With a little less than five months to go before the city elections in Hialeah, the abusive antics of Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez have begun again. What took him so long?
Even if the only declared and unlikely challenger to the dictator’s reign is a foolish but fed-up young man named Juan Santana who decided to jump into the race after cameras were seized by police during that infamous Hialeah Shake debacle that was a perfect documentation of the city police department’s wanton abuse on its citizens. Usually, it is at the behest of the tyrannical mayor, although maybe that time they were just high on their own power trip.
Thursday morning, it was likely the case when Glenn “The Goon” Rice — the mayor’s “bodyguard”/chief intimidation enforcer and a failed former police officer with the frightening combination of a bad attitude, a drinking problem and carte blanche from the mayor — harassed Santana this week.
In front of the candidate’s own home.
It’s on YouTube under the title Possible Hialeah Employee sent by Mayor. Santana knew he had seen this man around City Hall, but didn’t know the Goon’s history for this type of stalking behavior. He asked anyone who recognized him to give him the Goon’s name.
Of course I did. But he already had it by Friday, when the video had close to 350 views.
The cellphone camera captures Rice pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of Santana’s home videotaping him as he ridiculed him and his candidacy, calls him fat and threatened him about some kind of code violation, which in Hialeah is in every other house (including, perhaps, the mayor’s) and which the Santana family has been fighting the city for 17 years (more on that later).
But what was he doing there? Just passing by at 10 or 10:30 a.m.? Hardly. This is the beginning of the mayor’s harassment campaign.
Because we know, dear readers, that this is the typical behavior that the Goon displays as elections near. Remember 2011? How he intimidated and stalked not only Ladra but the city employees at the JFK library during early voting because they dared to support former Mayor Raul Martinez and his slate against Castro and his crooked den of thugs? Expect for more Kodak moments like these.
“Are you fat? I gotta move, ’cause you stink,” Rice says and waves his hand over his nose.
“Are you a government employee,” Santana asks.
“Oh, I could stand here all day and do this,” Rice answers.
Indeed, he can. He has been shown to do so in the past. He is, most likely, paid to do so. Hopefully by his crooked boss through a PAC or his campaign account. Hopefully not through the taxpayer dime. Ladra has made some public records requests to see if he or any of his three companies get paid through city coffers. Let’s see if the city clerk will respect the law.
Rice — who did not return my calls — refuses to tell Santana who he is, or who he is there on behalf of, and so the young naive boyish man says he is going to call the police. Then Rice, who said earlier that he could be there all day, says he’s leaving anyway. So Santana goes across the street and gets a shot of Rice’s license plate, which says KIXAZ and which — besides being a woefully untrue self expression and sign of his possible need for a higher dosage of Viagra (as is his multiple photos of different cleavage on his facebook wall… can anyone say “overcompensation”?) — Ladra thinks is a violation of state laws prohibiting such profanity on tags.
Clearly shaken up, Rice turns to his tired arsenal of personal insults to try to rattle Santana and calls him fat, again. It’s really a sad and pathetic piece documenting the downward spiral of this clearly unstable man with delusions of mafia grandeur. He should be Baker Acted.
Santana ends up laughing at him as Rice gets in his car and scurries off. “Don’t leave,” he says, repeatedly, then laughs, before the scene turns into a shameful chusmeria with him railing loudly against the corrupt Hialeah government.
As unlikely a candidate as Santana is, he already had close to 200 views on his YouTube video by midnight — even with the competition of the Miami Heat’s tight and wonderfully delicious victory last night — which almost doubled by noon to 335 views. And if he is the only one who is going to go against Castro — a sad state of Hialeah affairs — then I’m going to have to support him because Ladra is still ABC (more on that later).
At the very least, Santana’s candidacy offers an opportunity to expose Castro for the abusive, corrupt politician that the mayor — who reportedly has code violations at his own home (more on that later) — is.
And this is one of the examples of his abuse. Castro intimidates and harasses people with no qualms because nobody has ever done anything about it. He once threw Ladra out of a joint press conference with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. I complained to her staff. And guess what happened? Nada. The Miami-Dade Police and State Attorney’s Office know how the former police officer uses the city’s police department to harass and silence any of his opponents or, more often, their supporters. How do I know they know? Because I’ve spoken to each of them about it. Nada.
Santana, who lives with his grandmother and gets disability for an accident he had some years ago, told Ladra he’s going to go to the professional licensing department on Monday to file a complaint about Rice, but I hear The Goon doesn’t have a license. Not as a P.I. And I’m willing to bet he is not a code enforcement officer.
Someone in Santana’s house was sitting near a window with the blinds open and told him, “Hey, dude, there’s a guy outside taking pictures of the house.” So Santana does what he does best. He grabbed his own camera and went outside to document the city-sanctioned stalking and heckling.
“I’ve been getting harassed for many years,” says Santana, who has another video of a police officer trying to unscrew his own license tag after they ran it and found he had no insurance.
“You think he is the only one sent by the mayor? I have video of other police officers coming to my house. The last time they did a code enforcement visit here, they had 15 police officers,” Santana told Ladra. “I’m not afraid of anybody. I m not afraid of the police. I’m not afraid of Glenn Rice.”
Of course, he is never alone. “I come with an entourage. At the end of the day, if someone comes and tries to harass me, I will have someone video tape it. I show their vanity and expose it. Not through my vision, but through the television. That way everyone sees it the way I see it: That there is something wrong.
“What Carlos Hernandez is doing is violating my rights.”
Ladra called the mayor at his office and left a message but doesn’t expect Castro to call me back. He never tries to justify his corruption. At least not to me.
Maybe Santana and I and activist Julio “El Flaco” Rodriguez — who Rice has been allowed to video tape and harass at actual city council meetings — can go to the authorities together. Let’s talk, guys.
Santana said he will go and ask the mayor about his role in the incident at the next council meeting Tuesday, which, while likely a futile effort should be entertaining.
Naturally, he plans to videotape it.
Hialeah’s oppression, er, I mean elections start to heat up added by Ladra on
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