Sometimes the evidence that exposes how a series of calamities came to pass can be easily and readily traced back to a single incident.  The current shit show at Miami City Hall is one of those calamities that can be traced to the Sunday morning after Francis Suarez had been elected in Mayor in November 2017.

That Sunday morning Francis appeared on the Michael Putney Sunday morning talk show, and was asked whether he was going to join his father is supporting Alfie Leon in his runoff campaign against Joe Carollo for the vacant District 3 Commission seat.

There was no love lost between the Suarez family and Joe Carollo, and Xavier Suarez had wasted little time in declaring his support for Leon, when it became evident that Carollo failed to win the first round.

Instead of declaring that he would join his father in supporting Leon, Francis declared that he was going to stay neutral because he wanted to work with whoever got elected.

That decision would almost immediately start to haunt Suarez after Carollo won the runoff, and continued to color and define much of his administration's future which eventually led to this latest fiasco.

I say this because Suarez had won his election to mayor with 86% of the vote, and had hundreds of thousands of dollars left in his PAC that he could have used to bolster Leon's chances.

That morning he was the most popular politician in Miami-Dade County, and if he had declared that he was supporting Leon because he needed to make sure that he had commissioners who would work with him in moving the city forward, the odds are that his support, and his money could have swung the election to Leon.

He didn't, and Carollo went on to win the runoff by roughly 200 votes.

It didn't take long after Carollo moved into city hall that the "CRAZY" JOE CAROLLO from the past revealed that he had only gotten crazier and more dangerous as he set about turning District 3 into his personal fiefdom.

.I will forgo listing the long list of mean, vindictive and manipulative behavior that Carollo engaged in as he set about demonstrating that he intended to be the real power broker at city hall because you can go read all of those stopries for yourself: 2018, 2019, and most of 2020

And even though I spent considerable time writing about Carollo I was only able to detail only some of the many actions that revealed just how devious and dangerous Carollo had become since his last stint as an elected official to city employees, local business owners who he disagreed with, or who refused to pony up money as he set out early on the establishing that his office would operate as Pay For Play cash register.  

For some, the worst exhibits of how crazy he'd become were his rants and personal attacks during commission meetings. (You can go to my 2018-2019 Archive to read those stories and watch those videos.)

Things only got worse after Carollo conspired with Alex Diaz de la Portilla to get him elected to the vacant District 1 Commission seat, vacated by Willie Gort, who after a long career of shuck and jive grifting received as a parting gift for his years of service as a pliable "team player" an appointment to the Miami-Dade Ethics Commission, thereby insuring that the history of that group continues to reflect their role as gatekeepers for the Family and Friends Plan.

THE EASIEST PEOPLE TO HUSTLE ARE THE ONES WHO FANCY THEMSELVES HUSTLERS

Francis Suarez has always had a thing about cops. When his father was Mayor, and received some death threats for his decisions in refusing to honor Nelson Mandela, Francis was essentially given his own personal police protection, and as told by men who were his school mates at the time, there was nothing that he enjoyed more than running his mouth and then running to those cops so that they could protect him from the school yard ass whipping that normally came with being a privileged little prick.

Even before he was elected, Mayor Suarez had arranged to have on-duty Miami police assigned to protect him 24/7. That benefit only increased after he became mayor and he had both SIS officers and Sgt-At-Arms providing him with the kind of personal protection that included blocking anyone from entering the men's bathroom in the lobby of city hall when the Mayor needed to piss and escorting him to private parties and family events.

All of that was possible because Suarez made sure even before he was elected that his personal choice for police chief would be Jorge Colina, who then supposedly so impressed Emilio "Colonel Klink" Gonzalez after he was appointed City Manager that the Klinker declared he didn't need to conduct a search to replace Chief Rudy Llanes .

Colina more or less fulfilled his obligations as being Suarez's sock puppet before deciding that perhaps the time had come to retire.

To replace Colina, a "search committee" was formed to conduct a national search, with insiders expecting that the final selection would be someone from inside the department.

Keeping to that script the search committee supposedly settled on Assistant Chief Manny Morales, a choice that Suarez, for whatever reason, was not happy with.

Full of himself as a budding national political figure, Suarez managed to bump into Art Acevedo at the same time that Art Acevedo was seeing the handwriting on the wall in Huston, and both Suarez and Acevedo, formed a mutual bond as each obviously tried to blow smoke up the other's ass.

Suarez ordered the ever pliable City Manager Art Noriega - himself selected and appointed as part of an agreement with Alex D Diaz de la Portilla after he was elected to the District 1 seat - to ignore the decision of the "search committee," and instead appoint Art Acevedo, going out of his way to praise Acevedo almost to the point of proclaiming his arrival in Miami as better than the second coming of the Baby Jesus.

It didn't take long however, before it became evident that Acevedo's habit of recklessly running his mouth as well as lack of knowledge about how the City of Miami really operates, as well as lacking the kind of detailed management skills that the really good Chief's of Police who make it onto the national stage have all insured that he would not be around long.

It was also evident that Carollo and Diaz de la Portilla - engaging in a little transactional fence mending, after months of school yard squabbling over whose dick was the biggest - seized on Acevedo's claim that Miami was run by the Cuban Mafia - which in reality is actually quite true as a useful description of who these grifters run the city - jumped at the opportunity to push him out the door at a time that it benefited Carollo the most - which in this case was a month before the November election where Carollo could use his antics and breast beating as the protector of the Cubans in the city.

And so it all came to pass in a series of shit show performances over the last couple weeks as his fellow commissioners stepped back and allowed Joe to be Joe: Crazy, vindictive, mendacious, yet weaving together a plausible case that Art Acevedo really didn't deserve to be the Chief of Police.

Carollo's antics, though rude, crude in the classic Carollo tradition of weaving a few facts into a tapestry of insane accusation and personal attacks were in this case bolstered by Acevedo's part behavior which were revealed in the below document, and which given the world we live in today, all but guarantees that no city can risk having a guy with this kind of background running their police department.  

After the dust settles from all of this, the chances of Art Acevedo ever becoming the Chief of Police of a major American city again, are slim, none and Zippo.

YOU ARE INVITED FOR AN AFTERNOON BATTLE INVOLVING HAND GRANADES AT 3 PM

Art Acevedo's only way out of this situation, other than to slink out of town with his tail between his legs,  is to show up at Miami City Hall this afternoon trailed by TV crews from as many of the cable TV networks as he can coax, and bring along a box of hand grenades that contain real, and damning inside information of what Carollo and Diaz de la Portilla have been up to and go after them with the same ferocity, if not more, than they went after him during the last two meetings.

He's got to walk into City Hall as a disgraced Chief of Police who got manhandled by two members of the Cuban political mafia and walk out as a fire breathing, no holds barred champion of fighting public corruption within police departments and municipal governments.

The big question is not only whether he's personally capable of doing this, but whether Commission Chairman Ken "Selfie Boy" Russell will give him free reign to do what he needs to do.

Russell has repeatedly shown himself to be a weak, ineffectual commission chairman when it's come to allowing people to go after Carollo the same way that Carollo has gone after them during public meetings.

If Russell needs to strap on a back brace and foot long dildo to bolster his courage to be able to tell Carollo and Diaz de la Portilla to shut up and let Acevedo speak if he shows up for battle, then he better go shopping before this afternoon's activities..  

If he can do that, then maybe the show will be both entertaining and informative and let Acevedo walk out with dome dignity remaining.

If Russell knuckles under though, it's going to be a nasty one-sided beat down that Acevedo will look back for the rest of his life and realize that the worst professional mistake he ever made was coming to Miami.

The one thing that will quickly define just how serious Acevedo is will depend on whether he comes in with names, dates, and documents that detail just how badly Carollo and Diaz de la Portilla have been behaving behind closed doors, or whether he shows up and tries to get by by regurgitating the haphazard and largely ineffectual 8 page memo that I'm sure he was convinced to prepare as a fallback whistleblower bit of ass-covering protection.

Eleven years ago, then former Chief of Police Miguel Exposito tried to ward off being fired by claiming that his actions in reporting that Mayor Tomas Regalado tried to bribe him to resign represented a whistleblower action.

In fact, city employees filing whistleblower complaints as a way to try and protect themselves from getting fired is so common, that in the 3rd hour of the first season of the TV series I've been working on about political corruption in Miami, I have my Chief declare that he thinks he should put together a whistleblower complaint after he and his Deputy Chief are told by an Assistant State Attorney that contrary to their wishes, the State Attorney has found out that the Chief has been wearing a wire in an effort to entrap the Mayor (JULIO) into admitting that the payout that the City Manager keeps offering him to resign is actually a bribe. SALAZAR is an FDLE Agent handling the case.

While Acevedo has been left with limited options, Carollo has Captain Javier Ortiz, who earlier this week filed his own whistleblower lawsuit in response to the information that continues to surface about former Deputy Chief Papier's wife and her "running up over the curb and damaging her police SUV,  as a perennial club in his bag of tricks.

I've been told that Acevedo, who as part of the tradition of agreeing to certain "things" with the Mayor as a condition of employment also has a few string left dangling that Carollo might have knowledge and access to. Carollo is a guy, who, regardless of his many faults, is still  really skillful as getting his hands on damning information, and on knowning how to use that information to his advantage.

At the same time there are a lot of people who hate Carollo and Diaz de la Portilla, and have probably reached out to Acevedo with information of some of the sleazy stuff that they have been engaged in for the last couple years, some of it, including some of what Acevedo alleged in his 8 page memo, while sleazy and unethical, is not illegal per say, and that's where he has to be very careful.

Carollo can, and will whine like a baby if Acevedo makes a claim that he can not support with documents and/or witnesses, and once Carollo starts, the only way to shut his ass up will be to hit him between the eyes with a cattle prod because "Selfie Boy" Ken Russell, will fold like a napkin.

All in all, todays show could be more entertaining that anything else you'll find on TV.

If you go to City Hall, drink a lot of water, and if you stay home to watch it on TV make sure you have a lot of popcorn because I predict that the shit show could go late into the night.

It's Miami, Bitches.