The Miami New Times and the Justice Building Blog pick up our City of South Miami NCIC Story.

It's nice to know that the word is getting out about embattled City of South Miami police chief Orlando Martinez de Castro's nefarious and possibly illegal misdeeds.  Both the Miami New Times and the Justice Building Blog picked up on our story about the chief's misuse of the NCIC system from last week.

From the New Times article...

Adds Klock: "I think the police chief believes he is above the law and he can do anything he wants. The people who continue to employ him can solve the problem by firing him."

LOL! And from the Justice Building Blog...

WHAT'S YOUR NCIC LIKE?
Did you ever wonder what your NCIC printout looks like?
Now, courtesy of the Chief Of the City of South Miami Police Department, you can find out. 

The Miami New Times reported here that the good natured and ever helpful chief Orlando De Castro has been (illegally? es possible) running attorneys in NCIC. And not just any attorneys, but attorneys who apparently bug him.

NICE!  I'm in a bit of a rush today, we'll discuss at length next time.

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.

The New Times gives us a mention!

Happy Thanksgiving! Our friend, Francisco Alvarado, gave us a mention over at the New Times today, take a look for yourselves. We were honored to name soon to be former City of South Miami Police chief our ham! From the article...

Mike Hatami, the Strawbuyer: Orlando Martinez de Castro, South Miami Police Chief
"I don't have a turkey, but I do have a big ham. Martinez de Castro acts like a general running an army in a third-world dictatorship. He has abused his official position to pressure the state attorney's office into prosecuting three innocent women who worked at his wife's auto tag agency.

The Miami-Dade ethics commission recently found probable cause that Martinez de Castro also violated South Miami's prohibition on transacting business with relatives and the county's conflict of interest and ethics ordinance because he had the police department use his wife's tag agency to get tags and titles for forfeiture vehicles.

When several South Miami elected officials got wise to his shenanigans, Martinez de Castro used his officers to attack his political enemies. For instance, he had Warren Popove, a Canadian national who did odd jobs for Commissioner Bob Welsh, picked up by ICE. Now poor Papove is sitting in a jail cell at Krome Detention Center.
In June, Castro arrested Mayor Phillip Stoddard's friend Michael Davidson-Schmich for resisting arrest without violence. Castro was upset that Davidson-Schmich had the gumption to make a hand gesture to the chief for making an illegal turn.

These are tactics employed by secret police officers in Cuba. It's no coincidence Orlando shares the same last name as Fidel."

LULZ! Have a happy holiday folks, we'll see you on Friday!

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...