Eighties Flashback
Remember when Raul Masvidal was the Herald’s Pick for Mayor, Joe Carollo was an Angry Young Man with a Loving Wife, and Demetrio Perez Was a Right-Wing Blowhard?

Suarez had beat out Raul Masvidal, a self-made millionaire and Bay of Pigs veteran once voted the “most powerful Cuban in Miami.

By Rebecca Wakefield

This column, for those who’d like to skip ahead, is about 1987.

But first I’d like to apologize to School Board member Renier Diaz de la Portilla. Two weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with the Feb. 14 board meeting, in which charter school operator Fernando Zulueta played ringmaster to seven elected officials.

The board was considering whether to allow Zulueta to open another charter school despite serious questions about some of his company’s financial maneuvers raised by the school district’s chief auditor, its audit committee and its ethics advisory committee. The auditor also noted that the State Attorney’s Office has opened an inquiry into the matter.

Despite this, only two board members were disconcerted enough to vote against Zulueta.

I speculated that this was because he mounted an aggressive defense, and has been generous with the campaign cash, funneling at least $4,000 apiece to the recent campaigns of Solomon Stinson and Agustin Barrera.

I also said that Diaz de la Portilla might need the cash for his 2008 race, since former board member Frank Bolaños (who vacated his seat last year in his unsuccessful bid for the state Senate) had filed to run.

Turns out I was wrong. While Bolaños did file last year, he subsequently dropped out. It seems the county Elections Department Web site is not as up to date as it could be. When I checked it on deadline, it showed Bolaños as a candidate. A friend at the Miami Herald kindly showed me a neat trick. There’s another elections site the county apparently updates more frequently. This one, (www.precinctfind.com/candidate_pr.php?c=fl_dade&el=11) , showed Bolaños had dropped out months ago.

Happily, the more updated site also had Diaz de la Portilla’s campaign reports. A cursory glance showed he had also collected money from Zulueta, at least $2,500 based on a quick look. So, there’s the update.

Of course, then I remembered the last time I looked at School Board campaign reports and being struck by some of the donors. What got me was less the naked avarice of it all, but more the fact that some of these characters just never go away.

For instance, among the huge amounts the insurance industry invested in various recent School Board campaigns, one name stuck out: Ric Sisser, lobbyist, reformed crack smoker, prone to heart palpitations around TV reporters. The dude is still in the game, ponying up at least $5,000 just in the couple of reports I looked at, through companies with fun names like the Committee to Maintain Quality Education, Inc. Bully for him I guess, but wasn’t this the guy who at one point made something like $4 million off a single health insurance client, while, probably coincidentally, rates for teachers, bus drivers, janitors, cops and cafeteria ladies went through the roof?

But that was back when school district insurance contracts were largely controlled by Sisser’s close friend and mentor, Pat Tornillo, before the former teacher’s union chief went to prison — for stealing from teachers.

Wasn’t Sisser also the guy former Commissioner Arthur Teele socked in the nose during a dispute over who was going to be appointed county manager?

Another name that popped up in the campaign reports was that of ex-School Board member Demetrio Perez, a fascinating fellow who presided over a public district while owning a chain of private schools, before becoming a convicted felon for cheating poor old ladies out of rent money.

He and his companies gave at least $3,000 to his old colleague Sol Stinson, to name just one campaign. His son, Demetrio Perez Jr. (who ran for office from a storage shed on his daddy’s property before being disqualified through a legal challenge), who is now apparently a lawyer, also gave a generous $500. I don’t know what the Perezes are doing sniffing around the School Board these days, but it’s bound to be entertaining.

This line of thinking brought me around to the ’80s, when Perez was a one-term Miami city commissioner, proposing that the city give Juan Felipe de la Cruz (who died in the ’70s trying to blow up a Castro agent in Paris) his own day, and protesting against Miami Vice.

In 1987, journalist T.D. Allman wrote a book called Miami: City of the Future, in which he examined the 1985 election that resulted in Xavier Suarez becoming the city’s first Cuban-American mayor. That same election, Rosario Kennedy became the first Cuban-American female city commissioner, winning her seat from Perez, whom Allman wrote “epitomized the worst” of the Cuban community’s political traditions.

Even with hardheaded firebrand Joe Carollo on that 1985 commission, Kennedy and Suarez were then seen as the bright new hope for the next generation of Cuban-American leaders who could bridge the gap between their parents’ ideology and the sensibilities of Anglo America.

Suarez had beat out the Miami Herald’s candidate, Raul Masvidal, a self-made millionaire and Bay of Pigs veteran who was once voted the “most powerful Cuban in Miami.” “[Masvidal] knows what Miami can become: He became it himself,” one Herald endorsement read. Another 1987 book called Miami, this one written by Joan Didion, includes a revealing quote from then-Herald editor Jim Hampton, professing his “baffled amusement” over the rumor that the newspaper had actually secretly backed Suarez by endorsing Masvidal, since Cuban voters hated the Herald.

What a difference 20 years make. Masvidal is now charged with misusing public housing funds to finance his own lavish lifestyle — and did the classic Miami thing, accusing the Herald of unfairly trying him in the court of public opinion.

The watermelon that Masvidal couldn’t live without in 2007. Graphic courtesy of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office

Suarez, once the Harvard-educated golden boy, is considered an old-school nut by many political observers, and unelectable even though he keeps trying.

Kennedy is a lobbyist ever lurking around Miami waterfront deals.

And Joe Carollo is fighting the city for his pension, while accusing his ex-wife of being, in the Herald’s choice words, an “adulterous, money-grubbing deceiver.”

So hard to escape the sucking pull of the swamp, where if you wait long enough, dirty becomes clean and clean gets muddy.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.

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