Kick Ass (17 page)

For the sake of argument, let’s say Bush wants to leave Star Wars alone. Let’s say a 12-month hiatus would disrupt research and development. Then let’s look at another system that’s supposedly finished, researched to perfection: the B-2 Stealth bomber.

Despite serious doubts by military experts as to whether this aircraft will be able to fool Soviet radar, the Pentagon wants to build 132 of them at a total price tag of about $70 billion. Each new plane supposedly will cost about $550 million.

Although defense contractors are notorious for underestimating, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. What if you took the money from just 10 new Stealths (say two a year, over the next five years) and applied it to the federal anti-drug budget? That’s more than $ i billion a year that we aren’t using now.

Given the choice, most Americans would want their tax dollars fighting crime on the streets, not floating around in outer space. There’s no clear and present danger to compare with having a crack house on your block.

Money alone isn’t going to end the cocaine wars, and many reasonable critics wonder if we haven’t already squandered too many billions on a law enforcement strategy that has failed dismally. Yet there are signs that increased funding does make a difference, especially in the classroom. To claim that we simply don’t have the money is nonsense; worse than that, it’s hypocritical.

The money is there, if Congress and the president can find the courage to use it.

George Bush is smart enough to know that the political stakes have changed since Reagan, Carter and Nixon declared their wars on drugs. Today the streets are so frightening and cocaine crime is so prevalent that American voters are ready to blame somebody if things don’t improveand that somebody is likely to be the president.

Four years isn’t enough time to stamp out crack, but it’s enough to learn if George Bush means business. Judging by this week’s announcement, war is heck.

BSO strikes again in battle of the bulge

December 17, 1990

Another true chronicle in America’s War on Drugs:

An appeals court has rebuked the Broward Sheriffs Office for permitting female undercover officers to randomly search the crotches of airport travelers.

And you thought the Hare Krishnas were annoying.

For years now, eagle-eyed BSO deputies have been scouting for suspicious trouser bulges on the theory that drug smugglers often hide the booty between their legs. When a likely lump is located, the suspect is pulled aside and an official grope is conducted.

That’s what happened to one Anthony Lewis Tognaci in 1987 while he waited for a USAir flight at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Unknown to Tognaci, the dimensions of his groin had caught the eye of BSO Lt.Vicki Cutcliffe.

According to court records, Cutcliffe approached Tognaci after noticing an unusual prominence in his pants. Tognaci consented to a search, and while patting him down Cutcliffe felt something “crinkly” located “a little bit higher than where his male organs would be, normally”

The possibilities seemed limited.

The young man was taken away and strip-searched. Police found 112 grams of cocaine, and charged Tognaci with drug trafficking. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 3 ‘/> years.

He appealed the case, arguing that Lt. Cutcliffe’s search “exceeded its scope.” In a ruling handed down last week, the Fourth District Court of Appeal upheld Tognaci’s conviction, saying “it is not clear from the evidence that the officer actually touched appellant’s genitals.”

However, the court expressed serious concerns about the BSO’s crotch patrol, because travelers who consent to being searched aren’t informed that it will focus on “this most private area of the body.”

The judges also questioned the value of such methods in drug enforcement. They cited Lt. Cutcliffe’s testimony that she had searched “hundreds of men’s crotches without discovering any contraband.”

Said the court: “We emphasize that these encounters are random, not generated by any articulable suspicion of wrongdoing, not by a drug courier profile, nor by a fear of the officer’s safety.”

Rather, the searches are motivated only by the contour of a suspect’s pants. Sternly the judges added: “And at least based upon the hundreds of searches which not do not produce any drugs, we conclude from the testimony that the genital search is not a very effective investigative tool [the court’s word, not mine]

“

For her part, Lt. Cutcliffe doesn’t seem to mind below-the-belt surveillance. She said it’s easier for her to do it because most male deputies are reluctant to search a male suspect so intimately.

Nonsmugglers seldom complainflattered, perhaps, that the natural topography of their trousers made someone think they were carrying something extra.

Still, problems extend beyond the appellate court’s Fourth Amendment concerns. Now that the BSO strategy has been publicized, lots of very lonely guys are probably heading for the Fort Lauderdale airport in the hopes of being frisked, and frisked slowly, by Lt. Cutcliffe.

Then there’s the more delicate public-relations challenge. Some tourists who come to South Florida might not wish to be groped as they disembark. Should we warn them to wear baggy pants? To avoid crinkly underwear? To carry their cellular phones in a back pocket?

It’s an unusual welcome, that’s for sure. When you get off the plane in Hawaii, you get a lei around your neck. Here in Florida you get a hand on your zipper.

In spite of the court’s warning, Sheriff Nick Navarro has announced no plans to terminate the crotch patrol. So if you’re passing through the airport, don’t be shocked if a female cop stops you and whispers: “Is that a kilo in your pants, or are you just glad to see me?”[“#chapter_06”]

Tourist Season

Only a fool fails to follow these rules

September 19, 1986

Florida’s new tourism jingle is catching some flak, and this is too bad. The $4 million slogan, unveiled this week, is: “FLORIDAThe Rules Are Different Here.”

This is the first honest tourist slogan we’ve had in a long time, and it’s a shame that a few naysayers are picking on it. The rap against the new jingle is that people in the country’s heartland might misconstrue the part about how “the rules are different here.”

What’s to misconstrue? Accept the phrase exactly for what it says and you have a public service announcement; a friendly warning, if you will. We should be delighted that our tourism promoters finally are taking a responsible approach.

Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Ron Cochran says the new tourist pitch is “about the dumbest thing I ever heard.” He says it promotes an image of rampant lawlessness. I say it merely informs.

By way of counterattack, Beber, Silverstein, the agency that developed the Rules campaign, hired a big research company to go out and interview 11 New Yorkers to see if they were scared off by the jingle. Why it required a big research company to find 11 talkative New Yorkers I’m not sure. Naturally the New Yorkers said no, the slogan didn’t scare them away from Florida. These people had all taken the subway to Yankee Stadium and obviously were not scared by anything.

The problem with the new go-Florida campaign is not the slogan, but some of the rules they dreamed up to go along with it. For instance: “You must remove your wingtips before going swimming.”

Or: “You must get suntanned in a place you’ve never been tan before.” Or: “You are required to watch at least one sunrise.”

These rules are sort of cutemaybe not 4 million bucks worth of cute, but medium cute. Collectively, however, they hardly present the exotic, Vice-ish image of Florida that Yuppie travelers all over America are hungering for.

What potential tourists really need is some useful advice, because the rules down here are definitely different.

RULE NO. 1: You must remove your Beretta shoulder holster before going swimming.

RULE NO. 2: You must get wounded in a place you’ve never been wounded before.

RULE NO. 3: At spring break you must never stand for too long beneath a hotel full of drunken college kids.

RULE NO. 4: You must never stop on Interstate 95 to ask directions from a teenager holding a cinderblock.

RULE NO. 5: You are required to watch at least one sunrise, because that’s what time the 10 P.M. Metrobus finally shows up.

RULE NO. 6: You must never light a cigar with 12 drums of pure ether in the back of your car.

RULE NO. 7: You must never wear your beeper into the sauna.

RULE NO. 8: You are required to take home at least a dozen giant Bufo toads as souvenir doorstops.

RULE NO. 9: You must stand in line for three hours outside Joe’s Stone Crab, only to be mistakenly rounded up in a Border Patrol sweep of South Beach.

RULE NO. 10: You must never wear a tie to your arraignment.

RULE NO. 11: You must never, ever use your turn signal while changing lanes.

RULE NO. 12: You must never open your front door to a gang of armed men wearing police badges, black Ray bans and rubber Ed Meese masks. You must never believe them if they tell you all Florida cops drive unmarked Maseratis.

RULE NO. 13: You must never carry correct change when going through a busy tollbooth, and always spend as much time as possible chatting with the cashier about which way Sea World is.

RULE NO. 14: At the first sight of an actual Florida alligator you must pull off the road and feed it enormous bags of Toll House cookies until it grows so tame that it eats your dachshund.

RULE NO. 15: You must not be alarmed to discover that two entire floors of your hotel have been rented out to the federal Witness Protection Program.

Auto trunks are no place to park bodies

January 21, 1987

Bust our buttons! This week’s crime news brings another unique distinction to Dade County: The Car-Trunk Murder Capital of the United States.

Last year local automobile trunks yielded a record number of homicide victims (12), a statistic provoking comment from no less an authority than Dr. Joseph Davis, the unflappable chief medical examiner.

“Years ago,” he reflected, “if you found somebody dead in a trunk, it was unusual. There was a great deal of interest. Now it’s a ho-hum thing.”

Your basic car-trunk case goes like this: Some poor soul is out walking his poodle or pulling into the shopping mall when he notices a Foul Odor emanating from another car.

Next the police are summoned, the trunk of the offending vehicle (usually a late-model, luxury sedan) is pried open and therein discovered one or more extremely dead persons who, more likely than not, have had a passing attachment to the narcotics trade.

A seamy spectacle, to be sure. “Not a pleasant scene to go to,” says Metro-Dade detective Al Singleton.

“It’s a bother,” Dr. Davis agrees. “Another thing that’s annoying

now you find a car parked at the airportstinks to high heavenand for some reason you have to wait six hours while they go find a judge to get a court order to open the thing up! Everybody knows there’s a body inside.”

Twelve car-trunkers out of 438 homicides is scarcely an epidemic, but for 1986 it certainly puts us at the head of the pack, per capita. (Admittedly, national statistics are somewhat elusive in this area. Believe it or not, most large metropolitan areas don’t keep a separate category for car-trunk murders.)

Assuming that the illicit drug business will be with us for a long time, and assuming that a natural by-product of the business is murder, we can only conclude that the problem of corpse disposal will also persist.

On behalf of all hard-working homicide cops and coroners, I’d like to make a public plea for a moratorium on car-trunk murders.

1. It’s a lazy and unimaginative method of getting rid of dead drug dealers. Granted, a few old Mafia traditionalists still use car trunks, but only because New York has so little open space for regular dumping.

2. The car-trunk method is rude and very annoying to everyone else in the neighborhood. It is the homicidal equivalent of not picking up after one’s self.

3. It ruins a perfectly good car. A dead body in the trunk destroys the resale value of any automobile, with the possible exception of a Ford Pinto.

At the risk of sounding heartless, I really don’t give a hoot how many dope dealers are killed by other dope dealers, as long as the deed occurs in private and poses no threat to the innocent.

Dade County had its famous spate of public machine-gunnings a few years back, but lately the bad guys have been more considerate about where they settle their disputes. A common preference is the remote dirt-road executions that my police friends so sensitively refer to as “Krome Avenue Specials.”

For one unseemly stretch we also had a run on drug-related dismemberments in Biscayne Bay. Fortunately for the beach tourist industry, this trend abated quietly.

Experts are at a loss to explain the resurgence of the car-trunk method, but part of the blame belongs in Detroit. Back in the mid-‘/os, when the gas crunch and Japanese imports forced U.S. automakers to go compact, you almost never read about dead bodies found in trunks. The trunks were just too darn small.

However, in the oil-glutted ‘8os, Ford, GM and Chrysler all increased production of mid-and full-sized carscars with roomy trunks. Drug assassins responded enthusiastically.

Says Dr. Davis: “It sure shows they have a lot of cars to spare.”

Another good reason to ride the Metrorail.

Local leaders need to foster pride, not panic

July 20, 1987

Someone please administer heavy sedatives to certain downtown types so they will quit convulsing about the New York Times.

As everybody knows, the Times magazine published a cover story yesterday that asked the musical question: “Can Miami Save Itself?” The article was subtitled “A City Beset by Drugs and Violence.”

Actually the headlines had little to do with the text of the article, but it was enough to provoke the usual gnashing of teeth among the Guardians of Our Sacred Tropical Image.

Indignantly they declared that the Times piece was “grossly exaggerated,” a perfect description of their own reaction. They also whined that author Robert Sherrill downplayed the wonderfulness of Dade County while dredging up all that nasty old stuff about cocaine cowboys, Mariel murders and racial tensions.

This criticism is not only inaccurate, it’s ludicrous. In assessing Miami’s current national image, it is impossible not to discuss the indelible traumas of the early 19805. If anything, Sherrill was merciful for not dwelling on more current events.

Consider a few everyday news items:

” The statewide prosecutor has publicly apologized for unknowingly buying stolen suits, which he said he needed to look nice for an upcoming corruption trial.

” The so-called River Cops case has swelled into the worst police scandal in local historyyou now need a calculator to add up all the former city cops implicated in drug-rip-off-murder schemes.

” Meanwhile, a new group of international narco-assassinsthese from Jamaicahas relocated its headquarters in Dade and Broward counties, where it’s easy to get parts and servicing for their MAC-ids.

” To ensure that our Dodge City reputation never ebbs, many South Florida legislators backed a new state gun law that enables practically any glassy-eyed psychopath to arm himself on a whim.

” And, oh yes, the state attorney general recently was asked to give an opinion on whether animal sacrifices were permissible in Hialeah.

Image problem? What image problem? How could the Times suggest such a thing?

Face it, things get bizarre in these latitudes. Consequently, every magazine that strives for hipness has taken a crack at MiamiEsquire, Vogue, the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and there will be more. Writers come down here because it’s interesting, in the best and worst sense.

By now you’d think the Civic Pillars would have the brains to shrug it off, but no. The county manager, who had not yet read the Times article, boldly announced that “we’re going to take a public stand.” (Quickcall the networks. A public stand!)

Then, two days before the magazine actually appeared, an emergency meeting was convened at the Grand Bay Hotel to plot counterpublicity.

The session was closed to the public, so God only knows what was dreamed up. Perhaps it was a list of alternative headlines for submission to the Times corrections department: “MiamiWe’re Doing Our Best, So Lay Off!” Or: “A City Beset By Snotty Press Articles.” Something mature like that.

In critiquing the Times’ presentation, it should be noted that the magazine used a photograph of a mock drug bust staged by U.S. Customs. This was undeniably sloppy, but would a picture of the real thing have made the Chamber of Commerce any happier? Probably not.

The publicized summit at the Grand Bay Hotel accomplished at least one thing: It sold a heap of Sunday newspapers for the New York Times. If I were Publisher Sulzberger, I’d send citrus-scented thank-you notes to the whole Beacon Council.

For the record, Bob Sherrill’s article does not portray Dade County as the sludge pit of the universe, so take your medicine and calm down. There’s nothing wrong with civic pride, but civic panic is embarrassing.

Newsweek story glitz-wraps same old city

January 20, 1988

You probably noticed the restraint with which this paper greeted the current Newsweekcover story, bannering it across the front page like a new Soviet arms treaty. The reason is simple: Anytime anyone anywhere says anything nice about Dade County, it’s front-page news.

Still shellshocked from last summer’s New York Timesprofile, local tourism honchos had huddled heavily sedated in underground bunkers to await the Newsweekpiece, predictably titled: “MiamiAmerica’s Casablanca.”

After a quick review, the boosters proclaimed the portrait to be darned near positive, and called off plans to mewl, sulk and fly to New York in protest.

The fact is, the content of the Newsweekstory is not much different from what stirred up a storm last July in the Times. The real difference is the tropical caption and the pretty pictures.

Let’s begin with the cover: There’s the glorious new skyline (photographed at such a distance where you can’t see all the vacant office space), set behind a tranquil Miami River (photographed at such an angle that the water somehow appears blue) .

And no wonder everybody’s celebrating! In three years this is the first nationally published picture of the Miami River that did not feature dead drug dealers on the end of a coroner’s gaff.

Most of the other Newsweekphotography is equally flatteringmore skyline, a sunset, the Fontainebleau Hilton, a parade through Little Havana. As for dramatic photos of cocaine busts, there’s just one teensy-weensy shot of a crack arrest. Big deal.

By contrast, the text itself mentions the C word no less than 12 times, including this passage: “You cannot understand Miami without understanding cocaine, either. Miami is supersaturated with cocaine and cocaine money.”

Whoa there, Beacon Council, no need to panic. The very next sentence puts an upbeat spin on the drug climate: “The point many tourists overlook, however, is that the core of Miami’s cocaine problem is on the wholesale, not retail level.”

So bring the kiddies on down!

Any national story about Dade County must also be rated by the PAN factorthe ratio of positive to negative adjectives. My friend Tom Morganthau, who wrote the main Newsweekstory, obviously plundered Roget’s in search of superlatives.

At one point he calls Miami an “almost lunatic concatenation of ethnicity, glitz and restless energy.” Since Tom is one of only three persons in the whole universe who know what “concatenation” means, he might be forced to defend himself solely on the “lunatic” issue.

A sample of the positive adjectives used to depict Dade County include “unique,” “bustling,” “prosperous,” “newfangled,” “proud,” “jazzy,” “cocky,” “mellow,” “multicultural,” “exciting,” “exotic” and “sensuous.”