By Rebecca Wakefield

Ah, to be Victor Igwe this week. Igwe, the much-oppressed auditor for the city of Miami, has got to be considering cracking a smile, though it is unlike him.

For about eight years, Igwe has diligently toiled away as the city’s in-house red-flag guy for departments and programs that are not working properly. Igwe, a Nigerian by way of London, is as honest as they come. But he’s always been viewed by some city officials as a pain.

Case in point was Igwe’s audit four years ago of Miami’s Community Redevelopment Agency, detailing suspicious expenditures and questionable hiring practices, among other bad news. That led to media attention, a Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office investigation and, after a series of plot twists worthy of a movie, to the suicide of former Commissioner Arthur Teele, a major player in the CRA mess.

I remember how at one meeting, after a city official told commissioners Igwe was wrong about some of the problems he noted in an audit, Igwe briefly fainted. He claimed at the time he was just feeling weak because he hadn’t eaten that day, but I’ve always suspected he was so upset that his tightly wound constitution just couldn’t take it.

A couple of years ago, Igwe produced another audit, pointing out that some $39 million worth of no-bid contracts were awarded to clients of political consultant Steve Marin, a friend of Mayor Manny Diaz and then-city manager Joe Arriola. Arriola tried to railroad Igwe, but couldn’t quite do it.

Just this week, Igwe released a damning audit of the city’s Community Development Department and its director, Barbara Gomez. His audit backed up earlier reports in the Miami Herald, pointing out that the department had poor controls over the money it was handing out to developers and in making sure they did the work they were supposed to do. No competitive bidding? What a shock! What are the odds somebody got a nice kickback there?

After those reports (which also rehashed the fact that Diaz’s campaign manager, Al Lorenzo, was let out of a million-dollar debt he hadn’t paid in years), Mayor Diaz went into full-blown Bush-administration-style denial, meeting with the Herald’s editorial board and submitting an op-ed, which ran Monday. It was titled “There is no crisis in housing.” Seriously.

The mayor has every right to highlight the city’s attempts to fix past mistakes, but he also glossed over some pretty large failures. That became evident just a day later, when, splashed in the Herald’s pages, came the news that the woman responsible for running the city’s affordable housing programs is pretty much a crook, with possibly the worst taste in husbands imaginable.

You can’t make this stuff up. In the ’70s, Barbara Gomez married and had a son with Ruben A. Santana, who later became a Sweetwater cop and then got convicted of trying to smuggle liquid cocaine from Peru in tropical fish tanks. Santana went on the lam, but was eventually caught and served six years in prison. When he got out in 2004, he got a job with a catering company that then began receiving lucrative city grants. Gomez steered a million dollars to two companies that employed Santana.

Gomez went on to marry (and this year, divorce) Rene Rodriguez, who ran the county’s affordable housing programs, before he quit to work for developers he used to not regulate. Rodriguez is at the head of the long line of SOBs who directed public money intended to help poor people into their own pockets, and those of friends. Meanwhile, the number of people on the waiting list for affordable housing is large enough to start a new city. It’s sickening.

One humorous note is that even though Gomez and Santana have claimed she didn’t do anything wrong, they both hired the same lawyer to represent them. That lawyer is José Quiñon, who made his bones representing major drug lords in the ’80s and ’90s. He also represented former Commissioner Humberto Hernandez in his voting fraud case, until Quiñon was caught having an affair with Hernandez’s wife.

After Igwe’s audit was released, Diaz issued a terse statement promising he “will give careful thought to this report and work with the city manager to take all the necessary actions to continue reforming the process.”

Outside City Hall this week, various affordable housing activists held a press conference to argue that, in fact, there is a housing crisis. Denise Perry, executive director of Power U Center for Social Change, said the activists demand accountability, transparency and real progress in affordable housing development.

Perry said the city actually does have plans and processes designed to build decent housing. The problem is the rules are mere window-dressing, routinely ignored to the benefit of connected individuals. That much seems obvious.

“We’ve talked to housing developers to try to get them on our team with a proposal, and they say, ‘That’s a great idea, but we’re not interested in dealing with the city of Miami,’” she told me. “People say we’re nothing but haters [to criticize the city], but no one wants to play with you as long as that’s the condition [that you have to know someone, or pay someone, to get anywhere].”

As for Diaz, Perry said she feels like he is mostly interested in protecting his reputation so he can run for some higher office. Diaz, in her opinion, wants all the news to be good, no matter that problems cannot be dealt with until they are acknowledged.

“The emperor has no clothes,” she opined.

Max Rameau, who created the Umoja homeless camp in Liberty City last year, was also critical, even though the city has actually agreed to let his organization build housing on the vacant property Umoja once occupied.

“He’s either disconnected with what's happening to regular people, or his class interests are so deeply rooted, that — to him — there is no housing crisis, for developers,” Rameau said. “Either way, it doesn’t make much difference to people. If he thinks there’s no housing crisis, there’s no way he can solve it.”

Why don't we give Victor Igwe a shot?