Just one of the poster boards presented during last Thursday’s Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office press conference. Even more materials were given to a Miami City Hall-friendly publication named Miami Monthly.

Without doubt, the big story of the first week of summer was the stunning arrest of 11 city of Miami employees, members of the so-called “The Firm,” who were charged with running a private business on the public’s dime. To me, though, this was not so much a law enforcement story as it was a tale of political spin.

On June 21, when the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office sent out its e-mail blast to all media regarding the indictment of 11 low and middle-level officials in the city’s Capital Improvements department, the stage was set. This was an event. Cue the perp walk and the finger-wagging. The only thing missing was a theme song.

At the city’s downtown offices, Mayor Manny Diaz sternly held court in the lobby, surrounded by cops, bureaucrats and media. State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle was the opening act, wowing the crowd with colorful maps, organizational charts and other props used to describe the results of the extensive investigation.

When Diaz, schooling his poker-faced mug into a grim mask of paternalistic suffering, said, “I pledge zero tolerance for this sort of abuse,” it was refreshing. At last, somebody was going to stand up and say, no más. The “bad apples,” as Diaz called the 11, had been rooted out, and this display served as a warning to any other potential miscreants lurking in the cubicle jungle upstairs.

First blush, you’ve got to think that this was a pretty savvy way to handle bad news. Diaz has taken public relations hits lately for the city’s unfolding affordable housing scandal(s), and the mayor’s own ethics slap on the wrist for his questionable mixing of public and private business.

That’s not to mention his cringe-worthy reaction to the news that city police officers hired to work off-duty at a graduation party didn’t show up, and thus two people were shot. Diaz suggested the cops were not to blame for not showing up or notifying the party hosts they wouldn’t be working the event. “Unfortunately, we live in a society where it's easier to point fingers at somebody else and blame somebody else for things,” he told the Miami Herald.

Back to the arrest party. There were a lot of weird things about that press conference. First of all, why in the world was former city manager Joe Arriola there? Why was former assistant city manager Alicia Cuervo Schreiber there? Why were both courting all the media present? Both have been gone from the city for about a year.

After I looked at all the next-day media coverage, I figured that the point was to give city operations chief Mary Conway cover. Conway , after all, was the person in charge of the Capital Improvements department until her promotion to Cuervo Schreiber’s old job (and that department still falls under Conway’s purview).

Let’s take a quick look through the claims put out there by this team. Arriola and Cuervo Schreiber claimed they had suspected a problem in the department more than two years ago.

The Herald article, which was short on details, said an internal investigation of some sort was conducted, but didn’t turn up much. City police were brought in but, according to police Chief John Timoney, any problems “looked strictly administrative.”

Then someone at the city authorized hiring a private investigator, paying out some $100 grand for the guy to follow this group of engineers and project managers around. He found enough dirt to warrant another police inquiry. The cops got clever with the computers and found that the employees were spending “85 percent” of their public time engineering projects for private clients. It sounds like good, solid police work.

What I don’t get is what exactly was Conway’s role during this period of time. If the conspiracy was so large and profound, sucking up 11 of 14 employees in the department, what was the boss lady doing about it?

Conway told the Herald that when the suspicions about her underlings’ work habits started: “At first we thought it was ineptitude or laziness or incompetence.” That seems like reason enough to start reprimanding, transferring or firing people. Why let the problem persist for two years? Are there no performance evaluations for employees in this department? Miami detectives documented two dozen private projects this group worked on in just two months this spring. Imagine what they got done in two years.

The situation reminds me uncomfortably of a piece New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once wrote about how fellow journalist Judy Miller allowed the Bush administration to dupe her into writing all those bad pre-war stories about the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Dowd described how a handful of hawks created an “echo chamber” effect by feeding her the same bad information and half-truths through multiple sources, thus making it appear more credible.

I’m not saying the same thing happened here in Miami, but is it really necessary for people now in the private sector to come back and claim the spotlight for allegedly uncovering malfeasance that, according to Arriola, probably had been going on for a decade or more? And if the city can afford $100,000 for a P.I. on this issue, where was the gumshoe tailing Community Development Director Barbara Gomez as she handed out city money to friends and family?

It doesn’t add up. Clue No. 1 that this thing stinks is the fact that Miami Monthly, the glossy Coconut Grove glad-rag put out by consistent Diaz/Arriola/Johnny Winton booster and Related Group shill Elena Carpenter, has, as its July cover story, an article written by publisher Carpenter and her editor titled “Robbing the City Blind.”

I’m not entirely certain when this issue hit the streets, but I saw the online version the day after the big bust. Spilled over six pages, complete with flattering pictures of various city officials, surveillance photos and the same maps and organizational charts handed out by the SAO, is the compellingly detailed story of how these 11 people did what they did and how they got caught.

Given the lead time needed for printing a story of this level of complexity in a monthly publication, it obviously means that the magazine had the scoop long before anyone else, possibly even some of the suspects. The story admits as much.

It reads like the city’s press conference, only with a lot more detail than reported by the Miami Herald. Miami Monthly’s tale paints a picture of concerned city officials and their diligent consultants pursuing the case. Cuervo Schreiber, according to the story, tried like mad to get something on the bad employees (until she left the city to go work for the Related Group).

The story names the detective agency, RJD Unlimited, Inc., and reveals that the agency was paid $115,000 over the course of about four months. There are even photos of the invoices the agency sent to the city.

The story says that Conway hired the agency and then used the evidence it collected to make her case to the police department and the SAO. The subsequent investigation turned up “more than a dozen” employees managing 79 private projects.

OK. Big question. Why would city officials choose to leak a story like this to a small monthly magazine known more for its cheery boosterism than hard-hitting journalism? Why not pitch it to, say, the Herald, which has a much broader reach, or the New Times, or one of the two or three local TV reporters who still occasionally dabble in investigative journalism?

My own personal wild-eyed theory is that this thieving bunch of jackals may turn out to be a convenient cover for a much bigger problem with the Capital Improvements department, which according to the city’s Web site “encompasses over 1100 projects valued at nearly $675,000,000 for the six year period from 2004 to 2010.” Some of that problem has been hinted at in local media coverage. Even the Miami Monthly piece admits the city “does not have a stellar track record when it comes to spending bond dollars.”

Where has much of the money gone so far? It has been paid to consultants, hired with very little due process to manage the lion’s share of the $255 million bond issue voters approved in 2001 to fix city infrastructure.

What have they done? Well, it’s hard to tell, really. There are lots of lists and lots of reports and numbers bandied about, but in many cases, it’s difficult to tell where the paper hits the street. Take the Flagler Avenue renovations the city has paid millions for several layers of consultants to do. That work dragged on forever, was poorly managed, poorly executed, and will likely have to be redone far too soon. Oh, and incidentally, one of those consultants employs Conway ’s husband.

I think a handful of city bigwigs, Conway among them, would like to lay the blame for the department’s execution problems on the backs of a bunch of petty thieves. No doubt, these guys deserve to be vigorously prosecuted and kudos to everyone who helped nab them.

But what do we make of their bosses? I suspect it won't be long before those answers start to roll out.