Dance of the Reptiles

by Carl Hiaasen

  The boondoggle was a Republican operation from start to finish, and election-year amnesia has afflicted almost everyone involved.

  Marco Rubio, for example, was the House speaker at the time the courthouse bond issue got tacked on to a 142-page transportation bill. For such a young fellow, Rubio has frequent memory lapses. Just as he supposedly couldn’t remember all those personal expenses he put on his GOP American Express card, he now says he can’t remember the hefty courthouse appropriation. Rubio insists the project was a state Senate priority and that he had nothing to do with it.

  Unfortunately, his version of events is disputed by his old buddy and former House budget chief, Ray Sansom, now awaiting trial for allegedly steering $6 million in public funds to build a jet hangar for a rich crony (another suspect budget item that Rubio cannot recall). Sansom says Rubio personally assured him that the new First DCA courthouse was a top priority, and that Hawkes repeatedly reminded him of Rubio’s interest.

  Also at odds with Rubio’s claim of noninvolvement is an e-mail circulated among the judges on the building committee for the new district courthouse. The e-mail, obtained by Lucy Morgan of The St. Petersburg Times, identified the “heroes” in the Legislature who helped secure money for the opulent new structure. Among four who were lauded as “especially helpful” was “House Speaker Marco Rubio.”

  Now running for the U.S. Senate on a platform of cost-cutting and fiscal responsibility, Rubio doesn’t wish to be outed as a helpful “hero” behind Tallahassee’s new Taj Mahal. “I never heard of this list,” he said.

  Numerous fellow Republicans wish they’d never heard of it, either. Sen. Victor Crist of Tampa (no relation to the governor) is named in the e-mail. So is former Senate President Jeff Pruitt. Likewise for Representatives Dean Cannon and Will Weatherford, both future House speakers.

  All these guys present themselves as vigilant guardians against wasteful spending, so it’s no surprise that they now claim memory loss about the courthouse splurge. Sen. Crist said he added the amendment to the Senate bill at the request of Pruitt, who of course says he doesn’t remember.

  Gov. Charlie Crist, then a loyal Republican, signed the legislative package despite a plea from Florida Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis for him to veto the courthouse funding. The governor, now an independent candidate for the Senate, said he can’t recall Lewis’s concern.

  Somebody please feed these stooges some ginkgo.

  And God forbid they should actually read an appropriations bill before approving it. Evidently, $35 million is chump change to the GOP lawmakers who controlled (and still control) the flow of public money in Tallahassee.

  The I-know-nothing defense presented by Rubio and other party leaders was expanded by Weatherford, the House member from Wesley Chapel, who, despite being named to the courthouse heroes list, now condemns the project as “a monstrosity.” Said he: “I doubt that people in the Legislature had any idea what they were doing.”

  If only that were true.

  April 7, 2012

  Stimulus Spending for Party Animals

  In a new twist on stimulus spending, the government’s General Services Administration laid out more than $822,000 for a rocking mega-party at a gambling resort near Las Vegas. It was fabulous for the economy of Nevada; not so good for U.S. taxpayers.

  The idiot who came up with this boondoggle still hasn’t been publicly identified, but the supposed mission was to reward 300 federal workers with an over-the-top conference in October 2010 at the M Resort and Casino.

  Apparently, six advance scouting trips were necessary, costing a mere $130,000. Here are some of the other items paid for by you and me:

  * A $31,208 “networking” reception that offered a thousand sushi rolls bought for $7 apiece, and morsels of gourmet cheese for which Uncle Sam paid about $19 per attendee.

  * Commemorative coins, delivered in velvet-lined boxes to all participants at a tab of $6,325.

  * Breakfast every day at $44 per head.

  * “Team-building” conferences that included an inspiring $75,000 presentation on how to screw together a bicycle.

  * The professional services of a clown (who probably felt right at home) and a mind reader, whose bold fee of $3,200 suggests that he also performed some hypnotism.

  A powerful and far-reaching agency, the GSA is in charge of major government purchases such as office buildings and fleet vehicles. Why not reward its workers for efficiency and frugality by sending them to a Vegas casino at taxpayer expense? Brilliant.

  The scandal is the talk of Washington, fueling as it does a widespread national sentiment that government is wasteful, arrogant, and clueless. As the economy claws back from a near-paralyzing recession, it’s boggling that anyone in a position of authority could dream up such a junket for federal bureaucrats and that their knuckleheaded bosses would approve.

  On the eve of a critical inspector general’s report, the White House moved quickly to douse the flames. GSA Administrator Martha Johnson resigned last week, and two of her top people were fired. Four other managers were put on leave.

  Congress plans to hold hearings about the Vegas extravaganza, and it would be nice to think that those responsible will be hauled forward to answer the question: “What on earth were you thinking?”

  Next question: “Did you at least learn how to build a bicycle?”

  We know that one of the high-ranking GSA folks on the trip was Robert A. Peck, head of the agency’s Public Buildings Service. He threw a $2,000 bash in his top-floor suite at the M. Peck no longer has a job with GSA, but he’ll always have those memories. And if he got his picture taken with a fake Elvis, we probably paid for that, too.

  It’s easy to flog the Obama administration for lax management, but the truth is that the GSA has been roaring out of control for a long time. Imagine a humongous stoned octopus that has no idea what all its legs are doing.

  One embarrassing GSA headline after another plagued the second Bush administration. The agency’s chief of staff resigned and was convicted of lying to Congress during the investigation of scumbag lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who later went to prison.

  And Bush’s choice for GSA administrator, Lurita Doan, departed under pressure after a series of controversies. Among other things, she was accused of trying to steer government contracts to her pals, which she denied, and had sought to slash the budget of investigators looking at gross overspending within the agency.

  The most infamous of GSA extravagances surfaced during the Reagan years, when it was revealed that the Pentagon had been paying $535 each for hammers and a bowel-churning $640 for toilet seats. It turned out there was nothing special about those toilet seats, either. They weren’t made of titanium or even skid-proof Kevlar, and they served no function other than to prevent the user from falling into the commode.

  The tradition of hog-wild excess continues, now with the Las Vegas excursion. As this is being written, reporters are intrepidly searching for the clown and the mind reader who were brought in to entertain the partiers.

  It goes without saying that the GSA wasn’t smart enough to hire a mime, who might keep his mouth shut, or a psychic, who could have warned of the furor to come.

  This time, what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas.

  Only our tax money did.

  LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

  September 2, 2001

  Human Desperation Fuels Greed on the High Seas

  The indictment of two alleged alien smugglers gives hope that the U.S. government is serious about cracking down on a dangerous and cold-blooded commerce.

  Three children and three adults drowned off Key West on a blustery night in July when a smuggling run turned to disaster. What happened was beyond the realm of nightmares. Roberto Montero-Domínguez and Osvaldo Fernández-Marrero have been charged with conspiracy, attempted smuggling for financial gain, and attempted smuggling resulting in death. If convicted, the Miami-Dade men could be sentenced to die.

  Prosecu
tors are making a big show out of the case because indictments are so rare. Refugees often are reluctant to testify, as are the family members who paid for the illicit passage. This time, though, some of the survivors went before a grand jury. It has been speculated that the government offered not to repatriate them to Cuba in exchange for their testimony.

  That would give defense attorneys something to chew on. Still, it’s a breakthrough for prosecutors to get willing eyewitnesses in an alien-smuggling case.

  The outlaw trade is booming, thanks partly to the dry-foot immigration policy that allows Cuban migrants to remain here if they make it ashore by any means.

  That was the prayer of those 26 people who were met on a beach east of Havana and crammed on a 27-foot speedboat that had come from Florida to get them.

  The trip back was calamitous. According to authorities, the passengers became frantic as the waves grew to eight feet and the boat began to wallow. At that point, one of the two alleged smugglers pulled a gun and ordered everyone to calm down.

  When the migrants rushed to the back of the boat, it pitched bow over stern and sank. The shouts of the survivors were heard by the crew of a passing freighter. As a bleak irony, the wife and two daughters of one of the alleged smugglers were among those who perished.

  Both men have pleaded innocent and have yet to present their accounts of the voyage. Don’t be surprised if they cast themselves in heroic roles, claiming they didn’t do it for money but, rather, to rescue others from communist oppression.

  Whatever their story might be, the crossing from Cuba was no casual pleasure cruise. Ask yourself what kind of a captain sets out across rough seas in the dead of night on a grossly overloaded vessel with only two or three life jackets. It’s a textbook smuggler scenario. They’re paid thousands of dollars per head, so they pack as many bodies on board as possible. Only greed breeds that kind of recklessness.

  Ask yourself who would get on such a precariously crowded craft, and the answer is obvious: anyone desperate and determined enough to get to the United States. Sadly, that hunger of the heart is where the profit lies for the alien smuggler. What makes the trade so repugnant is its exploitation of human longing.

  Whether a migrant is Cuban or Haitian, he or she usually has relatives waiting in Florida and always the promise of a brighter future. The stronger a person’s desire to come here, the more they’re willing to pay—and the greater the chance they’re willing to take.

  Cashing in on the immigrant dream is a scummy tradition as old as the high seas. Twenty years ago, plenty of freelance captains made a killing off the Mariel exodus, gouging big bucks from anxious families trying to get relatives out of Cuba before Castro slammed the door.

  Today’s profiteers do so with no invitation from Fidel Castro. The trips usually are made at night with fast boats that deliver their human cargo to the Bahamas or, increasingly, to the Keys. Nobody knows how many refugees have died on these crossings or under what dreadful circumstances. There are known instances of panicky smugglers ordering all their passengers into the water, whether the passengers could swim or not.

  That was the scene a few years ago when a group of terrified Haitians was forced overboard off a Broward beach. Tragically, several drowned.

  More recently, suspicious trauma injuries have been observed on bodies of Cuban refugees that were found floating in the Keys. Who knows what happened.

  As long as there’s money in it, there’ll always be smugglers. However, a successful prosecution of Montero and Fernández would introduce a serious new element of risk for those who traffic in human desperation.

  May 5, 2002

  One Little Lost Girl, One Bureaucratic Mess

  Three feet tall. Forty pounds. No wonder Rilya Wilson got lost. She’s way too small for a place as big and crowded as Florida.

  There are 16 million people here, mostly grown-ups busy with their own lives and their own grown-up problems. For a little 5-year-old who doesn’t say much and who has no mother or father speaking up for her, it’s not easy to get noticed.

  For 15 months, Florida’s child welfare agency failed to notice that Rilya Wilson wasn’t where she was supposed to be, at the home of a woman who says she is Rilya’s grandmother.

  Geralyn Graham said somebody who claimed to be from the state had taken the child away. Graham said she wasn’t suspicious because she’d been calling authorities to report that Rilya was having behavioral problems and needed professional help.

  As young as she was, Rilya already had led a hard and confusing life. Her mother was a cocaine addict. Her father might or might not be Geralyn Graham’s often arrested son. Graham says that Rilya is definitely her granddaughter and that she had planned to adopt her. Not long after the girl was taken away, Graham phoned Rilya’s caseworker to ask when Rilya would be returned.

  Graham says she was told not to worry, everything would be fine. That was in early 2001.

  Last week, out of the blue, somebody else from the Department of Children and Families showed up at Graham’s house in Kendall. They asked to visit with Rilya. Geralyn Graham said she was stunned. Those who she thought were treating her granddaughter didn’t have her after all.

  With well-practiced chagrin, Florida child-care authorities admit that there was an awful lapse in supervision. They don’t know where Rilya Wilson is, who has her, or what in the world happened. They don’t know if she’s healthy or sick. They don’t know if she’s well fed or hungry. They don’t know if she’s being loved or ignored or worse. They don’t even know if she’s dead or alive.

  Three feet tall, 40 pounds—and lost by a bureaucracy that remains a teetering monument to the incompetence of grown-ups.

  This despite the fact that the state had hastily retooled the laws meant to protect at-risk children from abuse and neglect. It happened after a 6-year-old girl named Kayla McKean was viciously murdered by her own father on the day before Thanksgiving in 1998.

  The following year, the Legislature made it a crime for police officers, teachers, and others who work with kids not to report suspected instances of abuse. A special hotline was swamped with phone tips, and the backlog of cases exploded from 4,000 to more than 50,000 in only two years. Meanwhile, more children under state supervision were dying than ever—a total of 60 in 1999 and 2000. The stories are excruciatingly familiar, as are the DCF’s dismal apologies.

  Despite the tragedies, Florida still spends too little to protect its youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Caseworkers, many of whom are fiercely dedicated, remain underpaid and overloaded. Inevitably, a few are also lazy bunglers.

  The caseworker assigned to Rilya Wilson, Deborah Muskelly, quit a few months ago after an audit revealed that she had falsified records and wasn’t making the required monthly visits to some of the children assigned to her. Evidently, no one checked on Rilya Wilson for a long time. The best-case scenario is that she was taken from Graham’s house by someone who truly cared about her, and that today she is leading a happy, settled life somewhere safe. The worst-case scenario needs no delineation.

  So chaotic and haphazard is the child-care infrastructure that it’s possible Rilya was picked up by DFC workers and placed in a foster home, and the information simply wasn’t put in her file. Whatever really happened, one fact is indisputable: Rilya went missing because the state stopped paying attention.

  As of this writing, the child hasn’t yet been located. However, she’s no longer just another name and number in the data bank. Rilya is newly famous, her photo televised all over the country. Missouri police thought she might be the girl of similar age and size, known only as “Precious Doe,” who was found savagely killed near Kansas City. Palm prints thought to be Rilya’s didn’t match those of the dead child in Missouri, but authorities are seeking a DNA test to make sure.

  Meanwhile, Rilya’s mother has surfaced in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is tearfully denouncing Florida officials for misplacing the daughter that she herself gave up in favor of dope.


  Finally, Rilya Wilson has been noticed, and she didn’t have to make a sound.

  All she had to do was disappear.

  Note: Rilya has never been found, but she is presumed dead. On February 12, 2013, Geralyn Graham was sentenced to 55 years in prison for kidnapping and child abuse in the case. Graham was Rilya’s foster parent, not her grandmother, as she first claimed.

  February 1, 2004

  “Utter Lack of Humanity” Killed Paisley

  The prolonged, pain-racked death of young Omar Paisley is like a tale from the old Soviet gulags. That it happened only last year at the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center is an atrocity and a heinous stain on Florida’s justice system.

  Grand jurors proclaimed themselves “united in our outrage,” and last week they indicted two nurses for manslaughter and third-degree murder. Yet the panel’s 50-page report, alternately chilling and sickening, goes far beyond the gruesome account of Paisley’s final days. It describes a facility in borderline chaos, crippled by an inept bureaucracy and indifferent workers.

  “At every turn in our investigation,” the grand jury wrote, “we were confronted with incompetence, ambivalence and negligence on the part of the administration and the staff of the M-DRJDC as well as the nurses employed by Miami Children’s Hospital [which provided medical staff for the detention center].”

  Paisley, 17, had been charged with aggravated battery after a fight. He’d taken a plea agreement and was staying at M-DRJDC until he could move to Bay Point Schools, a live-in program where he would receive counseling.

  On the morning of June 7, 2003, Paisley told staff members and other inmates that he felt ill. As required, he filled out a “Youth Request for Sick Call” form. “My stomach hurts really bad,” he wrote. “I don’t know what to do. I cand [sic] sleep.”

  Paisley didn’t know it, but he was dying from a ruptured appendix. He would spend the next and final two days of his life in slow torture—vomiting, soiling himself, and begging for help. The licensed practical nurses who were supposed to treat him were Gaile Loperfido and Dianne Demeritte. The grand jury found their conduct “so outrageous as to rise to the level of criminal negligence,” and it indicted them.