Miami: A Young but Turbulent History
Dead man voting
Two months after Miami’s resurrection, voters went to the polls again, this time to vote for a new mayor. After the ballots had been counted, Xavier Suarez emerged as the victor, ousting incumbent Joe Carollo, who had taken office 15 months earlier to replace the late Steve Clark.
But his victory was immediately deemed suspicious because there was such a large disparity between votes cast at the polls and absentee ballots. A Miami Herald investigation determined that many of the absentee ballots had been cast by voters who lived outside Miami’s city limits. And other absentee ballots had been cast by convicted felons, who are forbidden to vote in Florida. On Election Day, several of Suarez’s volunteers paid homeless people $10 each to vote for Suarez.
And in one case, an absentee ballot was cast by a man who had died four years earlier.
In his first two weeks in office, as state investigators began looking into the potential fraud, Suarez fired City Manager Ed Marquez, who was being credited by Wall Street for getting the city back on financial track.
Suarez then tried forcing the resignation of Police Chief Donald Warshaw, along with 70 other department heads, but the State Attorney stepped in and told him that would be illegal. During Suarez’s first two months in office, Miami went through five city managers.
Suarez then appointed City Commissioner Humberto Hernandez – who was under federal indictment for money laundering – to investigate the state agency that was investigating the mayor for voting fraud. The mayor then flew up to New York and told financial analysts that the city’s $70 million shortfall was fiction, a tall tale created by previous mayor and political opponent Joe Carollo. But Wall Street officials did not buy that story. Suarez’s antics were so absurd, even for Miami standards, that Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen began calling him “Mayor Loco.”
Four months after Suarez was sworn into office, a judge voided the election because of fraud. The city that had survived abolishment a year earlier no longer had a mayor. A week later, a separate panel of judges reinstated Carollo as mayor, stating that he would have won in November if it had not been for the fraud. Carollo, whose nickname in the local media was “Crazy Joe”, immediately fired the city manager, replacing him with Miami Police Chief Donald Warshaw. The sixth city manager is six months.
Five months later, Miami Commissioner Humberto Hernandez was convicted for his role in the voter fraud and the unrelated money laundering charge, and ended up serving four years in prison. Although 26 people were arrested in the voter fraud scandal, there was no evidence that Suarez was aware of the illegal activities.
The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. With the exception of the Florida Marlins winning the World Series in 1997, only five years after their inaugural season, Miami managed to remain out of the national spotlight for more than a year.
But that would all come to end on the morning of Thanksgiving Day 1999 when a five–year-old Cuban boy was found clinging to an inner tube three miles off the coast of Florida.