Surfside's Dirty Little (Political) Secret

I take some notes. Yavis tells me we're off the record. I tell him we're on. He tells me we're off. I tell him we're on. He keeps talking.

He tries to sell me on his deluxe package. He will call every voter in Surfside and convince them that they need an investigative journalist in office. He will go door-to-door. He will wear a T-shirt with my name on it. "Five hundred bucks, and I'll win this thing for you," he pitches. "Two hundred fifty up-front and two hundred fifty when we win.

Jacob Katel

Gus Garcia-Roberts

Jacob Katel

On the campaign trail in the beachfront hamlet of 4,700.

Details

Gus on the campaign trail:

• Vote Me For Surfside Commission
• My Platform Includes Mock Naval Battles and Pedestrian Taxes
• My Campaign Hits the Streets
• Polling Station Mobbed, Attack Ad Surfaces
• Wait, I Lost?!

Related Content

• Reader Mail: South Beach Tow Companies Are the Biggest Scam on Earth
  April 18, 2013
• Armed Bounty Hunters Burst into David Barton Gym Showers
  May 16, 2013
• Andrew Mirmelli Defends His Parking Lot on 17th Street and Lenox Avenue
  May 6, 2013
• Fillmore Miami Beach Won't Be Bulldozed! Developers to "Preserve" After Public Outcry
  April 24, 2013
• The Fillmore Is Saved: New Convention Center Deals Will Keep Jackie Gleason Theater
  April 24, 2013

More About

• Michelle Kligman
• Surfside
• Roger Carlton
• Politics
• Local Politics

"If we don't win, then I didn't do my job," he says, but then clarifies, "but I'm not giving back the first 250."

I turn him down, but not because I don't think he'd earn his money. Mine is a self-funded campaign. And if I get elected to my $1-a-day seat, I plan to keep all interactions on the record. Which would probably kill any extracurricular moneymaking activities like shaking down developers.

But I continue to hear pieces of news about Yavis — that he screamed about his water bill at a Miami Beach town hall meeting and that he got into a shoving match with a TV cameraman. He calls my cell phone one afternoon and tells me that even though I didn't buy his services, I still have his vote. Then I hear him and a passing pedestrian begin hollering at one another. Yavis spouts mischievous nonsense about Latin American dictators and the U.S. president. "¡Pinochet, sí! ¡Obama, no!" There's something else undecipherable about Hugo Chávez, some scuffling sounds, and then a dial tone.

A couple of weeks before the election, Town Manager Roger Carlton calls and invites me to meet with him at his office.

My election team doesn't like it. Carlton is the dreaded establishment. Phyllis calls him, with disdain, Surfside's "daddy rabbit."

OJ says, "He's just trying to get in your brain, man!"

I've read some of Carlton's columns in the Surfside Gazette, which is sort of the town's English-language Granma. He often laments the lack of laws available to squelch bloggers taking "unfounded" shots at town officials. Such cyber-critics, Carlton wrote in one recent issue, "ignore the impact on your family when these folks call you corrupt and uncaring in the new forms of unaccountable communication that our electronic age has created."

I like to imagine that he pens such columns on his front porch after dipping his quill in sweet tea. I agree to meet him.

The "daddy rabbit" greets me in his expansive corner office in town hall. He's a large fellow in a business suit, with a white beard on a big, bovine face. I can't quite place the likeness, until he mentions he once won $50 in an Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest at Flanigan's. "Of course," he adds, "because of my position, I couldn't accept the money."

Carlton probably won't miss his doppelganger winnings. He used to be a senior vice president at Lockheed Martin. Since then, he's overseen the City of Miami's street parking and served as the city manager of South Miami and Miami Beach. He's been Surfside's manager since 2010, and the town pays him $145,000 a year.

But Carlton doesn't really come across as the municipal Darth Maul that my team has made him out to be. He's more like an uncle who's interesting even if you aren't drunk. He lives with his wife in a Brickell high-rise because they like the urban life, but he talks in a yearning way about his North Carolina country house, in a region so sparsely populated that a six-vote election was once decided with a coin toss.

But things get weird when he broaches the topic of my supporters — namely Dorie Lurie. "If she had been around in his day," Carlton intones, "she would have been a compatriot of the Marquis de Sade."

That description seems a little harsh for a lady with a ceramic donkey collection. But Carlton says Dorie once lured him to her house with the promise of a civil meeting. When he arrived, she was waiting with a cadre of fellow insurgents, all ready to berate him about a recent zoning decision the town had made. "I told her," Carlton intones, his steely glare now ruining the Papa Hemingway thing, "never to ambush me again."

Everybody in town hall knows from the signatures on my petition that I am a member of the Dorie Lurie revolution. Carlton doesn't hide his hope that I lose.

"If you're defeated," Carlton tells me cheerily before showing me out, "that will mark the end of the days of Dorie's influence in this town."

Around the time I meet with Carlton, Michelle Kligman's signs start popping up around the neighborhood. "Experience matters," they read passive-aggressively.

Along with the rest of Surfside's political world, I first laid eyes on Kligman at a commission meeting in mid-March. The town's elected leaders had just announced a plan for a special election to address the open commission spot. I was considering my next move when a woman — handsome with dark brown hair and cloaked in soft fabrics — beat me to the podium.