Everybody's got a plan until they get hit in the mouth, and so it was with the folks who had visions of putting up a ferris wheel on the Bayside Marketplace property and start watching the money flow into their bank account.

The first, and most serious mistake they made was hiring Joe Carollo to be their location scout to find the location to put the wheel.

Joe would have probably fucked them one way or another, because that's just the way that Joe is, but Joe decided midway after signing a contract with these folks that he wanted to run for city commissioner.

Now, there's no way to know what the real terms of their parting was, but the so-called official terms that I was told by Jim Rigg's the guy who won the company that's putting up the wheel and that hired Carollo originally, that once they found out Carollo was running for commissioner they parted ways "amicably."

I now tend to doubt that, but be that as it may, Riggs decided to do a deal with the Bayside Marketplace folks to put the ferris wheel on their property and not on the property of the Bayfront Park Trust, which Carollo assumed the chairmanship of on getting elected to the commission.

The efforts to get the commission to agree to the placement of the ferris wheel on the Bayside property - requiring both PZAB and commission meetings as well as a 5th amendment to the lease between the city and the Bayside folks dragged on from 2017 to September of 2018, when to no one's surprise, Carollo, in one of his patented, "the city isn't getting enough money out of this deal," managed to scuttle a vote to approve the deal.

Days later, Jim Riggs filed a lawsuit in Circuit Court, and it was then that everyone learned about the private deal between Riggs and Carollo, and realized that once again Carollo's claim of looking out for the taxpayers had a backstory that involved him and money to his bank account.

At the November commission meeting, after a court hearing seeking an injunction, Carollo realizing his ass might be in real jeopardy toned down his demands and the deal passed.

But, this is Miami, where dirty deals often happen after items gets passed  by the commission often to be rewritten, expedited or slowed down depending on who's gotten the City Attorney to drop to her knees in an act of political subservience.

So it was with this deal.

On December 18th, I wrote a story - with photographic evidence - that the ferris wheel was far from completion, and most likely would not be ready for Super Bowl  Week.

As part of that story I also referenced the response of the City Attorney to the letter I had written her about the manner in which I had been told the permitting process for this wheel was being handled, and made a point to point out her proclivity for dropping to her knees, which she took offense too.

Copyrighted:  2011,2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

While Victoria Mendez might not be "officially" in charge of reviewing permits, the fact of the matter is that in the organized criminal conspiracy that passes for municipal governance - as referenced by the allegation surrounding how the City Manager had the permits for the back deck on his house expeditiously permitted, any, and everything is subject to review by the gagsters posing as public officials, and in fact I was told by a source in the know that the building permit for the ferris wheel was only issued last week.

In addition, while there is a "draft" of the 5th amendment to the lease between Bayside and the city floating around, that document, according to Assistant City Attorney Xavier Alban in an email to me on January 7th, that contract had not been approved and signed by the parties. (You can see the draft below the photos.

This morning, January 12th, I went to Bayside and took the following photographs, which I believe supports my belief that there is no way in hell that the ferris wheel will be up and spinning by the 25th of January when the first of the tourists expected to flood Miami for the Super Bowl are expected to start arriving.

So, it looks like while Commissioner "Comemierda" carollo didn't succeed in getting the ferris wheel on Bayfront property, he did succeed with the help of City Attorney Victoria Mendez and the other elves in the building department to fuck over Jim Riggs.

While that's a bad thing for the city, it's hard to feel sorry for Jim Riggs because anyone who does business with Joe Carollo is more often than not subject to get fucked, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out with even a modicum of due diligence.

It's Miami. Bitches!