What exactly is the mandate for an elected racketeer? Is he expected to continue extorting? If so, how much and from whom? Can he successfully bridge the ideological chasm between his criminal and noncriminal constituents? These questions are seldom confronted in American politics, and here's a rare opportunity to get them answered.
Because of its checkered history, Hialeah is a logical place to experiment with the convicted-mayor form of government. After 40 years of uninhibited corruption, the undeveloped land is mostly gone and, with it, the opportunities for easy graft.
The city is already an aesthetic ruin, one zoning atrocity stacked shoulder to shoulder against another. Even if Martinez went hog-wild, what difference would it really make? How much worse could it get?
In a sense, the Hialeah mayoral race was the purest test of democracy—the frank exercise of electoral choice in the face of civic pride, conscience and common sense. The people wanted a convicted crook, and they elected him.
Does government have a constitutional right to intervene? What would Thomas Jefferson say?
Voters sometimes do confounding things. Candidates who die on the campaign trail occasionally get elected anyway, but at least dead guys can't steal. The election of a shakedown artist is a riskier proposition.
Although Chiles is staying out of it for now, the Hialeah biosphere could be punctured by other forces. Martinez's conviction on six corruption charges is being appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If the verdict is upheld, the governor has no choice but to jerk Martinez from office.
That's the law. It was conceived on the premise that voters would never tolerate criminals in office and would demand their instant removal. In most places, that's true. Hialeah is a special case, though, and perhaps an exception should be made.
Certainly those who voted for Raul Martinez on Tuesday were aware that he might soon be sent away to serve his 10-year sentence. So deep is their loyalty that many Hialeans would like him to remain their mayor, regardless.
In fact, there's no reason why Raul couldn't take care of the city's business from a prison cell in Eglin or Talladega. All he'd need is a telephone and some privacy.
Heck, it works just fine for John Gotti.
Hialeah vote 2: This time hide the cheating
November 10, 1994
Across the land, weary voters groan in relief: Another insulting, infuriating campaign season finally ends.
Unless you happen to live in Hialeah.
Residents of Florida's crookedest city are gritting their teeth for an ugly new mayoral election. A judge threw out the old one after a trial confirmed "substantial"—how shall we say?—irregularities.
Mayor Raul Martinez won the 1993 contest by only 273 votes, a margin achieved by a timely but statistically improbable influx of absentee ballots.
To the shock of no one, it was revealed that scores of those ballots arrived with forged signatures, witnessed by some of the Democratic mayor's loyal supporters. Bunches of those votes were gathered in a sweep of convalescent homes for the mentally and emotionally disturbed.
Martinez, awaiting a new (and unrelated) trial for bribery, professed no involvement in any skullduggery. His defiant assertion brought giggles not only from cynical Hialeah citizens, but from the battalion of FBI agents assigned to keep track of corruption in the city.
While the feds added electoral fraud to their list of recent crimes, Dade Circuit Judge Sidney Shapiro this week ordered a new mayoral vote to be held within 30 days.
It's hard to steal an election on such short notice. Martinez's supporters will have their work cut out for them. Here are a few tips to avoid another fiasco:
• Don't cut it so close.
If you're taking all the trouble to rig a vote, do it convincingly. Arrange a victory margin wide enough that the result won't hinge on validating a paltry 200-odd ballots. Why make the FBI's job any easier?
• Get better forgers.
The forgery techniques used on many ballots were so bad that even the city's own hired handwriting expert had to admit the signatures looked phony.
Microscopic examination revealed that some of the names had been penned in erasable ink, and even showed signs of erasure smudges. There's no excuse for such sloppiness.
Hasn't anyone in Hialeah heard of tracing paper?
• Get better witnesses.
When bogus absentee ballots are being prepared, it's important to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity. That's tough when many of those "witnessing" the signatures are the mayor's cronies, campaign workers or—in 13 instances—the sister of his own wife.
Another unfortunate choice was Hialeah policeman Glenn Rice, a Martinez campaign volunteer who signed 20 absentee ballots as a witness. When questioned under oath about forgeries, officer Rice crawled safely behind the Fifth Amendment and shut up.
For the upcoming election, the Martinez camp should make an earnest effort to find ballot witnesses who won't get laughed out of court, or require their own defense attorneys.
• Get undetectable voters.
Signing up the infirm and mentally disturbed must have seemed like a clever idea, but it backfired on the mayor's goon squad.
Equally ill-advised was the scheme of putting nonresidents on Hialeah voter rolls. For example, ballots were mysteriously cast in the names of two North Dade people who've never lived in Hialeah. Another woman claimed to have been a legal resident of the city, but she couldn't recall her home address.
Where election riggers made their big mistake was by using living and breathing humans in the fraud. That's not only risky, it's dumb. Dead people make better phantom voters, because they won't blab to federal agents, and they can't be subpoenaed.
The cemeteries of Hialeah are full of potential Raul Martinez supporters, absentee in the largest sense of the word.
Older, yet not wiser, Miami deserves Carollo as mayor
July 28, 1996
So it's your birthday, Miami.
A hundred-year journey ends with three stunning words: Mayor Joe Carollo.
It's perfect, really. Absolutely splendid.
In many ways, the man epitomizes the character of Miami—crafty, combustible and doggedly opportunistic.
Never mind that he would have scared the bloomers off Julia Tuttle and sent cranky Henry Flagler cursing all the way back to St. Augustine, yanking out the railroad ties behind him.
Carollo truly deserves to be mayor. He deserves it because he went to the bother of running, and because he knew that—despite a reputation as a pernicious little ferret—he could gnaw his way out of political purgatory and win.
More than most local office-seekers, Joe seems to understand South Florida's rich tradition of voter apathy, rotten judgment and shallow values.
The hype surrounding Miami's 100th birthday has sparked absolutely zero interest in how the city will be governed entering its second century, or by whom. Joe counted on the fact that folks would get much more excited about the chili dogs and free concerts than the mayoral race. He was right.
Up to 250,000 people are predicted to show up for today's huge centennial birthday bash in Bayfront Park. Less than 22,000 showed up for last Tuesday's special election.
Carollo was elected with a preposterous 16,556 votes—even fewer souls than attend an average Marlins game. Joe deserves to be mayor because an astounding 81 percent of registered voters stayed home, sat on their butts and let it happen.
Too bad for them. Good for him.
Even as modern-day Miami puts on its glossy birthday face, it continues to revel in a checkered history full of rogues, hustlers and blowhards. More than a few of them were elected to public office.