BOOK The Espanola Way of Doing Business

Many people are infatuated with whatever they believe is new and they could care less about soon-forgotten history, so history repeats itself, albeit with certain variations. And so goes Miami Beach, where there is, as Solomon said of the world, nothing new about human nature under the Sun. There are always cultural variations of corruption, some of which seem to be necessary for progress so called. In South Beach, influenced by Miami, we have the Espanola Way of Doing Business with a Jewish and Protestant twist, so drink hearty.

Notwithstanding the hypocrisy of the leadership, hypocrisy being the underlying Crisis between Reality and Ideality, hope for salvation from the inequities of unmitigated greed springs eternal in faithful naivety. The residents of City of Miami Beach, like residents everywhere from time immemorial, have wanted reform ever since it was formed over a century ago. Al Capone and Meyer Lansky are long gone, and the vestiges of organized crime have been legalized for the power elite presiding over the police power.

The current focus is on disorganized crime in the perverse South Beach district, which has long had a bad reputation, recently made worse by Black Chaos when shut down during the Coronavirus Pandemic Panic. Indeed, badness has been part of the attraction of South Beach. Many residents are sick and tired of even hearing about the spectacular crimes in their own city even though they may not live in or near the Entertainment District that, like all such resorts that smell of money, attracts its fair share of fraudsters, money launderers, predators, vagrants, and the criminally insane.

The part-time mayor and part-time commissioners serving the city at very low pay are affluent and do not live in the Entertainment District. They are more than willing to save South Beach from short-term rentals, big bowl drinks, sidewalk cafes, and late drinking hours. Their developers are licking their chops over the prospects of renovating the whole area. They would, or so it is said, gladly kill the goose that laid the golden egg and return South Beach to economic desolation for decades.

I myself long for the Good Old Days of the late Sixties and early Seventies when I lived on Ocean Drive and Washington Avenue. The old ladies called me when a young girl came to town, and I left with a nice Jewish girl from Manhattan. She was quite the beauty, a starlet in B-movies, and an excellent photographer to boot. I loved her dearly and flew to Honolulu when her business got so busy she could no longer accommodate me. To this day I play the flute she gave me.

I returned in 2004. Cuban refugees, developers, modeling, and more civil liberty had changed the beach, but it remained the same in some respects, still a poor man's paradise notwithstanding the developers. Eventually many folks including hospitality workers were priced out. An annual event called Black Week or Urban Week was a serious problem. The ruination was accelerated by the advent into politics of a Clinton friend and funder, a hard-working, ambitious, and arrogant developer by the name of Philip Levine, who began his career hawking tours and had attached himself to the Robins family who excelled in real estate development and construction.

It was said that almost every inch of Miami Beach was up for grabs when Levine bought enough commission seats to render himself a strong mayor in a city with a weak mayor charter. It was also believed that he pulled the police back and allowed vagrants and criminals to run Ocean Drive, the Art Deco crown jewel in the Entertainment District, into the ground so there would be good reason to hand the area to developers. He endorsed Dan Gelber, a former prosecutor and state representative, to succeed him so he could run for governor. Levine lost a fortune on that campaign, some of it purportedly made as the result of a cozy deal with the city on his Sunset Harbour property before he became mayor. And now, Lo and Behold, Levine has reappeared on the scene to back his friend Gelber.

Gelber continued with Levine's “reform” efforts, cracking down on and criminalizing short-term rentals of apartments in order to push tourists into the major hotels, accusing establishments on Ocean Drive of fostering drunken chaos and headline crimes, pushing through a straw poll favoring cutting liquor sale hours back to 2:00 am although voters had already voted otherwise and almost all the crime occurs before that time, complaining all the while about Big Bowl drinks, and now 13 restaurants on Ocean Drive and Espanola Way are to have their sidewalk cafe licenses pulled even for minor or long past infractions.

All that is fine by me if done for good reasons, and not simply for the aggrandizement and enrichment of the mafioso-like Good Old Boys that run Miami Beach to the impoverishment of hospitality workers and their employers.

I had stopped writing about Miami Beach because it has been a big waste of time. But I have collected this history of hypocrisy on the reform effort because of a remark by Gayle Durham, a fine woman and neighborhood association president, who has worked diligently for decency for many years, only to be left in tears by the outcome, to the effect that I am irrelevant, that I have “lost traction” because I no longer have my “ear to the ground,” that am ignorant of the fact that everyone on the city commission is finally aligned with a “mindset” to back what the “Residents Coalition” want.

I never had traction. If you do not go along here, you are not welcome and must, as Levine pronounced, “wait until the next election to be heard.” At least the mafioso tries to reel in the dissidents before killing them. Neither Levine nor Gelber ever responded to me as I am considered to be some sort of Enemy of State, and officials have apparently been advised to ignore me.

What? Resident mindset? Of a minority? A 30% or 50% faction, or the Five Percent who show up for meetings? Led by whom? Levine again? Gelber? There is nothing new here. You do not have to have to keep your ear to the ground if you know where the camels' noses are.

Vegas odds say, that fine woman, notwithstanding her good intentions and well-meaning activism in and out of her own neighborhood, will probably be left in tears again. Therefore I dedicate this historical record of Hypocrisy as Usual to her and all those who disapprove of The Espanola Way of Doing Business and desire a nice, clean, and quiet city to live in.

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