Dear Mr. Hirsch,

First, congratulations on the work of your reporters on uncovering and pursuing the story of how former Miami Beach City Commissioner Micheal Grieco tried to pull a fast one in by using a friend as a cutout to rout a $20,000 donation to his PAC.  

I especially liked your response to a Tweet by your reporter Nicholas Nehamas, quoting Grieco's excuse about the ability of anyone being able to find campaign violations of just about any politician just by looking at the campaign reports.

Why lie about it indeed.

Which bring me to the reason for writing you this letter. Below is a little story that your City of Miami beat reporter David Smiley wrote back in 2015 about Miami's Mayor Tomas Regalado getting married. I've highlighted the important part of this story.

I know this will come as both a surprise and a shock to learn that the Mayor of Miami lied to your intrepid reporter David Smiley when he told him that he and Ana Christina Carrodeguas got married in Miami, because they didn't.

I first stumbled on this fact back in August, and after personally driving around and visiting the Marriage License Bureaus in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe Counties, as well as knocking on the door of the Servants Of The Pierced Hearts Chapel, I then wrote a story asking the Mayor to produce a marriage license, because he sure hadn't been married at the Chapel, and none of these counties had a record of issuing a marriage license to Regalado and Carrodeguas.

A couple weeks ago, I ran into David Smiley at City Hall and asked him if he had asked Regalado about my story, and he replied that he had, and then proceeded to tell me the most amazing  answer that he claims Regalado told him.

Smiley told me that Regalado told him that he and Ana Christina had gone to another state - a state where marriage licenses are supposedly protected from public records requests - to get married, and that they did all of this in order to keep me from getting a copy of their marriage license

I shit you not. That's what he told me.

So!  Here you have a situation where the Mayor of Miami not only admits to lying to your reporter, but that his reason for doing so was to keep me, a local blogger, from supposedly going and getting a copy of his marriage license.

Think about that. And then ask yourself, why would my getting a copy of his marriage license be a problem?  

Or to use your quote, "...why lie about it."

What would I find that was so potentially embarrassing or incriminating that Regalado and Ana Christina would first go looking for a state where marriage licenses are not public records - in and of itself a dubious proposition since marriage licenses are a cornerstone of the growing ancestry search business - and then go to whatever state it was, all to keep me from being able to get my hands on their marriage license?

But worse, after David Smiley was told this, he didn't think it newsworthy enough to write a story about it.  Mind you, Smiley's been sitting on this story for well over a month.

Imagine if you would how this story would be treated in any other major American city. Let's say New York.

If a hypothetical Mayor of New York were to get married while in office, and   the reporter to whom he had told his story of getting married had discovered that he had been lied to, how long do you think that reporter would have waited to not only break the news that the Mayor had lied to him, but if he worked for the Daily News or the New York Post the headline would have probably been something like this:

MAYOR LIED! CLAIMS HE AND WIFEY GOT MARRIED SECRETLY TO KEEP LOCAL BLOGGER FROM GETTING HANDS ON MARRIAGE LICENSE, WHICH HE WON'T PRODUCE

And why should this story be so important to you, besides the obvious reason that he lied to your reporter?

Again, you're the big cheese at the Miami Herald, so you might want to start asking yourself why would the Mayor of Miami have lied to your reporter back in 2015 as to where he allegedly got married, and perhaps you should go and really read my story about Regalado and Ana Christina living rent free in a luxury apartment owned by the Milton brothers, and then you should read the story that I'm going to publish tomorrow about, The First Lady Of Miami, that reveals how "wifey" is traveling around Spain and passing out Key's to The City of Miami.

While you're at it, you might ask yourself whether it's time to assign David Smiley to a less stressful beat, because when he sends out a Tweet like the one below, it's obvious that he's not up to the rough and tumble of actually being a real reporter in one of this country's most corrupt cities.

Imagine, a gown man, and your City Hall beat reporter to boot, whining about being forced to sit on the floor because he didn't have the balls to tell a couple lobbyists and lawyers to get out of his seat.

Just another sign that it's Miami, Bitches!,