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Miami descended into a terminal noir fugue state in 2005, so it’s only fitting that the whole mess would collapse toward a surreal New Year’s Eve with Jim DeFede — the Miami Herald’s star columnist, fired for secretly taping an off-the-record phone conversation with a disgraced local politician an hour before the man shot himself in the lobby of the Herald building — eager to serve as grand marshal of the satirical King Mango Strut in Coconut Grove. Though the organizers consider DeFede to be the conscience of Miami, he has gone, in the span of a few months, from a cause célèbre to something of a goof celebrity. Like his source and friend Art Teele, the former county and city commissioner who staged the theatrical suicide, the muckraking DeFede has proved himself to be a tenacious scrapper. He’s the writer who would not stay fired, an investigative reporter who turned on his own paper like a dog gone feral.

This has not been a jolly time for the Herald — Monday-to-Friday circulation dropped 4 percent in just six months — or for its parent company, Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper chain in the country. The company’s largest stockholders, who collectively hold 37 percent of the stock, have forced Knight Ridder to test the market for buyers. Preliminary indications of interest were received in December from Gannett, McClatchy, and several private equity firms. In the meantime, the Herald, the flagship paper of the chain (which stopped publishing a state edition and shrank its newshole), can’t really afford a lingering pall of the sort that has been cast by the death of Art Teele and the controversial dismissal of Jim DeFede.

As with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Teele’s suicide would, on a far smaller scale, shine a light on some base truths beneath the surface of Miami. There are two Americas now, as Senator John Edwards put it during the last presidential election, and there are two Miamis: the new Miami, a perky engine of commerce fueled by condominiums and the celebrity machine of South Beach, and Teele’s constituents in District Five, the people of Liberty City, Overtown, Model City, and Little Haiti, hard-scrabble neighborhoods in America’s poorest city. (After Katrina, The Brookings Institution concluded that poverty was more severe in Miami’s black population than in the poor parishes of New Orleans.)

On the afternoon when he blew his brains out all over his proper blue business suit, Teele was a fifty-nine-year-old man with massive debts and nothing to lose, though his career had once been all glittering promise. He was a decorated Vietnam War veteran who had become a lawyer in his hometown, Tallahassee, where his father was a professor at Florida A&M University. In 1980, he was tapped to serve as the national head of Blacks for Reagan-Bush. That led to a job as head of the Urban Mass Transit Administration with the Department of Transportation, a position that would enable him to funnel $220 million in federal funds for the Metrorover and Metrorail transit systems in Miami. (After the Liberty City riots of that era, federal money poured into the city.) Teele subsequently moved to Miami and set up shop as a lawyer.

Throughout the seventies and eighties, such Waspy civic organizations as the Non Group — presided over by Alvah Chapman Jr., then the Herald’s publisher — pretty much ran Miami. When Teele was first elected to the county commission in 1990, he was hailed as the Great Black Hope and one smart parliamentarian. In 1993, he became commission chairman, and according to the forty-three-year-old DeFede, Teele’s rise to power was a triumph over racial politics as usual. “It was remarkable that Art could sway a predominantly Cuban commission . . . . What he actually did for his community over the years might have been more bluster than a real legacy.”

Despite the Herald’s endorsement, Teele lost a 1996 bid for county mayor, then slid into the less august realm of the city commission. In time, Miami, as it will for some people with pronounced appetites, lured him to the dark side. At the end, Teele was facing a twenty-six-count federal fraud and money-laundering indictment, and had been removed from office by Governor Jeb Bush after being charged with threatening an undercover Miami-Dade police officer, who was following Teele’s wife as part of a corruption investigation. Corruption is a given in Miami, but even by local standards, Teele had become a kind of Bad Lieutenant commissioner.

Teele’s alleged sins were compiled in a thick evidentiary file at the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle had been pursuing corruption charges and the file was full of police surveillance reports, unsupported allegations, and juicy reading. Unfortunately for Teele, Miami New Times — an alternative free weekly (it belongs to the national chain that recently bought Village Voice Media) — hit the streets on July 27 with a tabloid-style cover story, TALES OF TEELE: SLEAZE STORIES, a few hours before Teele shot himself. It was themed around the low-rent Miami imagery of the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City with Teele as a cartoon character, a kind of Captain Corrupt — and consisted almost entirely of the surveillance reports in Teele’s file at the state attorney’s office. No one, including Teele, had been asked to comment on the allegations, which included Teele taking Gucci shopping bags of cash from drug dealers and hiring both female and transvestite prostitutes. For a married man with a son, run-of-the-mill prostitutes were enough of a problem, but the allegations of bisexuality, the idea that he might be part of local down-low culture, was too much for him to bear.

Florida’s “government in the sunshine” law is a noble precept that can also be a mixed blessing: the damning material on Teele had been in the public record weeks before his death, open to anyone with a whiff of initiative. Much of the testimony was uncorroborated, including the ramblings of the transvestite prostitute, Frederick “Mercedes” Davis, who had called from jail and couldn’t remember any concrete details about his encounters with Teele, yet insisted that Teele had used his services and shared cocaine with him. (Later on, even the state attorney’s office said the information in the file included “salacious and uncorroborated details about Mr. Teele’s personal life.”)

Teele shot himself at 5:56 p.m. on July 27, timing that would guarantee maximum play on every local evening news broadcast. He opted for the grander stage the Herald building offered, as opposed to the New Times headquarters, a few blocks up Biscayne Boulevard. Teele appears to have been interested in something beyond being remembered as just one more controversial figure crucified by the media. As with many Americans, he seemed to look upon the press as a kind of free-floating court system that could grant final justice. But his suicide was also an intensely personal rebuke, a final swipe at a newspaper that had become an obsession.

‘Powerful Forces’

Teele had walked over to the Herald from his home in the Plaza Venetia, a second-string condo complex just across the Venetian Causeway from the Herald. Teele was heading downhill fast, and had shown up at the Herald building carrying a canvas book bag with his final legacy, including an apologetic audiotape addressed both to his wife, Stephanie, and to DeFede (a detail that the Herald did not report in the days following the suicide), denying the charges of the transvestite and of his womanizing.

Miami teaches its citizens to always look for the dirt under the carpet, and many locals speculated that in firing DeFede a few hours after Teele killed himself, the paper’s management used the high-minded excuse of absolute moral standards to get rid of a columnist who has irked a lot of powerful people. In 2004, DeFede came under fire for a column pointing out the controversies surrounding the developer and civic figurehead Leonard Miller — his tract homes didn’t hold up too well in Hurricane Andrew — a few days after Miller’s death. A tough reporter with a calculated harmless-slob demeanor, DeFede resembles a Santa Claus gone to seed, with unruly tendrils of hair, a permanently unshaven face, and a middle-America husky boy’s wardrobe. But he is just as smart as Teele was and, like his friend, he sometimes went too far.

In his canvas bag Teele also enclosed a gift for DeFede, documents about a $250 million luxury condo project in Overtown called Crosswinds, to be built on public land. Ironically, the land had originally been purchased for the city partly through Teele’s efforts, back when he was lobbing out all those federal transportation dollars in the Reagan eighties. Activists fear that the high-end condo development — which will feature retail shops, restaurants, and more than 1,250 apartment units — will displace local residents and change the character of the neighborhood. Sixty-five units are to be turned over to the city and set aside for low-income residents, but this being Miami — a city where the tourist trap Parrot Jungle somehow got federal empowerment-zone grants — many black activists consider the project a land grab. A group called Power U Center for Social Change has sued the city to stop the project until an impact study is finished, a suit that is pending in federal court; the group has collected more than 650 signatures from Overtown residents who oppose the project.

Like the early pioneers, Miami is always pushing westward, since most of the available waterfront property has been developed. Overtown has been considered the next South Beach for several years. It begins immediately west of Biscayne Boulevard, the north-south road running along the water and famous for the Orange Bowl parade, and is in play on many different profit levels. On the day Teele died, DeFede says, he had distracted him from obsessing over the transvestite’s claims by talking about his reporting on Crosswinds. Teele, in turn, warned him to be careful about offending “powerful forces, with links to the Herald,” that were behind the deal.

As it happens, Overtown and Crosswinds itself are only a few blocks away from Herald headquarters. The Herald building — which nearly spans the distance between the entrances to the Venetian and MacArthur Causeways leading east over Biscayne Bay from downtown to Miami Beach — is a squat circa 1963, anywhere-USA corporate headquarters of the gulag architecture school. But it’s also in a prime location, the ultimate wet lot — as the phrase goes in Miami — in the hottest real estate market in the country. Accordingly, Knight Ridder, the Herald’s parent company, has capitalized on its assets: in the business section on March 5, the Herald announced the sale — for some $190 million — of ten acres around Herald headquarters, mostly parking lots and a series of low-slung historic buildings on Biscayne Boulevard. (This is, of course, significant money; in 2004, Knight Ridder had a net income of $326.2 million.)

The buyer of the parking lots was Pedro Martin of Terra Group. Not long after, Martin submitted plans to the city for a seven-story shopping mall called City Square, which will also include two sixty-two-story condos. To the north and directly beside the Herald, a third condo, sixty-four stories tall, will be built. In a later Herald business-section story about the sale, Martin was hailed as a real estate pioneer, and Larry Marbert, vice president of production and facilities for Knight Ridder, had an interesting quote: “Never say never, but we are not actively pursuing the relocation of The Miami Herald.” Until that point, the Herald had insisted that its actual headquarters was not for sale, though Terra Group had filed a master development plan for zoning approval with the city, envisioning yet another sixty-four-story condo on the hallowed ground of One Herald Plaza.

Terra Group also owns the beautiful Freedom Tower, a 255-foot-tall Mediterranean revival masterpiece a few blocks south on Biscayne Boulevard. Built in 1925 as the headquarters for the long gone Miami News, the Freedom Tower — designed by the architects who also created the Waldorf Astoria in New York — is known as Miami’s Ellis Island: 400,000 Cuban exiles fleeing Castro (including Pedro Martin) came through the tower, which had been turned into an immigration processing center in the 1960s and early seventies.

Martin has lobbied for an aesthetic atrocity — a $500 million, sixty-two-story condo that would engulf all that elegance, with the Freedom Tower becoming a kind of glorified hood ornament. In December, the day before a city commission hearing on Martin’s plans, he donated Freedom Tower to Miami-Dade College, making the front page of the Herald. The next day he made page one again, when the commission approved his plans. No mention was made of Knight Ridder selling its own land to Martin.

In Miami, everyone is ready to throw the dice on the real estate crapshoot, even your hometown newspaper. The Herald is an old-fashioned paper that has always seen itself as a master of Miami’s blueprint. Tony Ridder, who runs Knight Ridder, was one of the leaders in the creation of the American Airlines Arena downtown. Over the past fifteen years, the Herald has used its influence to promote the Cesar Pelli-designed Miami Performing Arts Center and the glory it will bring to Miami; the arts center, which wraps around the historic Sears Tower, is set to open next fall and straddles Biscayne Boulevard, right in front of the Herald property. (Knight Ridder actually donated 2.2 acres, east of Biscayne Boulevard.) The sheer scope of the 450,000-square-foot, almost half-a-billion-dollar arts center, which will largely cater to the upper middle class, has been controversial. It’s mostly publicly funded, and years of construction delays have added to the cost. Teele, like many others, had argued against the project, but the arts center was always the Herald’s baby. And somehow it has finally kick-started Overtown’s manifest destiny, namely condominiums.

‘Part of the Action’

An hour after the fateful phone call that DeFede illegally taped, Teele made one more brief call to DeFede — who was working at home — from the lobby phone in the Herald building. In that call, DeFede says Teele was entirely professional and matter-of-fact, a long way from his earlier plea to DeFede: “Who did I piss off in this town?” After he shot himself, the police seized the canvas bag, which eventually wound up with Teele’s widow, Stephanie. She still has the contents — the tape he left for her and DeFede as well as the material on Crosswinds. Some enterprising newspaper should look into this, but as DeFede notes, “What are you gonna do — wrestle the widow for the tape?”

Tom Fiedler, the executive editor of the Herald and the man who had hired DeFede away from New Times, where he’d been a political reporter and columnist for eleven years, says that the newsroom was naturally interested in Teele’s claim that the Herald was somehow linked to Crosswinds, and wanted to “find out about any possible conflicts before anyone else did. I don’t think we ever asked Mrs. Teele for the file, but we did an exhaustive investigation and determined that the Herald and Knight Ridder were not involved in any way.”

So what exactly is in Teele’s Crosswinds file remains a journalistic mystery in Miami. Lieutenant Bill Schwartz, commander of the media office for the Miami police department, says the police determined there was no “investigative value” in the file. “My suspicion is that it was much ado about nothing.”

Still, Denise Perry of the Power U Center for Social Change, who took DeFede around the Crosswinds site and Overtown shortly before he was fired, is “dying to know” what’s in the file. Teele’s thought, she says, was that “the land had been given away for nothing at six and a half million dollars. He wanted the property to be sold at true market value — mad cash — and use the money to endow scholarships for Overtown kids. The question of how many units they’ll set aside for low-income housing is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They have no real accountability — a $20,000 fine for every unit that’s not turned into low-income housing. No doubt, it’ll be total luxury condos when it’s finally built.”

Matthew Schwartz, the director of urban development for Crosswinds Communities (the multibillion-dollar company is based in the Detroit area) is not worried about any smoking guns in Teele’s mystery file. Schwartz spent twenty-four years working for the city and retired as the director of the Miami Downtown Development Authority. “We have been so straight and careful with this project,” he said. “There’s no real controversy, except for Power U.” As head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, Teele had tremendous power in Overtown. Schwartz insists that Teele supported Crosswinds. “It’s hard for me to understand, because we had regular meetings with Teele — dinners at public restaurants, even a meeting at his apartment — up until his removal from office.”

Power U’s Perry says Teele advised her group to be aware of a number of Miami movers and shakers who were interested in Overtown, including Philip Blumberg of American Ventures, a real estate and investment management group (the group launched a venture called the South Florida Urban Initiatives Fund in 2004). Teele’s list also included Miami commissioner Johnny Winton, a developer and a foe of Teele; Hodding Carter, former head of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Alberto Ibargüen, the foundation’s current head, and the former publisher of the Herald. (Ibargüen missed Teele’s suicide at the Herald by nine days, with the situation falling instead into the lap of the current Herald publisher and president, Jesús Díaz Jr., who comes from an accounting background and formerly served as the general manager of the Herald.)

Schwartz of Crosswinds says that American Ventures has met with Crosswinds officials “about providing financing, but at this point, Crosswinds is the only investor. American Ventures is a solid company, based right here in Coral Gables,” he adds. “I think the Knight Foundation has invested with them.” The foundation — which has a historical link but no official connection to the Herald — is a passive investor in the South Florida Fund and another American Ventures fund. On the purely philanthropic side of its ledger, the $1.9 billion Knight Foundation has long been a Miami booster. Along with grants intended to strengthen the standards of journalism — CJR has been a beneficiary of the foundation’s philanthropy for years — the Knight Foundation’s mission is to promote projects that aid twenty-six “Knight communities” where the Knight brothers had papers during their lifetimes, including Miami. It spends at least $5 million a year on local priorities in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, with roughly 85 percent going to such neighborhoods as Overtown and East Little Havana. It has also given just over $4 million to the performing arts center, its resident companies, and a street theater program.

On June 11, 2001, at a gala dinner in Miami, the foundation marked its fiftieth anniversary by giving $24 million to fifty-four organizations. Among other efforts, the money launched the $7.5 million Collaborative Overtown Transformation Project, and an Overtown Revitalization Program that included partnerships with the Black Archives/Lyric Theater, and two churches. The foundation also gave a three-year, $3 million grant to the Collins Center for Public Policy, a Miami-based think tank that originally brought Crosswinds to the table. The Collins Center was part of the “Community Land Trust,” designed to “insure that Overtown’s residents aren’t forced out as redevelopment occurs.”

The center is a serious outfit; its board includes such local civic stalwarts as State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, and it is headed by Rod Petrey, a Holland & Knight lawyer who is also the Knight Foundation’s attorney. Petrey, an articulate sort, is no fan of the Teele legacy: “He chewed me out one time, told me I had to have his permission to buy land in Overtown. More than being a foe of anything, he just wanted to be part of the action.”

Essentially, Crosswinds is a symbol of two contrary development visions for Overtown. A generally white power structure believes that condos will fix pretty much anything, with Crosswinds in particular raising property values in Overtown and ushering in the return of the black middle class, which is still connected to Overtown’s powerful churches. On the other side of the equation are residents who worry about the toll of gentrification on these gritty but authentic neighborhoods for the poor and working class.

A July 28, 2005 Herald editorial began with a tough lead — “It’s time to move forward on the Crosswinds project in Overtown, Miami’s historic — and blighted — black neighborhood” — then conceded that gentrification can displace low-income residents, “but only if the redevelopment proceeds in a vacuum that doesn’t take poor residents’ needs into consideration.” It’s easy to find the editorial: visit the Collins Center Web site, click on “gentrification fears” and you go straight to Herald.com, complete with Herald ads and a Herald subscription button.

Abstract Thinking

In the early fall, when it seems as if the heat will never break, a flock of vultures comes to roost on top of the Dade County Courthouse and stays for the winter. One miserably humid September afternoon, Dan Gelber, the lawyer representing Jim DeFede, assembled the media in his office to pass out copies of the “close out memo” for an investigation of DeFede’s taping of Teele’s phone call, conducted by the state attorney’s office. Besides losing his job, DeFede had also been facing anything between a misdemeanor charge and third-degree felony charges. Florida has a murky law dictating that “all parties must consent to the recording or disclosure of the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication,” though a federal appeals court had earlier found that taping a business call without consent was essentially no big deal.

In his “close out memo,” Joseph M. Centorino, division chief of the Public Corruption Unit — an outfit Teele and DeFede knew quite well — concluded that the taping was an illegal intercept, but that there was the extenuating circumstance of an unlikely friendship between two people who were supposed to be adversaries. No one knows the media drill better than a journalist, and for his lawyer’s press conference, DeFede had helped to prepare a handy Cliffs Notes version of the five-page official report, outlining the “significant findings of State Attorney Office Investigation” that also happened to favor his case. The state attorney’s office came to the conclusion that DeFede flipped on his tape recorder out of “concern for Teele.”

Still, what kind of a friend keeps taping after you’ve said you don’t want to go on the record, and what kind of a journalist separates from his job long enough to be friends with someone like Teele? It all gets a little murky: an off-the-record tape is useless to a reporter, and a personal tape, done out of “concern for Teele,” seems fairly pointless, too.

The entire press conference, meanwhile, was an exercise in abstract thinking. DeFede was denouncing his former employer and, at the same time, asking for his old job back. A week later, Chuck Strouse — a former Herald writer and the brand-new editor of New Times — wrote a column about the possibility of a union drive at the Herald sparked by the firing. On the day Hurricane Katrina bore down on Miami, Tom Fiedler went into the newsroom and inveighed against the News Media Guild. Business is business.

‘Just the Stage’

On July 27, the day that Teele checked out, police and television news helicopters were whirring overhead as reporters stood around talking to one another, waiting for a sound bite from someone official. Teele had asked the lobby guard, Felix Nazco, to “tell Jim DeFede to tell my wife I love her,” then shot himself through the roof of his mouth. It was somehow too real and not real enough, like any disaster scene.

Shortly after six p.m. that day, according to DeFede’s timeline of events, DeFede spoke on the phone with the Herald’s new publisher, Díaz, and the general counsel, Robert Beatty, who is also the vice president of public affairs. Being Herald people, management — according to DeFede — immediately assumed the tragedy must have resulted from something DeFede had written in the Herald. New Times never entered the equation. (Fiedler disagrees, saying the Herald always thought the suicide “was about Art himself and, if anything, New Times. The Herald lobby was just the stage for his last performance; if he was Jim’s friend, why would he want to hurt his friend’s newspaper?”)

For some reason — naïveté, hubris, honor, integrity, or God knows what other impulse — DeFede told Díaz and Beatty about the transgression of taping Teele. According to Fiedler, management told DeFede to come downtown with the tape and advised him to get his own lawyer, which the paper would pay for, to protect himself against any possible criminal charges for illegally taping a conversation. (DeFede finds this version of events vastly amusing: “Common sense dictates that if they’d told me at that point to hire a lawyer, I wouldn’t have given them the only evidence, the tape, or even gone to the office. I assumed Beatty was also working on my behalf, and not just the Herald’s.”)

DeFede was interviewed for an online story and given a slot for a page-one column on Teele with a 10:30 deadline; around 8 p.m., when he arrived at the office, managing editor Judy Miller brought him pizza. At 10:35, DeFede walked into Díaz’s office, where Beatty and Elissa Vanaver — the vice president of human resources and assistant to the publisher — had gathered to fire him for violating the Herald’s ethics rules. They also told him they were running a story about his firing in the next day’s paper. DeFede’s largely positive column about Teele was spiked (on the ground that the interview was illegally recorded and off the record) though, in fact, the Herald later used one detail — that Teele was most upset about the allegations concerning the transvestite — in its own news story. DeFede walked out into the newsroom and, according to one editor, more or less held a “press conference” for an assembly of irate reporters. Downstairs, Teele’s blood was still being cleaned off the lobby floor.

Late that night, DeFede’s sister encouraged him to call a lawyer, and at eight the following morning, he hired Gelber and had him contact the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office, just to assure prosecutors he would cooperate in an investigation. DeFede turned over his transcription of the secretly taped, off-the-record conversation with Teele to Gelber, who showed it to the state attorney’s office. Later on, DeFede appeared at the state attorney’s office without a subpoena or grant of immunity.

On the day after the suicide, Díaz and other Herald executives called a press conference, proclaiming that DeFede might have committed a third-degree felony and vowing not to release the tape to prosecutors. The Herald management insisted they had a staunch policy of not turning over notes, along with a desire to be sensitive to Teele’s impulse to keep the conversation off the record. They would, in effect, shield the tape, though they hadn’t shielded the reporter. That same day, the Herald also ran a tabloid-style, front-page photo of Teele’s blood-soaked body in the Herald lobby: typically enough, the spread was accompanied by a caption from Fiedler that read, “The graphic nature of this photograph will no doubt be disturbing to some readers, but The Herald believes it is an essential element in the reporting of this tragic story.”

A few days later, Michael Putney, a local television commentator and occasional Herald columnist — he’d written a piece for the Herald mentioning that Díaz had been at a dinner party after the firing, talking about how he’d never liked DeFede’s column — went on air and broke the story that the Herald had played the tape of Teele’s conversation with DeFede for an assistant state attorney in a Herald conference room, which was certainly news to the Herald staff. Shortly thereafter, the Herald reported that it had allowed the tape to be played because DeFede had already turned over his notes. The whole dance seemed to be posturing, akin to the Cowardly Lion trying to act tough in Oz.

Tom Fiedler still has no regrets: “Jim crossed the bright white line of ethics, but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him for a job.” For a time, the DeFede revue was the star of Romenesko. On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz, the media columnist for The Washington Post, took DeFede to task for being friendly enough with Teele to advise him on his legal troubles during that taped phone conversation, as well as asking Teele to go on record during an emotional breakdown when Teele was close to tears. DeFede was judged to be both too soft and too heartless, at the same time.

In the days after DeFede’s dismissal, several Herald columnists weighed in on the matter, defending one of their own. And Bob Norman of New Times did a piece about DeFede’s past attacks against Tony Ridder in the Herald and New Times, suggesting that Ridder had retaliated against DeFede.

Norman’s piece wound up on the Herald’s internal online memo system, Read Me, which inspired Fiedler to issue a memo to the newsroom: “Tony Ridder is not only not fixated on Jim’s status, he has never appeared to me to have been bothered by anything Jim has written in the past.”

That may be the cold truth, real estate visionaries not being known for sweating the small stuff.

‘He Just Got Caught’

Teele’s suicide has been grist for a lot of mills, but the Sunday afternoon after his death belonged to his constituency, as thousands of mourners, gawkers, and protesters milled around the Richardson Mortuary in Liberty City for the wake. Teele’s mother, Florazelle, his wife, Stephanie, and his son, Arthur, were on hand. DeFede had called the family for permission to attend — he has talked to Stephanie several times since Teele’s death — but never made it, fearing, he says, that he might turn the proceedings into a “circus.”

But he had written a piece for the Miami Times, a black community newspaper, finally getting a chance to use the transcript of the off-the-record tape: “In our conversation, Art made it clear he believed his reputation was destroyed. ‘Do you know, if you Google me, the first thing that comes up?’ he asked. ‘The homosexual thing. You know what that did to me with the ministers and the church?’ ” From that sensitive issue about Teele, DeFede moved along to an appeal for help in getting his job back (“I love being a voice for those in this community who might not otherwise have an advocate”) and to his recounting of the big night: “The lawyer, Robert Beatty, told me there could be some legal issues and concerns, which he outlined, but he said, ‘The Herald will support you.’ ‘Absolutely, absolutely,’ reiterated publisher Díaz.”

Liberty City is north and west of the Herald, miles away from Biscayne Bay and pretty much forgotten. This is where the 1980 riots took place, and it will be a long time before the real estate boom of Miami comes to the forgotten heart of the black community. The stretch of Seventeenth Avenue before the funeral home unfolds as a reverie of indulgence and redemption, the earthly realm of pleasure in last-chance strip malls — the Three Fingers Lounge, Inner City Seafood (“You buy, we fry!”), DC Soul Food, and the Brothers of the Same Mind Restaurant and Laundromat (“Wash and Eat with the Brothers”) — breaking up a stream of churches in low-slung industrial buildings: Faith Mission God’s Resurrection Church, Centurion Evangelistic Center, and the Refuge Church of Our Lord Jesus, bearing the sign “Hearts Speak When Words Can Not.” Outside the modest funeral home, television news crews were lounging outside their trucks, sporadically filming a group of protesters waving placards (“Don’t Buy the Herald . . . Don’t Read the New Times”) and three Bahamian junkanoo bands in gaudy costumes, prancing about and tearing into such unlikely selections as “Kumbaya.” Next to the portable Chunky Conch stand, Ernestine Worthy, a community activist, was talking up the cause of protecting “welfare mothers and people with low-income jobs against greedy landlords. Art Teele was always very helpful. He wasn’t doing anything that everyone else in this town doesn’t do too. He just got caught.”

Inside the funeral home, several rows of folding chairs were set up before the casket, with matrons in bright dresses furiously fanning themselves and singing along to the hymns. Along one wall was an array of lavish flower arrangements, bearing condolence cards from the Bay of Pigs Invasion Veterans, the Vietnam War Vets, the Liberty City Optimists Club, Jackson Soul Food, and Teele’s old fraternity at Florida A&M University, Kappa Alpha Psi. The mourners were lined up along the flowers — Kappas in matching red jackets, Vietnam vets in fatigues and ponytails, dolled-up children in their Sunday best, random teenagers in Scarface T-shirts bearing cellphone cameras. One insensitive young man actually posed with the corpse for a grin-and-grip shot. The elderly lady in the next seat lent me her paper fan, adorned with a picture of a black Jesus holding a lamb. On the other side was an ad from The Keyes Company, Realtor Harriet Hawkins posing the eternal questions of Miami: Buying? Selling?

‘You Have to Wonder’

Thanksgiving weekend is the official start of high tourist season, the time when Miami renews itself and returns to the business of making money. Developers are pushing west into the Everglades and building taller and taller buildings, despite Wilma’s toll, and every publication in Miami continues to be fed by condo ads. DeFede, a media beast to the end, has moved on to other muckraking pastures, doing commentary in Miami for AM 940 and the television station WFOR, a Herald media partner: “There was a big item in the Herald about it,” he points out, “maybe you could put it in at the end of the story?”

In District 5, Teele’s old turf, the Rev. Richard Dunn — an old Teele friend devoutly opposed to Crosswinds and given to picketing the Herald for its campaign coverage — was battling against Michelle Spence-Jones, a former adviser on urban issues to Mayor Manny Diaz, part of the pro-development “concrete mafia.” An unusual amount of pro-development money poured into Overtown, and in a late November runoff race, Spence-Jones won the election.

Jim Mullin, the New Times editor who had presided over the Teele story, was still smarting from one tough year. After nearly eighteen years at New Times, he’d lost the support of his superiors with the Teele story, and been replaced by Chuck Strouse. New Times would think twice about going out on a limb like that again and, unfortunately, the press in Miami might be less vigorous for a while after Teele: “The death of Art Teele was very hard and sobering,” Mullin says. “I couldn’t sleep for a week, but I also didn’t think I’d be welcome at his viewing in Liberty City. That disturbing story, which was considered exploitive by so many people, crystallized everything the public despises about the media. Teele was a scoundrel but also the smartest politician we had here. It’s almost as if his suicide was carefully premeditated, the way that DeFede lost his job, the editor of New Times is gone, and Tom Fiedler’s professional reputation has suffered so much. You have to wonder who’s next, where the next domino will fall.”

Naturally, the Herald had made sure to cover the resignation of Mullin, who’d taken a risk and lost. In Miami, the Herald always wins.

To read the articles in the January/February 2006 issue, click here.

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