I was at a meeting last night when a colleague came over and whispered in my ear that Art Teele, once one of the most powerful politicians in Miami and a former Reagan administration official, had blown his brains out in the lobby of the Miami Herald, just before the start of the 6:00 news. Teele had walked in the lobby, asked to give a message to a metro columnist named Jim Defede, whom he had known for more than a decade and who was more or less sympathetic to him, gave a security guard a message for his wife ("tell my wife I love her"), then put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's all the radio stations are talking about today down here.
The shooting came the evening before a splashy 9-page expose in a local weekly, running down the various criminal investigations and lurid allegations against Teele in excruciating detail, hit the news statnds. The article touches on every conceivable aspect of Teele's public and private life, including tales of a transvestite prostitute someone dug up out of a Miami jail to tell his tales on Teele. Defede, for his part, was fired this morning after he told his bosses he'd taped a phone conversation with Teele (illegal in Florida without the tapee's consent) hours before the former county commissioner killed himself. (Defede has said that allegations of homosexual affairs were especially fueling Teele's distress, because he worried how the transvestite's stories would effect his son. More on Defede's comments here.) Teele was also running out of money to fight the various charges, and according to a former opponent of Teele's whom I spoke with this morning, he felt burned that more of the people he'd helped in the past weren't standing by him.
Not surprisingly, the case has raised questions about the local news media's multi-year pursuit of Teele, which has been unlike anything since Miami Mayor Joe Carrollo captured the attention of the press years ago, and caused some soul searching:
"It was the first thing that crossed my mind, that this was a response to our story, and it filled me with dread" New Times editor Jim Mullin said. "Who knows? It's all speculation."
The writer of the New Times story, Francisco Alvarado, told the Herald it was a "surreal coincidence'' that Teele shot himself the same day his article was published."I really feel bad,'' he said. "I would never want anyone to harm themselves over something I wrote, but at the end of the day, I was just doing my job.''
... Not that the local news media's taste for salaciousness hasn't been pointed out many, many times before. Teele seems to have been sending a message to the media, and to the Herald in particular, by choosing that building and that lobby to end it all. The paper and other outlets had pursued him relentlessly for years, for alleged corruption:
The one-time Reagan-era appointee at the U.S. Department of Transportation won two terms on the Dade County Commission in the 1990s -- and was elected its powerful chairman three times. He withstood a bitter loss when he ran for county mayor against a rising Alex Penelas, but staged a remarkable second act, rebounding as a Miami city commissioner -- powerful enough to survive an effort to recall him from office.
Long haunted by financial woes and improprieties -- he was once accused of putting a woman arrested on prostitution and grand theft charges on the city payroll to fetch him coffee -- Teele saw his troubles multiply in recent years.
As an attorney, Teele was an influential voice on the City Commission, serving as head of the Community Redevelopment Agency created to renovate blighted areas of Overtown and nearby neighborhoods. But it was the CRA that proved his political unraveling. He was under surveillance in an investigation of CRA-related corruption allegations when he chased and threatened a police officer. And Friday -- just four months after a felony conviction for assault -- his troubles snowballed: He was arraigned on federal charges of fraud and money laundering.
There's lots of sympathy for Teele today, and the chatter on Black radio is that the pursuit of Teele by both investigators and the media was racist (one caller to a popular R&B station likened the Teele pursuit to "attempts to bring down other Black men like Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson and Jesse Jackson ... I guess you can't pick your martyrs...) And even on generic talk radio, the media is coming in for some tough criticism for it's taste for the salacious when it came to the once-powerful figure cut by Teele.
Having worked in local media, though, I doubt that, even with all the soul searching, much will change. "Car in canal" ratings fever is much, much to strong and contagious. Exhibit A, the picture on the front page of the Herald today was not a smiling, live Teele, but a gharish, bloody dead one.
It also strikes me that it may be time to rethink the notion of paying local politicians peanuts (in the case of commissioners when Teele was in office, abouty $6,000 a year) to do a job where they're in constant contact with multi-million-dollar deals. That seems to almost invite corruption. (Though members of Congress work full time and you can hardly argue there's not corruption there, too). It seems the temptations of money and power are almost irresistible to politicians (though, as more than a few people are saying down here, woe to the Black pol who gets himself caught...)
Should there be more restrictions on letting discovery evidence in a case go to the press before a person is tried? Yes. Should the media -- local and otherwise, take a hard look at just how hard it can pursue public officials who are accused, but not yet convicted, of crimes, before that pursuit turns into hounding a person into their grave? Absolutely. But don't hold your breath. Every news outlet and their Web-site is having boffo ratings right now.
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%>
Tell a friend
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'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
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'put the webmaster address here
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sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
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sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
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%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
