"What are these goofy agencies doing?" cries Carazo, age 39, gesturing dramatically as she bustles from fax machine to desk in her office overlooking Biscayne Bay. "They have no clue. They're screaming to move the vessel, but at the same time they impose these fines. Instead of letting me take care of getting it running, they've essentially confiscated it." Carazo, who often cocks her head sideways to punctuate phrases, grows more irritated as she dwells on the subject. "What they've been smoking, I don't know!" she fumes.
Her streaked-blond, shoulder-length hair frames large brown eyes and imparts a vaguely Renaissance Madonna look to her face. She and her husband have two young children. It was their son Rex, now ten years old, who inspired Carazo to name the freighter after him and his fascination with the television characters the Care Bears. "Poor kid," she sighs. "He didn't know this was going to happen."
Carazo is holding forth in typically animated fashion in the office of First International Finance Corp., a Nevada-registered business of which Carazo is president and her husband, Michael Zapetis, chairman. The office, like the family's residence, is actually a condominium in the vast but exclusive Grand, just north of downtown Miami at water's edge behind the Omni mall.
Zapetis is 68 years old but looks very well-preserved, his pale face freckled and his hair a vivid auburn. Constantly taking and making phone calls at his desk in a converted bedroom off the main office area (the living room), Zapetis conveys an impression of affluence -- sheeny brown suit, red silk tie, glittering jewelry. He has worked in the marine business all his life and qualifies as one of the old-timers on the Miami River.
Like many river habitues, he has an engaging, friendly manner, and he likes to tell war stories. Others river veterans have stories about Zapetis too. They're aware, for example, that he's had some trouble with the law, though they're vague about what kind of trouble. But in an environment like the Miami River -- infused with a pragmatic lawlessness and a general distrust of government and regulations -- having had run-ins with the authorities isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Much worse is having trouble with other river folk. "He's referred to as the King of the Miami River Rats, you know," says one business owner, "because of all the lousy things he's done. He's done everything to everybody." When pressed about specifics, most of Zapetis's detractors simply say that they lost money one way or another when they did business with him.
And that, they say, is part of the problem with the Rex Bear. "There's not a place on this river that boat could go that it hasn't gone already and screwed people out of money," says one business operator who swears he's afraid of retribution if his name is published. "They know they're not going to get paid. Nobody wants anything to do with Mike."
Zapetis spent eight months of a fifteen-year sentence in federal prison during the early Eighties following a conviction for conspiring to import marijuana. (His unusually brief incarceration was largely the result of his poor health.) In 1987 Dade Circuit Judge Edward Moore ordered the state comptroller's office to close four finance corporations run by Zapetis because the comptroller believed they were fraudulently operating as banks. Zapetis and a co-defendant agreed to cease their business practices and to pay restitution to victims. And in August 1996, Dade County records indicate, Zapetis was convicted of petit theft, and adjudication was withheld on a felony charge of illegal loan-brokering. According to criminal investigator Michael Lipsitt of the Florida Office of the Comptroller, who arrested him, Zapetis agreed to pay restitution in lieu of a jail term. (Zapetis claims that he was falsely fingered on the marijuana charges, and he intends to prove that he was the true victim in the loan-brokering case.)
His current job as chairman of First International Finance (FIF) he describes as one of "buying, selling, and consulting to numerous offshore companies. Right now I've got orders for a hundred pieces of marine equipment." FIF also handles certain Rex Bear matters on behalf of the Costa Rican corporation that owns the ship.
For the most part Zapetis stays in the background and lets his wife take care of daily operations. Regulatory and law enforcement authorities have been suspicious of many of Zapetis's and Carazo's business ventures in recent years, but they say the couple's deft use of offshore corporations and other tactics to protect themselves from financial and legal liability have made it difficult to prove any wrongdoing.
The Miss Juanita mess is a good example of how a host of governmental authorities can pursue Zapetis and Carazo and still end up with nothing to show for it. From 1991 until 1994, Dade County's DERM tried to recoup some of the $73,000 it spent to clean up and remove an asbestos-contaminated ship that had been abandoned on the Miami River. A corporation owned by Zapetis and Carazo had, in 1989, purchased the vessel -- a wooden minesweeper from the Forties named the Miss Juanita. Right before it was abandoned they sold it to a homeless man named Bicycle Jim, who had been living on the ship, stripping it, selling the parts, and turning over the proceeds to Zapetis in exchange for living expenses.
