We finally got the NCIC logs from the City of South Miami! Also, the Miami New Times gives us a mention...

A few weeks back we discussed the possibility of members of law enforcement abusing the federal NCIC (National Crime Information Center) database in order to find information on people that they had non business investigating.  Specifically we wondered if embattled City of South Miami police chief, Orlando Martinez de Castro, had been abusing his access to the database to get the goods on his political foes.  I put in a public information request to the city requesting their NCIC request logs and after a few weeks, I finally go this...

  NCIC Request Sheets for the City of South Miami outlining illegal requests made by embattled police chief O... by The Straw Buyer

Interesting.  We're going to discuss this request log in detail tomorrow, in the mean time, take a good look at the people that the Chief himself requested information on, are any of our readers on that list?  There's a couple of surprises there and those particular requests clearly outline what kind of cop the chief is and just how he operates his department.

In the mean time, our friends over at the Miami New Times did a story on our involvement in the recent bank fraud case that we helped build with the feds, take a look.

Our readers perspective on City of South Miami Police Chief Orlando Martinez de Castro's taxpayer funded bariatric surgery and the Miami New Times gives us a mention.

The Miami New Times asked us to figure out what our favorite post of the year was, yesterday they included our pick in their "Miami Political Bloggers Pick Their Favorite Posts of 2012" story.  Ours was of course the post where we discovered City of South Miami Police Chief Orlando Martinez de Castro steering city business to his wife's tag agency, from the New Times story...

Mike Hatami, The Strawbuyer: Some fun with Googlemaps and I need a favor, can someone help me find an auto tag agency near South Miami? March 7
"I'd have to say that the blog post where we exposed the South Miami Police Chief Orlando Martinez de Castro's unethical and illegal activities had to be my favorite post of the year because in one fell swoop we managed to turn the tables on the chief. Now the once mighty chief finds himself in a situation where he's fighting for his job and is having to defend himself against the charges filed against him by the ethics commission."
This post began a series unraveling Martinez de Castro's alleged unethical practice of steering work to his wife's auto tag agency, which is now the subject of a Miami-Dade ethics commission complaint. Hatami went after the chief after writing several posts about how his wife allegedly wrongly accused three of her former employees of theft.

I was all ready to put together a great post today about a witness that the Miami Dade Ethics Commission would have loved to talk to in regards to the City of South Miami Police Chief's upcoming ethics hearing but apparently our story yesterday struck a chord with some of our readers, some of which may be City of South Miami residents and taxpayers.

If you recall, yesterday we discussed the police chief's bariatric surgery which as we've come to understand was paid for by a loan by the City of South Miami.  

After we made our post, we received this comment...

I wonder if a resident or tax payer of the City of South Miami can borrow money from the City of South Miami to help pay for medical or personally desired health concerns?
Better yet, can the City of South Miami give a loan to its tax payers or defer the tax bill for those who are WITHOUT health insurance, much less than having a service that is not covered under a health plan?

Lay-off the damn donuts and leave the darn arroz con this or bistec con that alone and you will loose pounds. Now I want to know who approved of this shit without public input.
Does he not make over $140,000. a year in salary, benefits: vacation, medical, dental, vision, auto, gas, long/short and life insurance, All of which is paid by the tax payers? Whats going on here?

What an insightful comment.  Why should a police chief who makes well over $100k per year need to borrow money from the city to get this elective surgery?  As the commenter said, if you really want to lose weight...

Lay-off the damn donuts and leave the darn arroz con this or bistec con that alone and you will loose pounds.

You forgot to mention all this crap as well...

Honestly, wtf?!  

The commenter says it best...

Does he not make over $140,000. a year in salary, benefits: vacation, medical, dental, vision, auto, gas, long/short and life insurance, All of which is paid by the tax payers? Whats going on here?

Our next commenter then puts things in perspective...

the manager hector mirable approved this for his friend orlando martinez de castro. the combination of these two were very unhealthy for the city of south miami and for the residents.

Exactly.  With these two characters at the helm of the city tag teaming the citizens and taxpayers of South Miami, anything was possible, even something as outrageous lending the chief the money for an elective surgery.  

To be honest with you, we really wish the Chief would have asked us about our thoughts on dieting as we have a far cheaper alternative to surgery...

Regardless, I've put in several public information requests regarding the loan for the weight loss surgery as well as a whole host of other issues regarding the embattled chief, so we'll have to wait and see if the city is going to play ball or if we're going to have to sue them to get the records, as of now it's not looking like they want to cooperate with us.  That's all for now folks, I'll post up my story about that witness we discussed earlier on Monday then I'll spend the gap between the holidays summarizing our posts over the last year as they pertained to the Airways Auto Tag story and the City of South Miami's Police Chief, Orlando Martinez de Castro.

And now the Miami New Times picks up our Maquinita story...

Newspapers...

Yesterday we talked about the Miami Herald breifly mentioning the "maquinita" story in one of their articles from last week and now the Miami New Times picks up our coverage of the maquinitas.  Our friend Francisco Alvarado went one step further than we did with regards to the expert witness report and analysis of the maquinitas in police custody, he actually reached out to the expert witness, D. Robert Sertell, and gave him a call regarding the report.  From the article...

You know those gambling maquinitas in convenience stores around Miami, Hialeah, Opa-locka, and Miami Gardens? Turns out Miguel Exposito was right and then some about the racket. Last year, Miami's then-police chief fell out of favor with Mayor Tomás Regalado when cops confiscated 105 "video amusement" machines from dozens of markets, cafeterias, and laundromats.
Exposito said the devices were being used for illegal gambling purposes. When Regalado allegedly tried to stop the raids, the top cop reported the mayor to the FBI for meddling in a criminal investigation. Eventually, Exposito was forced out. But three months before the chief's departure, a gambling machine expert hired by the Miami city attorney's office concluded the seizedmaquinitas were indeed for gambling purposes.
What's more, D. Robert Sertell -- a former slot machine mechanic for an Atlantic City casino -- found that many of them were rigged to make sure the user always lost. Sertell's findings were never made public until recently.
After reading about it on Mike Hatami's blog the Strawbuyer, Banana Republican contacted the gambling expert. Sertell said he spent three days in June 2011 analyzing the machines seized by Miami police officers. "They were designed and manufactured specifically for the purpose of gambling," he said. "It's a slam dunk."
Furthermore, Sertell continued, most of the maquinitas were designed to cheat the customer. He explained that the confiscated machines would not be allowed inside establishments where gambling is legal in Florida. He should know. He has inspected gambling machines for 15 years and has a contract with the state to keep an eye on slots.
If the maquinitas held by Miami police were in a casino, Sertell said, they "would get immediately shut down and whoever was responsible for them would be subject to punitive action."
Even though he was paid $5,221 by the city, no one asked him to provide a written report, Sertell said. He typed one up only after a former Miami police official recently requested a copy. He declined to name the official. (Hatami tells Banana Republican he obtained his copy from a concerned private citizen.)
However, the city might still call on Sertell to give testimony in an ongoing lawsuit filed by the owners of the maquinitas who want their machines back.
Regalado and City Attorney Julie Bru did not reply to four phone messages seeking comment. Ricardo Merida, the lawyer for the maquinitas owners, declined to comment because he had not read Sertell's report.
However, one of their clients, Miguel Gonzalez, scoffed at Sertell's assertions. "He doesn't know what he's talking about," said Gonzalez, who lost ten machines in the raid. "I'm just a hard worker trying to make a living for my family."

Nice!  Isn't it amazing that no matter who the machines are taken from, their line is always something along the lines of "I'm just a hard worker trying to make a living" or "We are not breaking the law, we are just providing entertainment for people who choose to eat a meal here", yet these are the same characters that'll brag about how much money they take in every week from these same machines that they know are rigged to screw the players.  Whatever.  At the very least we know that there's more people paying attention to this somewhat forgotten maquinita story now.

I'm going to attend an important court hearing this afternoon regarding former City of Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito and his termination from his post as police chief by the City of Miami commission last year. I'll update early this evening with the results.

Miami's best blogs, setting the record straight.

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I've gone over the Miami New Times article several times over the last week where we were named Miami's third most important blog.  While I greatly appreciate and am honored with the recognition, I feel that there are some errors in the article that need to be straightened out, beginning with the title they bestowed on me...

Persian New York born...

While that sounds great, it's also incorrect, I wasn't born in New York, I was born in Iran and have been in the U.S. since 1974.  No big deal there.

Prosecutors' Enemy

I find that a bit harsh and inaccurate.  First off, I'm not a prosecutors enemy, while I'm the first to point out when a prosecutor in a case that we're writing about makes a mistake, I'm also first to applaud a prosecutor that's doing a good job, IE the prosecutors in the Veldora Arthur mortgage fraud trial.  The particular prosecutor that I consider my enemy, William J. Kostrzewski, is only labeled as such because of his downright unethical and immoral behavior, his targeting of myself and my family and the fact that when he was faced with the real facts regarding the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case, he still chose to ignore them and go forward with a case that he knew was deeply flawed.

The idea: undermine the case against his spouse.  Hatami zeroed in on the two men responsible for arresting Delaila.  Miami Dade Police Det. Jorge Baluja and assistant state attorney William Kostrzewski. 

Not really.  The idea wasn't to undermine the case against my spouse but instead the idea behind the blog was two fold, first to provide some measure of therapy by giving myself a way to channel the anger I had against the police and the state for arresting my wife on totally bullshit charges.  Secondly the idea behind the blog was in some way shape or form to expose the way we were lied to by the prosecutor, just days before my wife was arrested, once the case was explained to the prosecutor in detail and after my wife passed a polygraph test, the prosecutor assured us that all was well and that he wouldn't move forward against her.  That was all well and good then the son of a bitch went ahead after reassuring us that everything was fine and arrested her, even worse she wasn't given a chance to surrender herself and being the scumbag prosecutor he is, he made sure the police barged into her office midday on a Friday and hauled her off in cuffs.  The real motivation behind this whole mess?  To make sure the MDPD's mortgage fraud task force was able to make a high value arrest to commemorate the one year anniversary of the task forces first arrest.  Wonderful, fuck up someones life, destroy a family just so you can have your fucking headline and hopefully use that to move yourself up the ranks to a statewide or maybe even a nationwide task force.  How did that work out for you Mr. Kostrzewski?  The third and most important purpose of the blog was to clearly show that the state's victim, the man who claimed his identity was stolen which started the whole case, Bernardo Barrera, was indeed lying and was an integral part of the fraud.  We proved beyond a reasonable doubt that indeed Mr. Barrera was an active participant in the fraud that was the basis for the states case, even going so far as to hire our own handwriting expert to prove that his signatures were all over the "fraudulent" documents, we'll talk about that in detail next month.  Despite all we've done to prove Mr. Barrera's complicity in this case, the state still refuses to go after Mr. Barrera when even the attorney handling the foreclosure that arose from this fraud after examining the documents associated with this case concluded that he was involved with this fraud, here's an email from that attorney...

There you have it, an attorney that works on behalf of Attorney's Title who represented Citi Mortgage reviewed the documents that we presented after which he concludes that Mr. Barrera was involved in the fraud that ultimately lead to the arrests in this case, yet here we are nearly four years later and the state still hasn't taken action against Mr. Barrera.

As far as the rest of the New Times article is concerned, the details really don't matter.  I feel like commenting on my background isn't really necessary as disposition of the states previous cases against me speak for themselves.  The rest of it?  Writing about all these other cases, finding corruption in local government, etc, I guess that all came with the territory.  What really bothered me about some of these other cases, all of which were more egregious than the one that my wife was charged for, was that none of them were as heavily publicized as my wife's case, in fact the biggest story of them all, former City of Miami Assistant Veldora Arthur's federal mortgage fraud indictment, wasn't even publicized till I wrote about it!  I never understood the tremendous disparity between these monster cases that never made the news versus the case my wife was charged in that was plastered all over the media.

So, am I done now?  Not yet.  There's still a tons of stories I have to tell about my wife's case that I've held back on, everything from plea deals that were never disclosed to the people that by law were entitled to know about them to prosecutor Kostrzewski ordering one of the defendants girlfriends to wear a body wire in their attorneys office so he could listen in on them discussing the case he was prosecuting.  Oh, and how can I forget, in the heat of the battle, after I laughed at prosecutor Kostrzwewski in open court, he went ahead and sent a subpoena to the company that hosts my domain name in order to reveal my identity!  We'll cover that soon as well.

With all that said, I'd like to thank the folks at the New Times and Francisco Alvarado for bestowing this honor on us.  I'll do my best to live up to being "one of Miami's best blogs".  Back to our regular fare tomorrow...

The Miami New Times ranks us among Miami's best blogs!

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Check the story here.  Can you believe it?  Our humble little blog has been ranked among the best and most prestigious blogs in Miami!  Thanks to all our loyal readers that helped us along the way as well as those of you that are constantly sending us tips.  I'll do my best to keep up and try my best to keep turning out stories that no one else sees fit to print!  I'll do a little explaining over the next few days regarding who I am and why I went about things the way I did.  Until then, thanks to Frank Alvarado and the New Times for recognizing us and congrats to our fellow bloggers who made it on the list, it's an honor to be counted among you.