Dance of the Reptiles (18 page)

It’s now embarrassingly obvious that her inclusion in the DAC airport-management contract was a charade. The big shots needed a black contractor on board in order to win the necessary votes, and Forrest was in the right place with the right connections.

Once the bid was approved, she was basically expected to take the dough and stay out of the way. Nobody would have been the wiser if only she’d kept up her side payments to the late mayor’s brother.

The arrangement between Forrest and Richard Clark
ended in 1997. Clark’s lawsuit says Forrest still owes him $163,968; she says he didn’t do anything to earn it. In any event, Clark seems to be doing just fine. Now retired in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he’s still profiting from his associations at MIA—as a lobbyist for the group that runs the duty-free shops.

You can understand why politicians and their pals don’t want to give up their stranglehold on the airport. It’s a place where ridiculous sums of money seem to fall from the sky, and all you’ve got to do is hold out your arms and catch it.

Every month, nearly $50,000 lands on Linda Forrest. Nobody in authority asks where it goes, because they don’t care. In this way, $5.8 million has evaporated in a single stinking deal.

Plenty of experienced, qualified black contractors would have been thrilled to get a piece of the airport project—and would have actually put in the work. That isn’t what the deal makers wanted. They wanted a front.

Given what we know about MIA, it’s harrowing to think how many millions of dollars have been squandered, funneled off, or diverted to friends and relatives of elected officials. One day MIA’s expansion might be finished, but in the meantime it’s enriching too many people who haven’t lifted a finger except to count the cash.

September 7, 2003

For Some, Indentured Misery Is a Way of Life

“They’re not worth killing anyhow.”

With those compassionate words, North Florida farmer Thomas R. Lee summed up his view of many of the laborers who sweat and toil in his potato plant.

“They are not much more than a damn animal, to be honest
with you,” he told
Herald
reporter Ronnie Greene. “The good people that you do hire, you are going to treat them right, and do them right. A lot of these type of people, if you give them $25, they are going to drink it up and dope it up.”

It would be nice to report that Thomas R. Lee is an anachronism in 21st-century American agriculture, but he’s not. He might be more blunt-spoken than the folks at Tropicana and Taco Bell, but they’re all in essentially the same business: exploiting the poor and the pathetic for profit.

Generations pass, but the story of the farmworker never changes, as Greene and photographer Nuri Vallbona graphically documented in a recent
Herald
series. The men and women who pick the fruit and vegetables that we eat live too often in indentured misery. Efforts to improve abominable working conditions are regularly thwarted by elected officials with family and financial ties to Big Agriculture.

To avoid lawsuits and ugly publicity, corporate farm operators take great pains to try to buffer themselves from the sickening abuses that occur daily in the fields and work camps.

Potato farmer Lee, for example, does not directly hire or pay his workers. For that, he employs a fine upstanding citizen named Ronald M. “Too Tall” Jones.

Jones is an independent crew-chief contractor, otherwise known as a crew boss. It’s not an occupation that tends to attract sensitive, big-hearted souls.

According to those who have worked for him, Jones recruits primarily homeless persons, many with crack and alcohol addictions that make them vulnerable to intimidation. In a plain work van or his own Cadillac Escalade, Jones trolls public parks and shelters in the greater Jacksonville area, rolling up with fat wads of cash and promises of other recreational enticements.

By no mere coincidence, he also owns several grubby
housing camps for farmworkers. There you can purchase marked-up food, beer, liquor, and cigarettes. According to at least five laborers, Jones is also glad to extend cash loans—at 100 percent interest.

One potato worker who had calculated his week’s pay at $300 was crestfallen to end up with only $35, Jones having voluminously deducted for rent and other “expenses.”

As you might expect, Jones was not available to be interviewed about his employment practices. One of his camps was recently shut down as unfit for human habitation.

Crew bosses get away with ripping off laborers because they purposely select those who, for a variety of personal reasons, are reluctant to complain. Said Gregory S. Schell, a lawyer representing migrant workers: “You’ve made a job so bad that the only people who are going to do farmwork are undocumented aliens or crack addicts.”

As a major agricultural state, Florida is home territory for some of the industry’s sleaziest and most brutal crew chiefs. More than 200 have been barred for offenses such as cheating workers, while a dozen bosses and migrant smugglers have been imprisoned for slavery, assault, sexual exploitation, and other crimes against farmworkers.

Naturally, the people on the high end of the profit chain claim to deplore the predatory treatment of laborers. They will also hastily add that the problem is out of their hands, since many deal strictly with the independent contractors supplying the crews.

The immorality of that dodge did not escape U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore, who, during the recent trial of several crew bosses, suggested that the blanket of guilt and shame also belongs upon those at the top of the corporate ladder.

Efforts to improve working conditions for farmworkers are regularly thwarted.

Every executive at Lykes Bros. or Consolidated Citrus is well aware of what life is like for the farm crews who make those companies rich. The big shots know all about the rip-offs, the slum housing, the loan sharking, the beatings and rapes—yet they continue to do business with the same thug bosses.

Why? Because the system works fabulously. The crops get picked, the money rolls in, and if anybody gets in trouble, it’s the crew chief. The rich white guys running the farm are safe.

Hefty campaign donations guarantee a smooth ride in the Legislature, where two bills that would have helped Florida farmworkers in a modest way were dead on arrival this year. One bill would have enabled those who get cheated on their pay to sue the growers. The other measure would have provided laborers with information about the pesticides being sprayed on the crops. Both measures were deemed too burdensome for farmers, proving once again that the lawmakers’ regard for those who work the fields is really no different from that of Thomas R. Lee.

It’s easier on the conscience to think of them as animals when you treat them that way.

January 23, 2005

Getting Rich in the Newspaper Business

As President Bush took the oath of office Thursday, it was hard not to be swept along in the tide of hope and optimism.

That’s because this administration is obviously working to forge a new, more mutually beneficial relationship with the press. The next four years could be lucrative indeed for those of us in the Fourth Estate.

Look at Armstrong Williams, the conservative talk-show commentator and newspaper columnist. During the 2004
election campaign, the U.S. government paid Williams $240,000 to say and write wonderful things about the president’s No Child Left Behind education program. This arrangement, exposed by
USA Today
, was a revelation to many working stiffs in the media. While every administration attempts to manipulate the news, the outright purchase of journalists is an audacious and clever approach—using taxpayer dollars, to boot!

If Bill Clinton had tried something like that, they would have impeached him again.

Bush’s fixers simply shrugged and said that the Williams payola, funneled through the Department of Education, was a straight “public relations” contract. Williams himself insists that he didn’t realize it was wrong to cash the government’s check and not tell his readers or viewers that he was being paid to praise the president’s policies.

Most reporters don’t make a lot of money, and $240,000 is a windfall. It’s impossible to believe that Williams was the first journalist to have been bought by the Bush administration or that he’ll be the last.

Therefore, in the spirit of the administration’s new No Scum Left Behind initiative, I humbly offer my services.

In exchange for a modest fee (a bargain compared to Williams), I promise to write glowing commentary about any policy, no matter how radical or half-baked, that Bush’s gang cooks up.

But, unlike Williams, I promise to dutifully inform my readers (by a small footnote or perhaps a secret code) on those occasions when I’m being bribed.

For starters, I could do a bang-up job helping to convince Americans that the Social Security system is shot, and that they’d be better off handing over their hard-earned retirement savings to Dick Cheney’s pals on Wall Street.

For the right sum, I’d be happy to overlook the fact that there’s currently a humongous surplus in the Social Security trust fund, and that a true budget shortfall is almost 40 years away (and possibly much longer).

Bush and Cheney have been trying their best to scare people into believing that Social Security is verging on flat broke, the same way they successfully scared people into believing that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction. This time around, though, Americans seem more skeptical. That’s why the president needs columnists like me, to sway public opinion.

Admittedly, the last time I swayed public opinion was … well, I can’t recall the last time. Anyway, here’s my fee schedule, which is based on an escalating level of fake enthusiasm:

For a mere $25, I’ll drop a line into my next column that says: “Privatizing Social Security isn’t nearly as reckless or goofy as the president’s critics would have you believe.”

For $50, the line would be: “Privatizing Social Security is an intriguing concept and one that should be seriously explored.”

For $99, I’d do two sentences, including a bonus exclamation mark: “Privatizing Social Security is a bold idea whose time has come. Kudos to President Bush!”

For $199.99, a fully punctuated paragraph:

“Here’s food for thought. If, instead of dull old Treasury bonds, you’d been allowed to invest your Social Security deductions in Enron stock (and then dumped it when Kenny Lay dumped his, before the company turned turtle), you might have doubled your earnings. Hey, if privatization is such a ‘risky gamble,’ then deal me in!”

For a flat $500, I’d give them a whole scary column, beginning with:

“If Congress doesn’t get behind our president and privatize
Social Security, we hardworking ‘baby boomers’ are doomed to a hellhole retirement straight out of a Dickens novel—impoverished, miserable, bleak. Those puny monthly checks from Uncle Sam (assuming they don’t bounce!) won’t be enough to fill our cupboards with stale cat food and Sterno.…”

And finally, for $999, the big enchilada—the screamer to end all screamers:

“If those wimps in Congress don’t wake up and privatize Social Security now—I mean this week!—President Bush will be forced to invade Nassau, the Caymans, and possibly Liechtenstein in search of tax-sheltered assets to replenish the soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security coffers.

“My own mother has burned her AARP card and rushed off to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate in support of the president’s innovative private-investment plan. She can’t wait to cash out her T-bills and sink her retirement savings into Halliburton.…”

That’s baloney, of course, and if Mom gives me any grief, I’ll offer to cut her in on the action—but no more than 10 percent, tops.

Who said you can’t get rich in the newspaper business?

July 27, 2008

Loan Scandal: Maybe It Was Just Job Rehab

The revelation that more than 10,000 convicted criminals have been welcomed with open arms into Florida’s mortgage industry is shocking, even in light of the state’s sleazy anything-goes history.

At first blush, things look bad for the Office of Financial Regulation and its commissioner, Don Saxon, whose long nap was harshly interrupted by last week’s headlines. And
although it’s tempting to view this story as just another embarrassing validation of Florida’s reputation as the most crooked, screwed-up place in America, there might be an upside to the scandal.

Granted, a
Miami Herald
investigation revealed that just about any scumbag with an arm’s-length rap sheet can get work as a mortgage broker or so-called loan originator.

From 2000 to 2007, the OFR allowed at least 10,529 persons with criminal records to begin arranging and selling Florida mortgages. Of that motley throng, 4,065 somehow cleared background checks, even though most had previously committed serious crimes—including bank robbery, racketeering, extortion, and fraud—that by law should have kept them out of the mortgage business. Other crimes of “moral turpitude” found on the records of newly approved mortgage peddlers: assaults, dope deals, sex offenses, and at least 15 homicides.

As it turned out, some of those felons failed to become model citizens upon entering Florida’s then-booming real-estate market. They went on to commit at least $85 million in mortgage frauds, fleecing both lenders and borrowers, according to the newspaper’s findings. Some people might look at such alarming facts and see a colossal failure by regulators to protect home buyers from known scammers and thieves. No wonder Florida has the highest rate of mortgage fraud in the country, you might say.

But let’s look at it another way—not as horrendous bureaucratic incompetence but, rather, as a daring, innovative way of diverting and retraining Florida’s inexhaustible supply of felons.

Take Donald Lewis Smith, for example. In 2003 he was licensed to sell mortgages in Kissimmee despite lying about his criminal record—a 17-year sentence for strangling his
wife and dumping her body into Tampa Bay. It should be noted, however, that in five years as a broker, Smith hasn’t murdered a single customer.