Miami parking nightmare: From the homeless parking mafia to the meter fairy

Haitian cabbie Pierre Jean-Charles climbed into his yellow taxi van while cradling a bottle of Coke and a bag of Doritos — the customary get-me-through snack for the 51-year-old full-time student and father of five. He had parked at a meter in front of a corner store at 75th Street and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. It was before noon September 7, Labor Day, and the sweltering streets were full of people draped in towels, wearing bathing suits, and flip-flopping to the beach.

Jean-Charles found that an SUV had parked inches behind him, jamming him in. He honked and stepped out of the taxi, gesturing for the woman behind the SUV's steering wheel to back up.

A short, stocky Hispanic man emerged from the passenger side and stomped toward the cab. "Where you from?" the man snapped.

"What difference does it make?" Jean-Charles shot back before climbing back into the driver's seat. Suddenly, the stranger began punching the cabbie through the open window, landing hard blows on Jean-Charles's face. The taxi driver grabbed a long umbrella from the back seat and jumped out of his cab to fight back. As a crowd formed to watch, the two men grappled for a few moments, destroying the umbrella, before the SUV passenger tripped on a curb and fell backward.

The stunned and sweat-drenched cabbie returned to his vehicle and sat down with the door open. That's when his attacker ran up on him again, clenching a dagger-like knife. With short, manic lunges, he stabbed Jean-Charles in his left shoulder and, when the taxi driver tried to escape, the back of his left thigh.

The man jumped into the back seat of the SUV and it took off northbound on Collins. When cops arrived, they found Jean-Charles "bleeding next to his yellow cab," according to a police report. A baggie on the ground contained cocaine — perhaps shedding light on the source of the attacker's rage. Despite many witnesses — including one who Jean-Charles says wrote down the SUV license plate number — Miami Beach Police spokesman Juan Sanchez tells New Times: "there hasn't been an arrest made."

It's a story quintessential to Miami, which has long been the nation's cultural capital for cocaine use and more recently has hoisted America's road-rage championship belt. For four years straight, a national study declared Miami to be home to the country's most aggressive and angry drivers, until New York City stole the title in 2009.

And though old-timers will tell you parking in this city was once a breeze, rampant development and a scheming homeless contingent have turned securing a spot into a Mad Max-esque adventure. Anybody who has trawled for parking on Washington Avenue on a weekend night or near Wynwood's clubbing area during bar hours knows the joys of inhaling Lamborghini carburetor dust or being extorted by a drug-addicted parking-protection mafia. Finding a spot usually isn't violent — but nowadays it's rarely boring.

In this report on all things parking in Miami, we'll sojourn with ragged Bayside Marketplace receipt scalpers fundraising for crack cocaine and visit enraged restaurateurs who claim the Miami Parking Authority is killing the neighborhood. We'll expose the county's worst ticket scofflaws and the teacher accused of assaulting a parking officer, and detail the rise and demise of a tutu-wearing parking-meter fairy. Because if anything unites folks from Aventura to Opa-locka to Homestead, it's the tireless pursuit of a place to leave their cars. "They say there's nothing certain in life but death and taxes," says Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, whose vehicle-clogged district includes Coconut Grove, Brickell, and portions of downtown. "Add the near impossibility of finding a parking spot when you really need one."

A month after being stabbed, Jean-Pierre Charles has recovered from his wounds, although he'll likely never lose the scars on his shoulder and thigh. The poster child for Miami's parking woes sits in his North Miami living room, which is strewn with his young daughter's pink plastic toys, and describes the ordeal with remarkable calm. He finally gets angry only when he partakes in one of our town's most popular pastimes: complaining about parking. "Last weekend, I went to see I Can Do Bad All by Myself in South Miami," he says, his voice rising. "I spent half an hour driving around looking for parking before I finally had to spend eight dollars on valet parking. When I bought the ticket, I had already spent $20 just getting in, and that's without any popcorn!"

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A large family of Indian Sikhs, the women in traditional saris and the men in turbans, climbs from a black Acura SUV after it's parked in the lot across Biscayne Boulevard from Bayside Marketplace. They're from Boca Raton, here to do a little sightseeing on this early Monday afternoon.

"Papo," a bug-eyed homeless Puerto Rican man who claims to have lost his teeth in the Iraq War, acts as their one-man Miami welcome wagon. "You need a ticket?" he demands, brandishing a parking receipt with a couple of hours left on it, which he'd begged off a driver leaving the lot about 15 minutes ago.