Gangsters of Miami by Ron Chepesiuk

Author:Ron Chepesiuk [CHEPESIUK, RON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781569801407
Publisher: Barricade Books

9

Gangsters in Blue

BY THE EARLY 1980s, Miami was more like the “Disaster City” than the “Magic City.” It had a multitude of problems, and most of them could be attributed to the rampant violence and corruption associated with the booming Latin American drug trade. During the early 1970s, as the drug trade grew, the Greater Miami region became the port of entry for perhaps 75 percent of all the cocaine and marijuana being smuggled into the United States. As Stanley Marcus, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, explained in a May 1984 Miami Herald article, “It was in South Florida that the criminal transactions of much of the American drug trade was taking place.”

Savage drug wars over the riches of the cocaine trade were leading to shootouts in suburban malls and a daily litter of corpses. Officials from prominent Miami financial institutions were being indicted for their greedy grab of some of the $3 million in laundered drug money flowing daily through the Miami banking system. Over a nine-month period in May 1980 Castro had emptied his jails of criminals and the mentally ill, and many of the so-called Marielitos were walking the Miami streets looking for trouble. In the early 1980s the new gangsters on the block were committing one-third of Miami’s murders as the crime rate skyrocketed.

Miami’s shell-shocked citizenry demanded that the police do something to stop the violence, killing, and mayhem. The city’s municipal government responded by doubling the size of the police force, hiring about 600 fresh recruits between 1980 and 1982. It was about time, for the city had not hired a police recruit in five years. Yet in the rush to recruit, most of the new policemen were not adequately trained or supervised; indeed, fresh-faced police officers with less than three years’ experience had to become field training officers, responsible for deciding whether the new recruits joining the police force should pass probation. If the police departments in Miami and in Dade County had done a thorough check, they would have found that more than a few of the recruits had been gang members while in high school and some had even committed thefts and other kinds of larceny.

Investigators later found that at least one fox had been guarding the hen house. Joaquin Miranda, whom the police assigned to conduct background checks on new recruits, was himself associating with drug dealers. Further, in at least six cases Miranda had left out of the reports potentially damaging information about the recruits, including their use of illegal drugs.

Some of the recruits had gone through the academy with reading skills as low as the fifth grade level, forcing the city to institute remedial reading and writing classes. The lack of basic literary skills led to some strangely—even funny—written field reports. One young officer wrote that a victim had been “bitten on the head” when he actually meant to write “beaten on the head.” Another police officer wrote up a traffic accident to read that the car had “squid marks,” not “squeal marks.

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