open the door.
“He looked mad,” she said, “really, really mad.”
I should tell you that one of the reasons Mrs. Benson criticized Mayor Loco in her letter was that he had appointed a Miami city commissioner named Humberto Hernandez to be chairman of the commission. What made this appointment slightly questionable, to Mrs. Benson and other observers, was that at the time, Hernandez was awaiting trial on charges of bank fraud and money laundering.
The fact that Hernandez was under indictment had not prevented him from being overwhelmingly reelected to the Miami City Commission by his constituents. The simple truth is that, in South Florida, being indicted almost guarantees that a candidate will win an election race; the voters seem to view it as a plus, proof that you understand how the political system works.
The best example of this is the mayor of Hialeah, Raul Martinez, who was indicted, and then convicted, on federal racketeering and extortion charges in connection with a ballot-tampering case. This did not prevent the voters from returning him to office twice, in landslide victories, while he appealed. Ultimately, he won the appeal, but you will not find a soul down here who does not believe that he would have continued to be reelected even if he had lost.
But getting back to Humberto Hernandez, the indicted man appointed by Mayor Loco to head the Miami City Commission: He ended up pleading guilty in the bank fraud case, although things got a little sticky on the legal ethics front when it was discovered that his lawyer, José Quinon (who, for the record, also had represented Hialeah mayor Martinez) had been having an affair with Hernandez’s wife while Hernandez was in jail. Now, follow me closely here, because it gets complicated: At this point, Hernandez was not in jail for the bank fraud case. He was in jail after being convicted on another charge, namely, helping to cover up vote fraud in the election that put Mayor Loco in office.
As it turned out, that election featured a lot of vote fraud, even by Miami standards. The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation proving that many of the ballots cast in the Miami city election were cast by people who did not, if you wanted to get picky about it, reside in Miami. The Herald contacted some of these people, who gave some truly wonderful, even heartwarming, explanations, including these, which I am not making up:
• A woman who had moved out of Miami but continued to vote in city elections for thirteen years: “I know I shouldn’t be doing it. But I don’t want to forget my people, my blood.”
• Members of a family that lived outside of Miami, but drove as a group to the city and voted every election day: “It’s a tradition.” And: “The important things, we do as a family together.”
• The wife in a couple who had moved out of Miami but continued to vote there: “When we moved, I couldn’t vote for the people I liked here.”
• A man who had moved to Hialeah, but continued to vote in Miami: “I’ve always felt more in tune with things in Miami than anywhere else. Look, I’m an American citizen and I feel you don’t violate the law when you vote. It’s my right as an American citizen.”
Damn right! This is America, where a person has the fundamental right to vote in the municipality of his choosing, regardless of where he lives!
I do not mean to suggest, by the previous statement, that to vote in Miami you absolutely have to meet the rigid and arbitrary standard of being alive. The Herald found that a vote had been cast in the 1997 Miami election by a Mr. Manuel Yip, who passed away in 1993. In fact, since his burial, Mr. Yip had voted in at least six elections. Talk about exercising your rights as an American!
Anyway, when all this vote fraud stuff started coming out, former mayor Crazy Joe went to court to challenge his loss to Mayor Loco. See if you can guess which lawyer represented Crazy Joe in this case.
If you guessed “former U.S. attorney Kendall Coffey, the guy who bit the topless dancer on the arm and also represented both Elián Gonzalez and Al Gore,” then you are really getting the hang of South Florida.
In the end, the courts kicked Mayor Loco out of office, and put Crazy Joe back in charge of the city of Miami. As I write these words, ex-Mayor Loco is gearing up to run for mayor again. Crazy Joe was making some moves in that direction himself, but then he got arrested, and spent a night in jail, after allegedly bopping his wife on the head with a cardboard tea box. So it is not clear what lies ahead for these two men, but I sincerely hope that they remain on the public scene, after all the years of quality entertainment they have provided. Plus, what’s the big deal about mayors acting a little crazy? It’s not as if they tried to kill somebody!
Which is more than you can say for the ex-mayor of Hialeah Gardens, a woman named Gilda Oliveros, also known, because of the way she dressed, as the “Miniskirt Mayor.” She was arrested on charges of soliciting two city employees12 in 1996 and 1997 to murder her then-husband so she could collect on a life-insurance policy. (I assume it goes without saying that she was also charged with vote fraud.)
The Miniskirt Mayor denied the charges. “I have good legs,” she said. “I’m tall. I’m good-looking. And yes, I explode easily. I scream for five minutes, but then I get over it. I’m certainly not going to kill anyone.”
Oliveros went on trial in 1999. I’m sure that by now you’ve guessed that the attorney who represented her was none other than: Ed Shohat, recipient of the totally nonsuspicious briefcase containing $150,000 in completely legitimate cash.
The trial featured allegations by the prosecution that Oliveros was having an affair with the former mayor of Hialeah, Julio Martinez (not to be confused with the current mayor of Hialeah, Raul Martinez, the one who got reelected twice while he was appealing his conviction on racketeering and extortion charges). The defense suggested that the main witnesses against the Miniskirt Mayor were gay lovers who were setting the mayor up because they had an ax to grind.
Nevertheless, the Miniskirt Mayor was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. I am confident that she will have no trouble resuming her political career when she gets out, or maybe even before.
I have, in this chapter, discussed only a few of the many South Florida politicians, judges, and civil servants, of all ethnic groups and genders, who were convicted of one crime or another and still somehow managed to wind up rich and respected in our generous and forgiving community. That’s the kind of “live and let live” place South Florida is.
This generous spirit is not new. It’s why Al Capone chose to live here, as did Meyer Lansky, as did Richard Nixon. And needless to say, when O. J. Simpson decided to move to a place where he would fit right in, he chose South Florida. Everyone is welcome!
This brings us to the melting-pot aspect of South Florida. If ever there was a bunch of people melting inside a pot, this is it. Among the major groups attempting to coexist down here are:
Natives: These are the roughly twenty-seven people who were born and raised in South Florida and are still here. They are always telling you how great it used to be down here before people like you came and ruined it—how there used to be no traffic, no crime, steady breezes, friendly pacifist/vegan mosquitoes, free beer, flamingos strolling on Biscayne Boulevard, and large succulent fish that jumped voluntarily out of the ocean right onto your barbecue. It was heaven! A lot of these people have skin lesions.
Retirees: These are the people who moved down here after they stopped working (or, in some cases, died) so they could relax, play bingo, wear their pants really high, eat dinner at 4:30 P.M., and drive their 1987 Oldsmobiles at a constant, unvarying speed of twenty-three miles an hour everywhere, including through red lights, on the interstate, and on sidewalks. Sometimes they drive into buildings, but this is not really their fault, inasmuch as they cannot see the buildings. Retirees tend to clump together in large condominiums, where they while away their golden years accusing one another of violating the rules.
New Yorkers: There seem to be millions of them down here, and I frankly don’t know why they stay, because they’re always pointing out, in voices that can be clearly heard on other planets, how much better New York is. Listening to them talk about New York’s infinitely superior neighborhoods, culture, sports fans, Chinese food, etc., you get the impression that New York is some kind of urban paradise, instead of an expensive, crowded, grimy place that always smells faintly of pee.
Ohioans: I am using “Ohioans” generically here, to represent people from normal parts of the country (by which I mean all parts other than New York) who get transferred to the Miami area and are quickly stunned into a state of stark quivering terror by the huge bugs and the psychotic drivers and the four billion percent humidity and the general permeating weirdness. The Ohioans who stay generally move to Broward County and huddle together in identical houses inside gated developments wishfully named for geographic elements that do not exist in South Florida, as in Oak Manour Estates at the Meadows of the Falls Phase IV.
French-Canadians: They come down in large numbers for the winter months and are a positive force for unity in South Florida, in the sense that all the other groups down here, which do not agree on anything else, hate them, because they drive even worse than the retirees and their idea of a good tip is 3 percent.13
European Tourists: Many Europeans vacation in South Florida, especially Miami Beach, which they like because it has a relaxed ambience of cosmopolitan sophistication, by which I mean it’s OK to be pretty much naked. American tourists are often stunned when they go to the beach and see European women flagrantly displaying their bosoms. This phenomenon often causes American men, who are trying to look as casual as possible while maintaining eye contact at all times with the European women’s nipples, to walk directly into the lifeguard tower. The downside of the European sophistication is that many European men, even if they are as large and hairy as water buffalo, insist on wearing pouch-style bathing suits the size of eye patches, thus transforming the beach into the traditional European Festival of the Hairy Buttcracks.
Immigrants: Outsiders tend to lump these all together under the label “Cubans.” There are a lot of Cubans, and they dominate Miami, economically and politically. But there are also large numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central and South America—so many that Miami sometimes feels, especially if you just got here from Ohio, like a foreign country. There are large areas in Miami where you will hear people speaking only Spanish, or Creole. I have seen signs in store windows that say ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE.14
Me, I like this international flavor. Of course, my wife is of Cuban descent, which has made it easier for me. For example, I now speak Spanish fluently. I don’t mean that I can speak the whole entire Spanish language; I mean that I have learned to say, with great fluency, the following phrase: “Un momento; mi esposa habla español” (“One moment; my wife speaks Spanish”). My wife takes over from there.15
Still, the language thing is sometimes a problem for me. When I’m with my wife’s family, everybody, for my sake, speaks English; but sometimes, to make a point, somebody will use an old traditional Cuban folk saying, of which there seem to be thousands. Then they’ll translate it for me, and it’ll be something like, “You don’t need three elbows to play the flute,” or “The dog that drives a tractor can laugh at the snake.” And I’ll nod thoughtfully, while thinking, Huh?
I have also had to adjust to the Latin concept of time, which over the years has been the biggest single source of friction between my wife and me. I believe in what I will call the Anglo Theory of time, which holds that there is only so much time in a day—roughly, twenty-four hours. Consequently, if you sincerely intend to accomplish a specific task in a given day—say, get to the airport—then at some point during that day you must actually take concrete steps in the direction of getting to the airport, lest you run out of time.
My wife’s theory—the Latin Theory—holds that each day contains an infinite amount of time; thus, there is never any need to do anything now. My wife believes she can do everything later. As a result, she tends to run late, at least from my Anglo perspective. Of course from her perspective, she is never running late, because there is an infinite amount of time ahead.
Miami, being predominantly Latin, operates mostly under my wife’s theory of time. So if you’re an Anglo down here, you must learn to interpret what people really mean when they use certain time-related expressions. Here’s a chart to help you:
| EXPRESSION | ANGLO MEANING | LATIN MEANING |
|---|---|---|
| “Right now” | Immediately | Later |
| “Today” | At some point in the current day | Maybe tomorrow. But maybe not. |
| “Tomorrow” | The day following today | Maybe next week. Definitely not tomorrow. |
| “Later” | At some future point | Probably never |
| “At 7 P.M.” | Roughly at 7 P.M. | This has no Latin meaning |
The other major Anglo-Latin difference I have noticed involves levels of passion. As a group, Latins have a much higher passion quotient than Anglos. At public events in Miami, if there’s music playing, you can easily distinguish between the two groups, because the Anglos will not be responding to the music at all, except maybe to tap their styluses on their Palm Pilots in a slightly more rhythmic manner. Whereas the Latins will be dancing. And I mean all the Latins—young Latins, old Latins, dogs belonging to Latins—they will all be swiveling their hips, even if those hips are artificial.
Fact: The average Anglo moves his hips less during his entire lifetime than the average Latin moves his hips during a single performance of the national anthem.
To me, the Latin passion is one of the best things about life in Miami, where people tend to respond to almost every occasion—birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, successful dental procedures—by throwing parties that can last for days. I love this aspect of Miami, the Latin energy that infuses it and vitalizes it, and is largely responsible for building it into a great city.
But sometimes the passion gets out of hand. This is particularly true in the area of Miami politics, by which I basically mean Cuban politics. For much of Miami, Cuba remains the issue; we are the only large American city I know of that has its own foreign policy. Fidel Castro is, by far, the most influential politician in Miami, in the sense that much of the political debate here consists of politicians screaming at one another about who hates Fidel the most.
Let me stress that I find this totally understandable. Castro is an evil egomaniac who has, through repression, brutality, theft, and murder, blighted a nation and its people. I don’t think any person with a brain doubts this; anybody who does can come to Miami and talk to the many Cuban Americans—my in-laws, for example—who had all their property taken by Castro’s thugs, or whose family members lost their liberty, or their lives, for daring to dissent.
To Cuban Americans, what Castro is, and why he should be despised, is obvious; it frustrates and infuriates them when outsiders fail to see it. Every few months, it seems, some celebrity twit visits Cuba, gets escorted around by government toadies, and is wined and dined and charmed by Castro (who can be very charming). And then this twit, having met not one ordinary Cuban citizen, and knowing nothing about Cuban history or about real life on the island, makes some astoundingly twittish pronouncement. In 1998, for example, Naomi Campbell visited Cuba and declared, based on her extensive training as a supermodel, that Castro was “a source of inspiration to the world.”
Around the same time, noted human-rights authority Jack Nicholson described Castro as “a genius.” Describing his visit with Castro, Nicholson said: “We spoke about everything. It was plain old talk. We talked about life, culture.… He stays up late, like me.”
Well, OK, then! What could possibly be wrong with a guy who stays up late, like Jack?
This kind of idiot statement—while people are still regularly dying on rafts in their efforts to escape Cuba—causes even my wife, who is normally pretty laid-back, to say bad words. It makes the harder-core Miami Cubans absolutely nuts. I’m talking about the older Cubans, the ones who once fought Castro, the ones who think of themselves as exiles, because they dream of going back and retaking their island from the bearded Satan.
Of course they won’t: Castro won, and they lost. That is the permanent salt in the permanent wound that is Miami’s exile community. Castro is in Havana, and they’re in Miami. It is almost impossible for outsiders to understand how angry, how bitter, how frustrated this makes the exiles. That anger constantly bubbles just below the surface in Miami.
Over the years, this anger has often erupted into outright craziness. Some of this is scary craziness. There was a period, lasting until not that long ago, when heavily armed paramilitary outfits regularly trained in the Everglades, and members of rival exile groups were assassinated, and bombs blew up outside Miami businesses and organizations deemed to be not anti-Castro enough.
But a lot of the anti-Castro craziness is more along the lines of wacky. Take the legendary case of Orlando Bosch, a former pediatrician and revered anti-Castro zealot who over the years was linked to an impressive array of bombings, raids, and assassination plots. In 1964, Bosch was arrested for driving in downtown Miami rush-hour traffic—towing a torpedo. In 1968 Bosch, striking a blow against communism, stood on the MacArthur Causeway and fired a bazooka at a Polish freighter docked in the port of Miami. (The freighter failed to sink, but it should be noted that, just twenty-three years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.)
There’s less outright violence now, but the frustration is still here, bubbling, bubbling, and it still occasionally erupts in bizarre ways. To pick just a few fairly recent examples:
• In 1995, several dozen Cuban exiles formed a protest flotilla of pleasure boats that motored into Cuban waters. Two Cuban gunboats sideswiped the lead boat, causing a Miami-Dade County commissioner named Pedro Reboredo to lose his balance and get his foot smushed between boats. He was airlifted back to Miami, where doctors amputated the second toe on his right foot. Leaving the hospital, Reboredo said: “I couldn’t be happier. It is very sweet to be able to give something for the country.” This kind of thing does not happen to county commissioners in Iowa.
• In 1999, a Miami-Dade aviation official ordered the magazine Cigar Aficionado removed from the shelves of airport newsstands because it contained an article about Cuba that the official considered too positive. (What First Amendment? This is Miami!)
• On New Year’s Day, 2000, exiles cheered when a fifty-one-year-old Vietnamese anticommunist named Ly Tong—who once hijacked an Air Vietnam flight over Ho Chi Minh City and dropped anticommunist leaflets from the cockpit—took off from Key West in a rented plane and flew to Havana, where he circled the city, dropping leaflets calling for rebellion and describing Fidel as “an old dinosaur.” For this bold strike against tyranny, Tong was honored as a hero in a Little Havana parade and awarded a medal by an anti-Castro group.
Of course the best-publicized recent example of Miami’s anti-Castro obsession was the Elián Gonzalez fiasco. To Anglos, this appeared to be a straightforward case: A boy’s mother died, so he should be with his father. But to the Miami exiles, it was not really about the family. It was about what everything is always about in Miami: Fidel. If Fidel says the boy must go back, then the boy must not go back.
And so it turned into a crazy international carnival, replete with farcical sideshows—the Miami relatives, the advisers, the lawyers, the media hordes, the shouting street mobs, the “fisherman” who wasn’t a fisherman, the tales of magical anti-Castro lifesaving dolphins, and the Virgin Mary appearing in a mirror.
The world saw this, and it concluded that Miami is insane. Which it is, no question. Totally insane. I’m just saying, there’s a reason.
If you don’t live in South Florida, you probably find this all laughable. That wacky Miami! Those crazy, torpedo-towing, bazooka-shooting, toe-losing Cubans! Perhaps you think none of this has any effect on you, up there in Ohio.
If that’s what you think, perhaps you should consider this: The Elián case left the Miami Cubans really pissed off at the Clinton administration for sending Elián back to Satan. People down here believe—and for what it’s worth, I think they’re right—that this anger cost Al Gore a lot of Hispanic votes. In other words, without Elián, Al Gore would have easily won Florida, and thus the presidency.16
So, Mr. or Mrs. Ohio Resident, it seems that the laugh is on you, ha ha! Because it was these wacky Miamians, plus a bunch of people in Palm Beach who cannot figure out how to punch a hole in a piece of cardboard, who decided who your president is!
Which brings us, full circle, back to the original topic of this chapter, which is: Fruit Flies of the Ryuku Islands.
No, really, it brings us back to the 2000 presidential election mess, and what practical steps we can take to prevent it from happening again. The point of this chapter, so far, has been to demonstrate that South Florida is one of the weirdest places in the nation, and that as long as we keep it in the nation, we are running the risk that our national political process will be infected by this weirdness.
I have several more, equally practical, suggestions for improving our election system, but this chapter has already gone on way too long. So I’ll continue this discussion in the next chapter. But first, let’s take just a moment to consider this:
1I would not rule this out.
2Actually, this makes as much sense as the Electoral College.
3Or possibly hearts, depending on how crabs work.
4I think they have their own member of Congress.
5Not to name names, but one of these residents is my good friend Carl Hiaasen, the legendary South Florida columnist and novelist, who keeps pet snakes. He feeds them rats, which he buys at the pet store (rat sales are big down here). “I have to stop on the way home and get some rats” is something you will actually hear Carl say.
6Reptile smuggling is a big business down here. In 1999, a man arriving from Barbados was detained at the Miami airport when officials noticed that his pants had some suspicious, wriggling bulges; he turned out to have fifty-five turtles in there. The Miami Herald account of this does not say whether the man was wearing a protective cup, but let us hope to God he was.
7True story from The Miami Herald: A Hollywood, Florida, firefighter was searching through a burning house when he found a ten-foot boa constrictor in distress. He bravely grabbed its head, and the snake coiled around his body. He walked briskly outside and returned the snake to its owner, who said: “Thanks, man, but there’s two more in there.”
8If you don’t like digressions, you should get out of this chapter right now.
9Not everything that washes up on the beach is fun. In 1995, beachgoers in four places over a three-mile stretch of shoreline found a pelvis, right leg, upper arm, shoulder, collarbone, lower jaw, and spinal column that police identified as belonging to a man named Aniello Napolitano III. The Miami Herald gave his occupation as “bodyguard.”
10I will not go into detail on Miami International Airport, except to say that if you go there, there’s no need for you to visit the Third World.
11Rubino also represented former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega when Noriega was tried in Miami on drug and racketeering charges. I feel compelled to note here that during that trial, Noriega’s wife, Felicidad, was arrested in an upscale Dade County department store on shoplifting charges after she—the former first lady of Panama—was seen snipping buttons off ladies’ jackets.
12My feeling about this is, even if she did it, she should have been found not guilty, because anybody who asks municipal employees to perform a task would know that it would never actually get done.
13I’m just kidding, of course. It’s more like 2 percent.
14True story: My wife and her mother were at a Julio Iglesias concert in Miami, and Julio, who usually sings in Spanish, started a song in English. This prompted the man sitting next to my wife to say to his wife (in Spanish): “He should sing in Spanish! This is Miami! If he wants to sing in English, he should go to Minneapolis!”
15The other Spanish sentence that I have learned to say fluently is: “Mientras sus zapatos se estiran, yo bailaría el mambo contigo.” (“While your shoes are stretching, I will dance the mambo with you.”) You’d be amazed how useful this is.
16This is not the first time that anti-Castro Miamians have affected the presidency. Remember Watergate?