Miami still has no new manager, but mayor has new advisor: Carlos Curbelo

From the frying pan and into the fire: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced Wednesday that he had hired former congressman, lobbyist and liar Carlos Curbelo to be his advisor for the short term, just to help him during this transition phase.

Some people have already commented that Suarez hired an in-house mayor because he can’t do the job. Or maybe because two postalita privilegiado parochial school boys — Curbelo went to Belen, Suarez to LaSalle — are better than one.

Or maybe Curbelo is getting some practice to run for county mayor, as many have rumored since last year. Or maybe he’s auditioning for the city manager’s position?

Suarez, who is expected to name a city manager Monday morning — y las malas lenguas say it is, indeed, Art Noriega, as predicted in this very space last month — said Curbelo, a longtime friend, wanted advise him for free. “But for legal reasons, it couldn’t be free,” the mayor said. So Curbelo will be paid $25,000 through — whenever.

“It could be a month. It could be longer,” Suarez said.

It could be shorter, too.

“He’s helping me for a transition period, as we bring a new manager and communications director,” Suarez said, because his last communications director was arrested after he sent a minor a pic of his eggplant. “He’s someone who can help me internally get the right team, and to make sure we are focused on the city of Miami for the next two years of my term.”

He means his last two years of his only term.

At least he’s not going to Paris with Suarez and Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla (more on that later).

Suarez said many people told him he made a great move by hii. He said that because Ladra told him he did not. And she’s not alone. The mantra is that Suarez is making one boneheaded mistake after another.

And Baby X has just handed Commissioner Joe Carollo a gift with a bow on it and the Recall Joe effort a kick in the nuts. Who is advising him? Because one might suspect he’s got a double agent in his ranks. As they say in Cuban, esta perdido en un campo de lechuga. Or, loosely translated, he gets lost in a cabbage patch.

While Curbelo has a pretty high political IQ, having served one term in Congress and a couple on the school board, his real experience is in lobbying and he has so much baggage, he could need one of those little hotel carts to drag it around. And since Carollo is going to do it anyway, and Ladra already told Suarez it was a bad idea because Carlitos is a dishonest and sneaky snake who goes where the wind blows, let me tell you, dear readers, why.

No, it’s not just because he tried to smear Ladra when I exposed that he had hidden the list of his lobbying clients by putting the company under his wife’s name and the first to report that he didn’t report, for some reason, the results of a $35,000 poll. He told Michael Putney, in an effort to get me off the next segment, that Ladra shook him down for a digital ad in exchange for positive coverage. As “proof” he showed Putney a text message in which I joked about a digital ad that he had put on another political blog called The Shark Tank. Since Curbelo had always purported to support Ladra’s work, even from his days on the school board when we were much friendlier, I texted him and said it would be smart to advertise also in Political Cortadito because I had a lot of CD 27 readers. It was true, and meant to show that he talked out of, er, the side of his mouth. And it was meant as a joke because there was no way he was going to support my work now that I had exposed his sneaking around disclosure laws. Ladra never said it would be in exchange for anything. And everybody, even Putney, knows that. But he had to ask me about it, which was Curbelo’s intent: to discredit me. Which he was not able to do. I went on the next segment and proceeded to tell people what a crybaby he was because none of that was true and dared him to come back and prove it.

He never did. And it’s the fact that he lied about something like that because it was politically convenient that should bother Suarez and anyone else. It’s not personal. Everybody says Ladra gets paid when she starts scrutinizing them. And I’ve been called worse by people I liked much more. But it’s because he went out of his way to lie to cover his ass that it still matters. If he would go to such extents to lie about something like that, what else would he lie about? You can’t trust him.

Which is why he wasn’t elected again two years ago.

What I had exposed was that a year before he was elected to the Miami-Dade School Board, Curbelo transferred his firm, Capital Gains, to his wife’s name just so he did not have to disclose the names of his clients, as laws require. He gamed the system so he could represent people like Juan Carlos Tovar — a wealthy developer whose uncle is vice president or something of the national bank in Venezuela and who was arrested for filing a false police report in Doral, where he was outed by none other than, drumroll please, Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo, who was then Doral’s city manager before he was fired — and Roberto Isaias, a convicted embezzler in Ecuador who is living as a fugitive in South Florida, without anybody knowing about it.

Furthermore, he may have used his official position and the access that gave him to help Areas, a subdivision of a Spanish firm that is said to also do business in Cuba, win a contract for vending at several Florida Turnpike plazas and the security firm that won a $100 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security.

Suarez defended the representation of Isaias, saying that he was fleeing a government that wanted to seize his assets, like in Cuba. Did Curbelo tell him that? So how do we know? And why hide him as a client, then? Who knows who else Curbelo is working for? We don’t. Because he won’t tell us. And that has become an issue again.

Oooooh, wait. That must be what Suarez — who also does not want to disclose his own legal clients — likes about him.

Most recently he was blasted for taking almost $400,000 from his political action committee — cynically called What A Country! — to give to his old friend and dentist with no political experience, JP Chavez, who then formed communications and consulting company called Vocero LLC in partnership with the Curbelo. Did the ex congressman use his PAC money as seed money for his new venture? Of course he did. Who are their clients? Do we get to know?

But there’s more. Because Curbelo — who cut his teeth on the campaigns of congressmen Lincoln Diaz Balart and his little brother Mario Diaz Balart — was also not that big a deal as a school board member, where he helped guide hundreds of millions of dollars in contract also sought revenge against the bus drivers who did not support him by trying to privatize student transportation. It was shot down.

In Congress, he is best known for … what? Nothing. Probably busy working for his clients as he made a name for himself as a moderate in a world of extremes, a Republican unicorn who believes in climate change science. He has since has become a media darling, and paid commentator on MSNBC, which is the AOC of the news world. Can’t get more left than that. If there’s one good thing about this, is that maybe we’ll see less of him on TV.

But Carollo is going to have a field day with this. He already blames the recall against him on a number of boogiemen including Venezuelan insides who want to get their communist little hands on District 3. Not on my watch, is Carollo’s bugle call.

But wait, there’s even more. Curbelos’s list of longtime supporters include a shady cast of characters. Like former and disgraced State Rep. Ralph Arza, who was forced to resign after a he left threatening messages on the voice mail of a fellow lawmaker who had filed an ethics complaint alleging Arza used racial slurs talking about former Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Rudy Crew. Arza excused himself by saying he was just drunk, but he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of tampering with a witness and was sentenced to 18 months probation.

Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres.

He also has allies in Hialeah Mayor and admitted loanshark Carlos Hernandez and Demetrio Perez, Jr., a convicted felon who committed fraud on elderly residents of his Little Havana apartments and made millions off the taxpayers through school board contracts. In fact, Ladra has to wonder if Perez was a client of Capitol Gains and hope he doesn’t help award any contracts for his clients in Miami.

See? This is why it’s important that we have his client list. Because he could be working on behalf of them — Ladra bets his clients pay him more than $25,000 — rather than on behalf of Suarez or even the residents of the city of Miami. He offered to do it for free! That should tell us something right there.

A source told Ladra that Curbelo has been interviewing potential city managers — and Suarez is supposed to name on Monday. Maybe Curbelo already has someone in mind. Maybe it’s a client who hired him to get the city manager’s job!

But, on the bright side, some of Curbelo’s people would be an asset to the city, and Ladra is principally thinking of his longtime Chief of Staff Christopher Miles, who is as politically astute as he is ambitious.

And maybe Curbelo’s lobbying experience will help Suarez two ways: One, he can stop lobbying on behalf of Jorge Mas, Jr., for the hoax Miami Freedom Park real estate deal disguised as an InterMiami soccer stadium and, two, Curbelo can lobby the commissioners for Baby X.

Who am I kidding? The old man and the yoyo guy might be eating out of his hand tomorrow. But can you imagine the likes of Curbelo — polite, educated, even-keeled, quiet, fino even, but cowardly — negotiating with the likes of commissioners Carollo, who he already had a confrontation about Tovar with at the 2014 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, Alex Diaz de la Portilla and Keon Hardemon?

That’s like Milhouse Van Houten making deals with The Sopranos.

Ladra says it’ll be less than a month.

Miami still has no new manager, but mayor has new advisor: Carlos Curbelo added by Ladra on February 20, 2020
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