Audio By Carbonatix
A City of Miami police officer is under investigation following a complaint filed by an assistant city attorney. The charge against the officer: lobbying on behalf of a Miami businessman.
No one would have thought twice about it except that the businessman, Orlando Mesa, also happens to be the officer’s landlord. More importantly, Mesa is the owner of the Camelot Inn motel at 7126 Biscayne Blvd. Most significantly, the city’s powerful Nuisance Abatement Board will consider on January 25 whether to temporarily shut down the Camelot because of alleged drug dealing on the premises. Mesa’s motel lies within the area served by the upper eastside Neighborhood Enhancement Team office, where Officer Darrell Nichols is assigned as a “neighborhood resource officer.”
Last fall evidence against Mesa was first scheduled to come before the Nuisance Abatement Board, which has the authority to close a business if the city attorney’s office can show that a significant level of illegal activity related to drugs, prostitution, gambling, gangs, or noise takes place there. Nichols called David Forestier, Jr., the assistant city attorney who prosecutes such cases before the board. There’s nothing unusual about that; police officers, community leaders, and Forestier regularly discuss nuisance cases, including those involving Biscayne Boulevard motels, which recently have come under intense police scrutiny. But apparently Forestier believes Nichols should have kept his mouth shut about this one.
Forestier declined to comment about the case or his complaint filed with the police department’s Internal Affairs section. And because the investigation is ongoing, Nichols’s superiors had no comment. But the details of the incident have been corroborated by several sources who spoke on and off the record.
In Nichols’s October phone call to Forestier, and in some subsequent conversations centering around motel cases set to be heard by the Nuisance Abatement Board, he urged the attorney to take into account Mesa’s cooperation with police efforts to weed out illegal activity at his motel. Nichols says his actions were no different from the normal input he gives as one of the officers most in touch with the community. He has spoken in favor of motel owners before, and he has spoken against them. “I am absolutely appalled,” Nichols says, “that Mr. Forestier has seen fit to make an issue out of my trying to do my job.”
Indeed, neighborhood resource officers are expected to work with residents and business owners in combating crime problems. “They are facilitators, problem-solvers,” explains Miami Police Department spokesman Angelo Bitsis. “Anyone who lives or works or operates a business in the area can go to them directly and get information about any police service, anything at all relating to the police department.”
For months Nichols and neighborhood activists had been advising Mesa regarding steps he should take to improve security and discourage illegal activity. (The Camelot, previously known as the Metro Motel, has been shut down by the Nuisance Abatement Board in the past, under different owners.) And no one disputes that Mesa was trying to clean up the place, though there is disagreement over how hard he was trying. But as with many of the motels on Biscayne Boulevard, on-site management was a problem. In the Camelot’s case, the manager had become a police informant and had orchestrated drug deals at the motel as part of a sting operation unrelated to Nichols’s work.
It wasn’t Nichols’s lobbying in favor of Mesa that Forestier objected to; it was that Forestier didn’t know at the time A and Nichols didn’t tell him — that he had recently leased a house owned by Mesa. Nichols says now he didn’t think it was necessary to mention his living arrangements. But when Forestier discovered what he considered to be the officer’s blatant conflict of interest, he was not reticent about expressing his outrage.
This past summer some upper eastside residents had mentioned to Nichols their misgivings about the propriety of his renting a house from one of the motel owners within his jurisdiction. But when he signed the lease this past August, Nichols says, no one — at least no one in the Neighborhood Enhancement Team office — knew that Mesa would soon be called before the Noise Abatement Board. “I was in dire need of a place to move my family,” says Nichols, a six-year veteran of the police department who formerly lived in Miami Shores. “I wanted to live in the community, and I was looking at another house, but the price was too high. All this was done without any [debt] to the Mesas being incurred, and without any knowledge they were going before the [board].”
“He was told this was not a politically smart thing to do, but I don’t think Officer Nichols is a politician,” says Brian Flynn Geenty, president of the Shorecrest Homeowners’ Association. Even the most outspoken community activists, who would like nothing better than to unceremoniously shutter all the boulevard motels, are loathe to criticize Nichols for his advocacy. They fear such criticism would be construed as a lack of support for community policing, and that could hurt the officers’ ability to work with business owners and perhaps undermine the effectiveness of the Nuisance Abatement Board.
Nichols has been instrumental in temporarily closing several motels and apartment buildings under the city’s nuisance abatement code. Among the dozens of official commendations in his personnel file is a 1992 memo to then-police chief Calvin Ross from City Manager Cesar Odio, praising Nichols for his help “in building cases against the Biscayne Boulevard motels for the Nuisance Abatement Board.”
“If he moves on, we will have lost one of the best cops we have,” Geenty worries. “He has been one of the cops who has really changed things on the boulevard. He made a mistake; he probably never should have accepted renting that house. But I’ll stand up for Officer Nichols every time.
