Chapter Nine

Kicking Sand in the Faces of Bad Guys

I declared myself an investigative reporter at a perfect time. Indeed, my bank bribery story aired three days after burglars were caught inside the Watergate offices of the national Democratic Party. In the months to come, my exposé received two of broadcast journalism’s biggest awards, prompting a Miami TV station to hire me as its chief muckraker.

I was not ready for prime time, nor experienced enough to avoid the pitfalls of being manipulated by sources. Nevertheless, I would eventually collect two Peabody medallions for investigations of illegal gambling and corruption in south Florida.

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My television debut in Miami, Florida in April, 1973 was memorable―not for reasons of journalistic enterprise, but because of the sartorial splendor I brought to South Florida’s then NBC affiliate, WCKT. For my first on-camera appearance, I wore a dazzling ensemble consisting of a double-knit white-on-white polyester suit, a glistening black silk shirt and a seventies-style wide-body white necktie.

In Baton Rouge, the attire embodied the height of fashion among politicians, barroom bookies and ambulance-chasing lawyers with whom I had associated. But peering into the camera lens through tinted spectacles that turned opaque under bright studio lights, I sensed a lack of appreciation for my debonair bayou garb. The suspicion was confirmed the next day.

“I thought we hired this guy to investigate the Mafia, not join it,” the station owner complained to the man who hired me.

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By 1975, I had become a full-time (public relations) whore for Miami lawmen and in the process added a second Peabody to my collection for a series of stories on so-called “Mafia” figures, who moved to the land of sunny skies and sandy beaches to escape a blizzard of subpoenas in the Northeast.

My second “Peabody award-winning” exposé featured undercover video of alleged hoodlums engaging in suspicious activities such as taking out the garbage or going to the post office. As I later discovered, the characters we filmed in the wild were mostly small-time crooks with names that ended in vowels. They didn’t belong to intricate crime organizations, but would have relished a chance to join.

My arrival on the Mafia scene was tardy by a few years. Survivors of early crime syndicates were busy attending funerals. Or getting buried themselves. Blood-oath Sicilian traditions died with them.  As a latter day “Mafia” hunter, I skulked around south Florida with the aid of law enforcement intelligence reports that were replete with distortions, contradictions and misrepresentations.

The Mafioso I stalked were a far cry from the Godfather’s suave Michael Corleone. These guys were barely literate gamblers, loan sharks and extortionists who engaged in opportunistic and primitive crimes. Most were Italians. But the menacing loan shark warning, “I’ll kill your children, rape your wife and cutoff your nuts if you don’t pay what you owe me,” was not the exclusive copyright of any ethnic group. The age-old threat was used by Hispanic, Irish, Russian and African-American crooks, as well as descendants of Mayflower immigrants. Indeed, “organized crime” in south Florida was a disorganized potpourri of every ethnic culture.