Miami, a sunny place for shady people
Plus, a new place for news
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers, grandfathers, father figures, and single mothers that do it all. This was my first Father’s Day as the honoree, so to speak, which was a bit surreal. Life sneaks up on you, even when you know it’s coming. I’m just lucky that it’s been so kind to me of late.
It’s easy to see the profit motive that drives Hallmark holidays, but they’re now the rare shared traditions in a time isolation and radicalization.
Tonight, we’ve got a look at gross corruption in Miami, the biggest scammer in Florida not named Ron DeSantis, and what Americans really need to know about the latest GOP contender.
A quick announcement
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Going forward, I plan to spend more time posting news and updates in Progress Report’s Notes section. It’s free to everyone, but we’ll start having regular discussions about the news for premium members who make this work possible. Notes are available for the Substack app and web browser.
Alright, let’s get going!
by
The City of Miami is an absolute dumpster fire. Aside from the evergreen issues of chronic flooding, lack of public transportation, skyrocketing housing costs, and rampant corruption, the city right now is being consumed by nonstop scandals.
Here’s a quick look at the most egregious of them:
A few weeks ago, one of the most perennially corrupt characters in Miami politics, Commissioner Joe Carollo, lost a lawsuit against the owners of a venue in Little Havana called Ball & Chain. Carollo, a no stranger to all manner of abuse, and was ordered to pay $63.5 million and the venue’s legal fees for weaponizing city agencies against Ball & Chain and its tenants as payback for their support for one of Carollo’s political opponents.
City Attorney Victoria Méndez — who was deposed and is a witness in a second lawsuit against the city by the owners of Ball & Chain — has been implicated in a corruption scandal involving a Miami-Dade County real estate program. The Guardian Program of Dade County is supposed to sell the properties of people who cannot care for themselves and use the profits to pay for their care. Instead, they were sold to Méndez’s family, including her husband, at cut rate prices, allowing the family to flip them for big profits.
In May, a redrawing of the City Commission map was tossed out after a federal judge found that its racial gerrymandering likely violated the Fourteenth Amendment. They’ve just released a new map, which activists call just as bad.
And last but not least, Mayor Francis Suarez is now under FBI investigation after secretly taking up to $170,000 in payments from a developer that later thanked Suarez in an email for intervening with the zoning director to cut red tape for one of their projects.
When I tried to ask Suarez about the investigation when I saw him outside the Trump arraignment, Miami Police pushed me against a wall.
Miami residents are hurting. The city is besieged by problems, the quality of life is declining, cost of living is soaring, and many of us are being pushed out. Instead of addressing these issues, the people in charge are grifting and using public office for their own political and financial benefit.
You’d think that any mayor with half a brain would realize that being under active FBI investigation and presiding over a dumpster fire of a city government are not ideal conditions for launching a presidential campaign, but Francis Suarez last week announced that he’s throwing caution to the wind and joining the Republican primary battle royal for the White House. (Suarez is the guy who bet on crypto as the future of government funding, so it may be that saying that he has half a brain was too generous).
Suarez has never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, and really only has his job because his dad was mayor of Miami in the ‘80s and then for a short time again in the ‘90s. Up until the recent crypto-market crash, he was mostly known for peddling a grift cryptocurrency called “MiamiCoin,” which should alone be enough to disqualify him from a future in public life.
Like Lincoln on the penny, Suarez played such a pivotal role in selling the crypto grift that he deserved to have his face plastered across the currency of slick losers. During an appearance on Fox & Friends, he promised that the revenue generated by the city’s stake in MiamiCoin would be distributed to residents like a dividend, and even claimed that “if this thing continues to grow, there is a world under which we can actually run the city without taxes.”
Needless to say, none of that happened. Instead, MiamiCoin lost 99% of its value and was suspended from trading.
Investment is not the only field in which Suarez seems to lack judgment. Hiring is not his strong suit; a former aide, Rene Pedrosa, pleaded guilty for child pornography and molesting a 16-year-old boy in the conference room of Miami City hall. Ethics are also a weak point, as Suarez has accepted unethical gifts from entities that have business before the Miami Commission, including $30,000 Formula 1 tickets and similarly high priced tickets to Miami Heat Games.
How has this total failson dope made it this far? And why does he think that he can keep moving up despite all of his failures and scandals? For one, growing up the son of one of the city’s most powerful political figures created a sense of birthright and cleared his path forward. Plus, he has largely been treated with kid gloves by a mostly compliant and sycophantic press that refuses to challenge or even question his rampant corruption and grift.
One cringe-worthy example: A Washington Post article from September 2021 provided an uncritical and shallow portrayal of MiamiCoin and Suarez’s plan to transform the city into the world’s “cryptocurrency innovation hub,” as if any of those words ever made any sense.
The story also characterized the mayor’s suggestion that using an unsecured digital token that nobody ever wanted could result in a “metropolis free from taxes” as a “lofty idea,” even if it was obviously going to crash. The piece reads like a press release by Suarez’s team, with no mention of conflicts of interest, sustainability, or the fact that crypto was always an obvious scam.
Suarez has long been able to behave with impunity and bullshit his way out of trouble, going all the way back to when he got caught up in an absentee ballot fraud scandal during his father’s mayoral campaign. Incredibly, he got away with claiming that he was definitely not the “F. Suarez” that signed the ballots as they were being filled out, even though he was the one that collected them. His dad was ultimately thrown out of office by a judge for election fraud.
Perhaps it’s good that he’s running for president, because it means that people outside Miami are going to start paying attention to him. Thus far, Suarez looks like a deer in headlights when confronted with even slight pushback from reporters, something he is not used to in Miami. Politicians can’t intimidate national media outlets the same way they do to local ones in Miami, threatening to withhold advertising money and calling editors to get reporters fired when they publish criticism of corrupt public officials.
People have asked me why Suarez is embarking in this quixotic run for president. The first reason is simple: While most people who run for higher public office are naturally narcissistic, Suarez has an even bigger ego than most, so he actually believes that he could catch fire and somehow win.
Failing that, he’ll likely raise a lot of money from tech companies and other special interests that he can use on a future campaign, and should another Republican win the White House, he could be in score himself an ambassadorship or other appointment. If all else fails, the grift can always continue with a high paying lobbying position. When you are blessed with zero self-awareness and even less shame, anything is possible.
Miami, a sunny place for shady people.
Thomas Kennedy is an elected Democratic National Committee member from Florida. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @tomaskenn.
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JZ, you are a treasure! No need to wade thru the Miami Herald slop sheet when you have summarized all I need to know about local politics. Smarmy stuff going on!
We need to know. Thanks for the reporting.