Anybody want to bet that this story is far from over?

It's always Miami, Bitches!

NUMBER 88 - JUNE 3, 2019

I WAS WRONG. ALEX DIAZ DE LA PORTILLA WON'T BE ABLE TO PULL A CAROLLO IF HE SOMEHOW MANAGES TO GET ELECTED TO  THE MIAMI CITY COMMISSION

In my last story I raised the possibility that one of the reasons - if not the main reason - that Alex Diaz de la Portilla was running for the Miami City Commission was that if he got elected he might be able to pull a Carollo and get the city to treat the code violation that has been lodged against his house for the last two years with the same kind of kid gloves that Carollo has received.

Well, I was wrong.

I was wrong, first because I kept failing to include "Diaz" as part of Alez's name when I tried doing a record search after I was told a rumor that the house was in foreclosure - my bad -  and secondly, because in January of this year Diaz de la Portilla and his ex-wife lost a lawsuit filed by Wells Fargo Bank in a foreclosure action on the property.

Here is a copy of the Final Judgement in that case.

If he had money to pay for this illegal construction, why didn't he have money for mortgage payments?

It's one thing if you figure that you can fix up and sell a house ahead of it being taken away from you in a foreclosure action, but given the amount that the bank claimed that Diaz de la Portilla owed - $359,798.96 - you really got to wonder whether he actually thought he had a snowball's chance in hell of saving the property from the bank, and then after that, getting past the illegal construction - construction which from all appearances were beyond just doing some adjustments to make it legal?

Was he operating on some rational plan, or had he convinced himself that he could bullshit his way through all of it because he was Alex de la Portilla, a perennial political candidate, and sometime office holder.

Again, you got to wonder whether the city would have shown the same degree of tolerance in granting time extension after time extension on what were obviously bogus claims about efforts to correct the violations to someone named, Smith or Jones, or Fuller, including the one on October 24, 2018, when Lazlo Orta, the Deputy Director of Code Enforcement, who you can see in the below video clip, on his own, offered an additional 90 day time extension claiming that he was doing so because Humberto Hernandez was on top of things with a contractor and engineer?  

What contractor? What engineer?  

Was any work ever done on the property in an effort to clean up the violations at any time from the initial inspector's serving a Notice of Violation in January of 2017, to January 22, 2019, the last day of the extension that Orta recommended?

From what transpired, including the fact that on October 19th, five days before this Code Enforcement Board hearing, the judge had set the date for a non jury trial on the foreclosure, one has to wonder whether the claim made by Orta was based on fact, or on an outright  lie?

As the record show, Diaz de la Portilla lost the case, and the bank took possession of the house.  

The property was scheduled to be sold at a mortgage foreclosure sale on May 13th, but at the last minute the bank filed a motion to cancel the sale. A hearing is scheduled for July 15th

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