"I feel like I was kicked aside like a bag of dirt.” — former NET director Ricardo Gonzalez

By Rebecca Wakefield

“I’m proud of the fact I didn’t punch him,” says Ricardo Gonzalez, munching through his sandwich at Larios on Ocean Drive, and reflecting on his short career in local government. “I would love to see what Joe [Arriola] would do if a guy got in his face.”

Gonzalez was, until last month, the director of the city of Miami’s Neighborhood Enhancement Teams. Then he made the mistake of not tucking his nose firmly between his nether cheeks to satisfy the ego of a city commissioner. Actually, he failed to do this twice, but it only counted once.

Both incidents occurred in the days after Hurricane Wilma had knocked out power all over the city. City officials organized a relief effort centered at the Orange Bowl. From this chaotic command post, ice and water were distributed to thousands of residents. The city did an admirable job, but there were glitches. Nearly every politician in town wanted to make sure grateful voters connected them with handing out supplies.

This made Gonzalez’s job of coordinating the trucks traveling out to neighborhoods more challenging. He had a log sheet, showing when and where he sent trucks out at the behest of the mayor or a commissioner. On October 28, he says, Mayor Manny Diaz asked him to send six trucks to Model City because the city had gotten some criticism lately about ignoring the area.

By Gonzalez’s account, he had the trucks loaded at the entrance of the Orange Bowl, waiting for a police car to head the caravan up to Model City. Then, he says, City Commissioner Angel Gonzalez showed up in a black SUV and led the trucks to a neighborhood in his district instead, despite being told the trucks were reserved.

Gonzalez the bureaucrat called Diaz to inform him that there would be a delay in the Model City run because Gonzalez the politician had commandeered the supplies. A little while later, the two Gonzalezes were together again at the Orange Bowl. Ricardo Gonzalez then made his first mistake. “I decided to say something so he doesn’t do it again,” he recounts. “I said, ‘The trucks you took were intended for the mayor. If you need trucks, tell me and I will get them for you.’ He said, ‘I have as much right to the ice and water as the mayor!’”

Gonzalez says that as he was trying to explain the nuances of the command central concept, the commissioner got more and more angry. “He was cursing — ‘I’m an effing commissioner and you need to respect me!’” he recalls. “He got in my face and bumped my stomach.”

Then the bureaucrat made his second mistake. He decided not to back down. “I looked at him and took two steps forward,” he admits. “He backed off. I’m not an aggressive guy, but no one is going to run over me. I’m just trying to do my job and that needs to be respected, too.”

Looking at Ricardo Gonzalez, one can understand why the commissioner would back off once he realized he couldn’t simply bully him. Gonzalez is about 6 feet 2 inches, 220 pounds, a large black man with a salt and pepper mustache and an occasionally intense manner. The effing commissioner, in contrast, is much smaller and well past his street-fighting prime.

“He came to intimidate me and he ended up being intimidated,” Ricardo Gonzalez says. “He called [City Manager] Joe Arriola. Joe called me and said, ‘You’re in trouble. Go home and Manny and I will talk to you later.’ I said, ‘Don’t you want to hear my side of the story?’” Arriola did not.

A few days later, Gonzalez got a call from his boss, telling him that a Herald reporter was going to call him and that he should downplay the incident. A brief Herald story ran on Halloween, in which the commissioner portrayed the NET administrator as the aggressor, and the reporter appeared to break the news to him that he’d been suspended. Later that week, the administrator got another call from Arriola. “Things are hot,” the city manager told Gonzalez. “The commissioner is calling for your head. I think the elegant thing would be to resign. Coño, you must be pissed. I hate to do this to you.” Gonzalez says Arriola indicated the commissioner had threatened to fire the manager, “which he couldn’t really do.”

A few more days brought a lunch between Gonzalez and the city’s human resources director, Rosalie Mark. She handed him a prepared letter of resignation, which came attached with a cash sweetener. Gonzalez, naïve fellow that he is, told Mark he wasn’t going to resign because he’d done nothing wrong and also, no one had ever asked his side of the story. Mark said she would recommend that Arriola do an investigation.

A couple of weeks later, Gonzalez called Arriola: “Joe, last time we spoke, you asked for my resignation. I’m not going to resign.” Arriola: “What? You’re going to leave all that money on the table?” Gonzalez says Arriola promised to speak to Diaz, but if he did, nothing changed. Gonzalez was terminated in early December.

“I feel like I was kicked aside like a bag of dirt,” Gonzalez offers. “I’m not even angry at [the commissioner]. He was humiliated in public. He punked out. I understood that he needed to come after my head to prove he was a man. But they didn’t have to give it to him. They never took the time to find out what happened. I’m disappointed in Manny and Joe.”

Bad things happen to good people in the city all the time. What makes this case interesting is that Ricardo Gonzalez was widely considered a close ally of Diaz and Arriola. There were whispers that he could be a possible successor to Arriola as manager. Gonzalez thought Manny Diaz was his friend. After all, the two men were old buddies from Belen Jesuit Prep. This friendship is one of the reasons Arriola hired Gonzalez in the first place.

Gonzalez, a Pedro Pan kid, left Miami in 1977. He spent the bulk of his career at Traveler’s Insurance Company in the Orlando area for 27 years, in corporate human resources, and then developing and running a national call center. He retired about two and a half years ago and called his old friend in Miami. He thought that with his private sector experience and his Afro-Cuban heritage, he could help the new administration bridge the gaps between Miami’s ever-distrustful ethnic enclaves.

“When I met with Manny and Joe originally, they gave me the speech about doing the right thing and that impressed me,” he says. “A lot of people in the city just survive, which always bothered me because I felt more could be done. After going through this, I have a different perspective. I understand the attitude better.”

Other city bureaucrats told Gonzalez that while they quietly cheered him for standing up to a commissioner, his fate only reinforced their worst fears. “I was in the inner circle,” he relates. “If it happened to me, it could happen to anyone. How can a director do the right thing if he has to be looking over his shoulder and be sure that nobody’s angry at him?”

OK, hold on a minute. Let’s hear from the other side. Calls to Manny Diaz and Angel Gonzalez went unreturned. Arriola, however, did call me back. I asked him what happened. “I’m not going to get into the details,” he explained, helpfully. “I listened to both sides of the story. I thought he was wrong, and he was fired. That’s my decision and my decision only. End of story.”

I related Gonzalez’s complaint that no one ever asked him his side of the story, relying only on the commissioner’s. This produced the following confusing, but typical, Joe-speak: “I never spoke to Angel about the incident, or Ricardo Gonzalez. I spoke to both of them, but I kind of knew what they were going to say. I spoke to the witnesses. I thought he was wrong.”

Alrighty then. I added that Gonzalez clearly felt betrayed by people he thought were his friends. “I have lots of friends,” Arriola responded, “but if the work is not what I want it to be, I have to get rid of them. I fire people all the time. If I’ve got to talk to the press every time I fire somebody, I guess I got a problem.”

The kicker to this story is that the day before the Gonzalez vs. Gonzalez matchup, the bureaucrat had a similar issue with another commissioner. Gonzalez was coordinating ice and water distribution at Hadley Park, when then-commissioner Jeffery Allen attempted to take some supplies on a goodwill/campaign tour. Gonzalez told him he couldn’t have them just then because people had been waiting in line for hours.

Allen, also a bit of an emotionally unstable show pony, took umbrage and seemed near to causing an altercation, but Gonzalez got the situation under control and backed the man down. “When I got back to the Orange Bowl, word had spread,” he remembers. “Arriola hugged me and said, ‘You’re my hero.’” The difference? Diaz and Arriola were running candidates against Allen, and Arriola was openly contemptuous of the commissioner.

So now, despite all the talk about cleaning up the city and making it run like a good business, the message is out that, as usual, city employees had better test the wind before they make a decision. There’s also that pesky matter of it being against the city charter for commissioners to meddle in personnel affairs, but since the city attorney isn’t going to mention it, why should I?

Ricardo Gonzalez says he just feels numb. “I find myself in this predicament and I don’t know what I could have done differently. I loved that job. I felt like I could make a difference. Somebody told me that the problem was I came back to Miami to work with my friend and ended up working with the mayor.”

So what will Gonzalez do about it? He says people have advised him to sue, but he’s not so sure he wants to do that. “It’s never been about money,” he says. “It’s been about truth and justice. How can a commissioner do something wrong twice and get rid of me? And my so-called friends are the ones who pulled the trigger. Right now I’m looking for a job – but not in the public sector!”