Kick Ass (11 page)

Wait until the have-nots discover that somebody is being paid $2.4 million to watch them scurry through the urban maze. It works out to about $436 for every man, woman and child in the control group. The Ford Foundation gave $400,000 to bankroll the study, while we taxpayers are providing the remaining $2 million.

There’s nothing wrong with reviewing public assistance projects to see if they really work. Given the miserable history of welfare, it makes sense to take a hard look at each programbut not like this.

The HRS plan is misguided, wasteful, coldhearted and just plain dumb. What possible social insight can be gained by randomly denying opportunity to some indigents while rewarding others? And what do you tell the unlucky onessorry, folks, maybe next time?

As long as the Legislature is funding deprivation experiments on humans, here’s an interesting one:

Make a random selection of state employees (say, the Secretary of HRS and his top staff) and take away their jobs for three years. No salaries, no state cars, no expense accounts, no health insurance, no pensions.

Then hire several thousand poor people (for, say, $2.4 million) to go around studying the dreary new lifestyle of Mr. Gregory Coler and his bureaucrats. Follow them to the grocery and the bank and the doctor’s office. See how they’re getting along with no money.

Certainly such innovative public servants wouldn’t mind taking a turn being poor, in the name of science.

Prostitutes talk of riskand addiction

May 14, 1990

Nine prostitutes gathered in the library of the Dade Women’s Detention Center.

They talked about selling sex in the harrowing age of AIDS and crack cocaine. What they said was: Not much has changed. They carry protection. They get tested for the disease whenever they’re in jail. Beyond that, it’s business as usual. The Johns don’t seem too worried. Most of the time, they don’t even want to put on a condom.

Victoria Brown, 26, arrested near Biscayne Boulevard: “If you’re a heavy crack user, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got AIDS or not. If you get in a car and the guy asks if you’ve got AIDS, are you gonna tell him the truth? No way. Not if you want to get paid.”

By her own count, Victoria has been arrested 95 times on prostitution-related charges. She is 26 years old, a veteran of county jails.

Sun Kelly, a slender South Korean woman, makes $600 to $700 on Saturday nightsa sum envied by the others. Where does all the money go? “Smoke,” Sun said. She’s been a prostitute for 25 years.

Ask the group who else smokes rock, and they all raise their hands. “Crack cocaine,” said one, “is the biggest pimp there ever was.”

To explain their dangerous lifestyle, the women tell of enslaving drug habits and, often, a wretchedly brutal family past. Their customers usually have no such excuse. You see these idiots getting nabbed in police sweeps on the nightly newsblue-collar guys, professionals, Yuppies, college kids. Talk about mindless desperation. Talk about stupid.

A sample of what’s out there: Of the nine prostitutes interviewed, most had used intravenous drugs. At least two women (one of them three months pregnant) had syphilis, while another had herpes. Most said they had been tested before for the AIDS virusall negative, they said. But keep in mind: By the time the results of their latest tests are known, they’ll be out turning tricks again.

From Victoria Brown: “I’ve had over 15 tests, and I never once found out the results.” She says she’d quit if she were notified that she’d tested positive. That’s what they all said. “I would commit suicide,” added Linda McArthur. “I would take an OD of heroin and die.” Said another: “I’d lock myself in a room and smoke myself to death.”

But, tragically, prostitutes with AIDS often continue working. They have no place else to goeven if they’re dying, even if they risk infecting others. The justice system keeps them for 30 days, maybe 60 days, that’s about it.

Proposed laws that would keep infected prostitutes in custody have failed in the Legislature; it’s doubtful such measures would survive a constitutional challenge. While it’s a crime to give another person a sexual disease, prosecution is nearly impossible.

It is not a crime to be sick and alone on a street corner.

Roxcy Bolton, an activist who has been counseling abused women for years, says a halfway house is needed, a facility where AIDS-stricken prostitutes can go. It would be, in one sense, a hospicea quiet place to die.

There’s no assurance that all would choose to stay there, but the opportunity should exist. To continue putting these women back on the streets is madness.

“If something is wrong with me, I want to know,” said Tina Green. A prostitute since age 13, she still has no plans to quit out of fear. “This is a career for me,” she said.

Although statistics indicate the prostitute is more often the recipient than the transmitter of AIDS, the sexual act puts every customer at risk. And there are other victims of the trade, some of them truly innocent.

A year and a half ago, Victoria Brown went into labor while lying in a Miami crack house. She got to the hospital just in time, but didn’t stay long.

“I left my baby in Jackson, and I never went back.” She said she doesn’t know what happened to the child, or where it is today.

Then she began to cry, and all the womenevery onecried with her.

Con artists hit the road to prey on old

May 23, 1990

The criminals we worry most about are crack dealers, armed robbers, rapists and murderers. This fear comes from living in urban America.

There’s another kind of crook who is seldom caught, rarely prosecuted and almost never jailed. Yet his brand of crime is particularly cruel and predatory because it targets the elderly who live alone.

Every year gypsy criminals come scouting for victims in the Sun Belt. They knock on doors and offer bargain home repairs, roof sealing and driveway pavingwork that’s invariably shoddy and overpriced.

A more sinister ruse is the unarmed “home invasion”one thief talks his way into a house and distracts the owner, while partners loot the place. In this way, hundreds of old people have lost all their money. In one month, 26 such gypsy burglaries were documented in the city of Miami; frequently the thieves pose as utility workers from FPL or Southern Bell.

Because court systems are already clogged, the traveling con artist is a low priority. The crime networks, though, are vast and well-organized webs that take in millionsand are more difficult to penetrate than the Mafia.

This week the Florida attorney general’s office is holding a police seminar on Eastern European and American gypsies, as well as the “travelers,” vagabond thieves of Irish, Scottish and English descent. (The notorious Williamsons of bogus roofing fame are Scottish travelers.)

Bunco cops know all the sad stories. The driveway paver whose “asphalt” is nothing but motor oil mixed with gravel. The “exterminator” who smuggles a piece of termite-eaten lumber into the attic and offers it as proof of infestation.

On the infrequent occasions that they’re caught, gypsies and travelers rarely do time. Typically they offer full restitution in exchange for dropping the charges. “When they’re arrested,” said investigator John Wood, “they’re usually the most polite, courteous people you’d ever want to meet.”

Like everything else, it’s an act. In addition to swindling the elderly, criminal gypsies go for insurance fraud, welfare cheating and shoplifting. They also excel at “store diversions” in which one family member creates a noisy scene while others empty the cash registers. This scheme netted $42,000 from one Chicago supermarket and has been used all over the country.

But these are the most tragic stories:

” A wheelchair-bound dialysis patient in Pinellas County found his house safe missing after gypsies “worked” on his roof.

” A wealthy 84-year-old widow in Houston was fleeced of $367,000 by Irish travelers who did only $2,500 worth of home repairs over 22 months. Police say the families passed the widow’s name from one group to another because she was such an easy mark.

” Four gypsy women traveling through southern Ontario stole more than $500,000 from senior citizens during a three-month crime spree.

It’s easy to dismiss the victims as gullible fools, but older folks are often intimidated into paying even if they don’t want to. Commonly, gypsy roofers do the “work” first (usually a quick spray of useless paint), then demand an outrageous fee. If the victim balks, the clan members protest loudly and traipse through the home, searching for cash.

The “marks” are selected carefully. Almost always they are old, frail and alone. Because of failing eyesight or weak memories, they make poor witnesses in court. Humiliation and embarrassment discourage many victims from prosecuting. An 84-year-old widow who lost $44,000 in a gypsy burglary wanted to report the theft as only $100she was afraid her relatives would put her in a nursing home if they learned the truth.

Miami officer Charlie Taylor, who specializes in tracking gypsy and traveler families: “When you talk to an old woman who’s lost her entire life savings, it breaks your heart. What do you say to console her?”

Now is the season when the gypsies and traveler families start north, but police say they’ll be back. Florida has been very good to them.

Without changes, nursing home neglect will occur

December 3, 1992

Imagine the scandal if 10 small children died, one by one, at the same day-care center.

The press would swarm like hornets, indictments would rain, and the dump would be nailed shut forever. Which is exactly what should happen.

It’s different, though, when the dead are not so young.

A recent series in this newspaper exposed an appalling pattern of abuse, neglect and mysterious fatalities at state institutions, nursing homes and boarding homes. The victims were not babies but adultsthe weak, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the mentally impaired.

At one North Dade facility, the Landmark Learning Center, at least 10 patients have died under suspicious circumstances during recent years.

Among the casualties was a retarded paraplegic named Richard Daniels, killed by a blow to the abdomen. In some places that’s called murder.

No one has been arrested for Daniels’ death. Landmark claims he suffered the fatal injury by falling against the arm of his wheelchairan explanation not embraced by the family, police or medical examiners. Meanwhile, Landmark remains open.

Administrator Ulysses Davis, who was temporarily relieved of command this week, said his facility had made no mistakes in treating patients, but added (in the understatement of the century): “There’s always room for improvement.”

More often it’s not violence but pure neglect that kills. Earlier this year, a 48-year-old retarded woman died of a bowel obstruction that, according to investigators, wasn’t noticed or properly treated by Landmark health workers. Another case: A 27-year-old woman died, riddled with cancer that Landmark doctors somehow failed to discern. Another: An epileptic patient died after a seizure on the floor; Landmark workers said they thought he was only taking a nap.

Unfortunately, such horror stories aren’t uncommon. Across the state, old and disabled patients have been found half-starved, consumed by bedsores, crippled by undiagnosed bone fractures. Time and again nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Responsibility is tangled among too many state agencies. Weak laws make it hard to prosecute adult abuse cases, and harder still to shut down shabby nursing homes. Health-care workers, grossly underpaid and sometimes undertrained, are frequently reluctant to report patient abuse for fear of losing their jobs.The system is perfectly designed to perpetuate itself.

Right now, in the great state of Florida, a guy who kicks a dog stands a better chance of going to jail than someone who slugs an invalid in a nursing home.

People moved out of sight are also moved out of our consciousness. Often they are as helpless as children, as trusting as kittens. Yet it’s almost as if, because they’re grownups (not cuddly babies), their deaths are not so tragic or important.

True, people die every day in nursing homes. If it happens to your grandmother or grandfather, you pray that the end was peaceful and natural, that they weren’t punched or starved or ignored to death. Because if they were, you stand little chance of getting the truth and virtually no chance of getting justice.

Government tends to react the way society does, with emotions deciding our priorities. When a child under HRS supervision is tortured by a monstrous parent, the reaction is an appropriate convulsion of outrage and cries for dramatic reform.

The death of Richard Daniels, age 43, is no less sickening. And he is but one of the forgotten.

That’s why the case of Landmark Learning Center is so disgraceful. With the same track record, a day-care center would’ve been boarded up a long time ago.

For that matter, so would a kennel.

English-only repeal won’t impose Spanish

May 16, 1993

Dade’s so-called English-only ordinance will probably be repealed this week. The sky won’t fall. The earth won’t quake. And the Metro commission won’t start conducting its meetings in Spanish.

Yet many will call it a sad day when the law is scrapped. Some warn that its repeal will legitimize ethnic separatism, dual languages dividing dual cultures. But if the English-only law was (as supporters insist) meant to unify Dade, it was a flop.

The ordinance was passed overwhelmingly in 1980 as native entrenchment against a tidal wave of foreign-speaking immigrants: All government meetings and publications were to be in English. So there!

Well, guess what happened in the next 12 years. Hispanics became a majority in Dade. The county’s politics, culture and economy transformedand plenty of folks didn’t like it. Thousands packed up and left for Lake City or Ocala. They’re still leaving, and it’s understandable. Watching one’s hometown change so radically is tough, confusing and often painful. Getting out is one solution.

Not all who stayed have adjusted easily. Some of us crackers won’t ever get used to hearing Spanish at McDonald’s. How come them people don’t learn to speak American? In moments of impatience, I’ve had similar grouchy thoughts.

Then I remember all the money this newspaper spent trying to get some Spanish into my skull, with minimal results. Someone as linguistically stunted as myself is in no position to lecture anybody about learning a second tongue.

The message of the English-only law is that those who come to this country should adopt our language. That sounds fair, but the reality of mass immigration is another story …

Today, 57 percent of Dade residents speak something other than English at home. All those people are touched by government and need to be well-informed. As a practical matter, it would be irresponsibleno, idioticto neglect the thousands who haven’t yet learned English, or can’t. Societies that exclude people pay a terrible price, as we know firsthand.

Judging from the hysteria, some seem to think abolishing English-only is equivalent to imposing Spanish-only. That’s absurd. The official language of Dade will always be English. We don’t need a law saying so.

The ordinance is a relic of Anglo defiance that offends many Hispanics, bilingual or not. Citizens of Dade United says it’s simply intended to save taxpayers money. Yet there’s no mistaking the resentment from CODU’s Enos Schera, who told the New York Times: “They have already established another Cuba inside Dade County, and now they are forcing Spanish down our throats.”