YOU THINK MAYBE IT WAS SOMETHING I SAID?
Tomas Regalado blocked me from his Twitter Page. Do you think that maybe it was something I said about him over the years, or maybe he didn't want me to be a smart ass and start posting questions on his Twitter page asking him where his "wife" is living nowadays?
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THE MIAMI HERALD QUESTIONS WHY PEOPLE HAVEN'T BEEN SPEAKING UP! THEY HAVE! IT'S THE MIAMI HERALD THAT HASN'T BEEN LISTENING
In closing, Mariano Fernandez, the subject of the Herald's story above, worked as the Director of the City of Miami Building Department before he up and left to go to Miami Beach.
Do you think that Mariano learned the tricks of shaking down developers for gifts only after he arrived in Miami Beach, or that he might have learned these tricks at the city, and brought them with him.
MIAMI COPS ARE SURPRISED AND UPSET AT THE SALARIES THAT THEIR TOP BRASS ARE BEING PAID
Over on LeoAffairs, the police bulletin board, cops have been commenting on the discovery that while the rank and file have yet to see any money from the long, dragged out lawsuit that they supposedly won that would reinstate the provisions of their contract that were taken away in 2010 and 2011 when the City Commission, following the lead of Mayor Tomas Regalado, voted to impose a "Financial Urgency" on the city's operation and employees, their bosses seem to be doing alright, including newly appointed Captain Javier Ortiz, who like all the other command staff are not only getting 6 figure salaries, but also annual pay raises and whatever other prerequisites are available to all City of Miami Police Executives, including cell phone allowances, and other benefits that provide them with resume enhancers that allow these guys, after they leave with hundreds of thousands in DROP payments, 1% payouts, and cashing in on hundreds of hours of vacation time and sick leave, to move on to other high paying jobs either in law enforcement or private security.
NUMBER 2 - FEBRUARY 12, 2018
MIAMI'S POLITICIANS ARE READY AND WILLING TO BEND OVER AND SPREAD 'EM BECAUSE WHEN AMAZON.COM, THE RICHEST COMPANY IN AMERICA PULLED OUT IT'S DICK, THESE MORONS GOT THE VAPORS
The politicians in Miami have gotten all lathered up about the Amazon.Com headquarters hustle that is basically pitting 20 American cities against each other to look in a mirror and say, 'Mirror, Mirror on the wall, whose the biggest moron of them all?'
So-called economic development giveaways, like the ones that the biggest company in America wants from communities vying to build a 2nd headquarters, is a recipe for rape and plunder, and Miami among all the contending cities is definitely no stranger to rape and plunder, especially when it comes at the hands of sleazy politicians looking for all the angles that they can take advantage of, whether it be for political gain, financial benefits for their lobbyists pals, deep pocket contributors, or just for their own personal financial enrichment.
In the City of Miami you have Commissioner "Selfie Boy" Russell looking for any, and everything he can claim credit for in his run for Congress, while Commissioner Keon Hardemon is laying the ground work to run for County Commissioner because Audrey Edmonson is being termed out, and of course, Miami's Boy Wonder, and guy who looks in the mirror every day and licks his eyebrows before he leaves the house, Mayor Francis Suarez, who failing to have any credible candidates to campaign against when he ran for Mayor, is now campaigning hard to convince Miami's residents that all his happy talk and community appearances should be enough to convince them to vote to make him a strong Mayor.
I have every expectation of writing more about the Amazon,Com deal in the future, in no small part because I cut my teeth writing about the giveaway of tax dollars through economic development schemes related to Florida's film industry back in the day, but for now, I want to focus on a vote made by the Miami City Commission at their last meeting to retroactively approve the new City Manager's signature of a non-disclosure agreement proffered by the Beacon Council as a way to keep all of the information related to the proposal they submitted to Amazon.Com. secret.
It's never a good sign when after touting how smart and qualified your new City Manager is you have to start following him around to undo, or make right decisions he shouldn't have made to begin with because they were illegal.
Commissioner "Selfie Boy," Russell, as he does every other week, made sure to send out a Tweet touting his actions leading up to his vote cleaning up the City Manager's illegally signing a non-disclosure agreement that included a link to the Miami Herald story on this issue.
Miami has always skated close to the edge when it came to following Florida's Sunshine Laws, but in the last couple years the situation has become exponentially worse.
It's always questionable when items are approved "unanimously and with no discussion," because the implication is that these items were agreed to in private, and the lack of discussion was a conscious decision to keep the public in the dark.
At the January 11, 2018 Commission meeting - the video of which has been removed from the City's website - the City Commission went so far as to bypass and ignore the legal requirement that all Public Hearing items needed to have a public hearing.
Instead, at that meeting, all but one item of the entire City Commission's regular agenda was bundled up and treated as a part of the Consent Agenda, and voted on without following the required procedures for public hearings.
More and more the Miami City Commission behaves like the loosely configured organized criminal enterprise that a growing number of people believe constitutes municipal government in Miami-Dade County.
This is again bolstered by the other questionable paragraph in the Herald's story:
The idea that anyone at the Miami Herald would claim to innocently ask, "Why didn't anyone speak up," about the latest in a long line of corruption scandals on Miami Beach is the height of hypocrisy.
For years people all over Miami-Dade County have not only been speaking up about about municipal corruption, they've been all but screaming at the top of their lungs about it, starting with writing letters, or copying and on occasion just outright stealing documents from inside government offices to give to Herald reporters or folks like me, and in doing so, going out of their way, often at risk to their jobs to talk to Herald reporters or anyone else in an effort to get them to pay attention to the corruption that flourishes in Miami-Dade County like kudzu on a Mississippi backroad.
It's all been a circle jerk. I personally know of at least 5 stores, all within the last year that Herald reporters have either been provided documents and other information - a couple by me - or that they have admitted to others that they are in possession of damning information that they have refused to do anything with.
I've previously written how Miami city employees back in 2010 and 2011 were in large part responsible for my continuing this blog after my initial reason, which was to get Harry Emilio Gottlieb fired from his job as the city's Film Liaison succeeded, because while looking for info about Harry, city employees kept providing me with other stories that opened my eyes to just how sleazy and corrupt the Regalado administration was becoming, and worse, how the Herald's City Hall reporter refused to write anything about the information and stories that the employees told me they had provided him.
True, not every story that he or I was provided with turned out to be a gold nugget, but there were a surprising number of gold and silver nuggets among those stories, and my willingness to follow up by researching and publishing them elevated me from just some loud mouth asshole, to a very knowledgable loudmouth asshole who was willing to do what the Miami Herald was unwilling to do: write consistently and with hard factual information about public corruption in the City of Miami.
Nor was I the only person who gained some prominence by writing about the corruption that the Herald has consistently refused to write about. Stephanie Kienzie who writes Voter Opinion, Elaine de Valle, who writes Political Cortadito, and Alan Fargo and Nancy Lee who write Eye On Miami, are among a half-dozen or so bloggers who have written about the sleaze and corruption in various municipalities during the last 9 years that I've been at this.
Contrary to the Herald's question, the question has never been one of, "Why didn't people speak up," because there is ample evidence that people have, but rather the question is how did the level of sleaze and corruption become baked into the very fabric of municipal governance in Miami-Dade County, and how and why agencies and law enforcement officials - starting with State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle - entrusted with the rooting out of corruption have either done a piss-poor job, or worse, have become willing enablers through what has become known locally as the Family and Friends Plan.
The Miami Herald also bears an outsized responsibility for a failure to inform the public about some of the most egregious examples of sleaze and criminal corruption that bloggers have uncovered over the years because of what I consider a bitch attitude about acknowledging that there were people in the community doing what they couldn't, or wouldn't.
For years, when any blogger broke a really big story the Herald would just appropriate the story and refuse to give credit to the bloggers. After repeatedly being called out about this behavior, they started occasionally giving credit, but mostly limiting the credit to Twitter references to THEIR story, and seldom if ever in the actual body of the hard copy of the story.
Worse is their outright refusal to acknowledge, much less cover some significant stories that in other cities around the country would have merited above the fold, front page coverage.
I can't speak for other bloggers, but I believe that my stories about the destruction of the homicide evidence in the rotten shipping container under I-95, and the theft of the 11 revolvers from the Police Property Room, are stories that merited wide coverage, especially since documents I uncovered revealed at there were open cases that had to have been impacted by the potential loss of any evidence, and as I revealed in my first story of 2018 regarding the theft of 11 revolvers from the City of Miami Police Property Room, concrete evidence is now available in the form of audio taped statements made under oath that established that among the crimes that warranted being seriously investigated and prosecuted were perjury and obstruction of justice by now retired Miami's Chief of Police Rudy Llanes and Police Major Orestes Chavez.
Instead, not only has the FDLE been allowed to white-wash this investigation, but after seeking copies of much of the information that I included in my January story last November, Miami Herald reporter David Smiley, failed to follow up or do anything with the information that he did receive.
Below are a baker's dozen stories that I've written over the years, that were with one exception never really covered by the Miami Herald - and that one, the Raquel Regalado Homestead Exemption Fraud story, was actually offered to the Herald, who turned it down, long before it was offered to me.
Even though all of these stories were exhaustively researched, and supported by numerous public documents, photographs, police investigative files and court documents that included video tapes and/or audio tapes, and all raised serious issues of public corruption and malfeasance, few people in Miami-Dade County, other than those who read my blog to this day know any of these things happened because the Miami Herald refused to cover them.
(A new feature of this newsletter is that if you click on any of the images of the stories in the box, it will take you to the actual story.)
In this Miami Herald story there are a couple paragraphs that underscore problems more severe than the City Manager's illegally signing a non-disclosure agreement without the permission of the City Commission.
There's nothing like refusing to provide details to inspire a belief that an attorney working for the City of Miami is lying.
In this case, all one had to do - which obviously no one on the City Commission did - was to Google, Florida economic development law, and you'll find links to Florida Statute, Chapter 288, which includes FS 288.075 - Confidentiality of records, that includes this section:
I'm not defending this law, which I think is a very badly written law that has allowed numerous scammers and schemers to use it to hide the amounts of public money they've received for dubious "economic development deals," including of course the Pitbull deal, and the current fight in Tallahassee over the secret funding of a TV cooking show featuring Emeril Lagassee.
Florida has, like other states, given tens of millions of dollars to scammers and schemers whose deals either went belly up, or failed to produce the economic benefits promised, only this time there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and this law will deprive anyone in Miami from finding out what these devious politicians were willing to give away to Amazon.Com.
But even before we get to any of that, we have another example of Commissioner "Selfie Boy" Russell attempting to position himself as a champion of transparency by asking a question that he did not know the answer to, thereby providing another opportunity for the Deputy City Attorney Barnaby Mim to flat out lie to the City Commission.
All the while, dope dealers continue to sell drug in Overtown like they're licensed by the City, and the usual games of cops screwing cops and the residents literally and figuratively keeps going on.
If the photos on her Facebook page are any indication, she's hanging out in Spain and shouting, "Viva España!,"
In any event, Tomas, you should know by now that trying to block folks on social media sites is like trying to practice safe sex by using a condom run through a meat grinder. Below is a screen grab that I took of your page over the weekend.
Maybe you ought to invite me on your radio show. Think of all the fun things we could talk about, like your claim, "I pay rent, motherfucker!"
Anytime you want to produce a cancelled check to back that up, let me know.
