Letters

Memo to Feds: Wake Up!
Jim DeFede’s column “Inside Job, Part 2” (May 20), dealing with bail-bond “king” Jim Viola and corrupt guards at the Miami-Dade County Jail, was a great follow-up story to “Inside Job” (May 6).

“Part 2” only reinforces the popular belief that U.S. law-enforcement agencies (more specifically, local ones) are either corrupt or incompetent. If the FBI, the IRS, or any of the local clowns really want to put away piece-of-shit Viola for good, I suggest the following:

Viola allegedly writes bail bonds in the amount of approximately $15 million per year (check with Ranger Insurance Company or C.E. Parrish). If he charges the ten percent allowed by Florida law, then his business account should reflect $1.5 million in deposits.

Now if he is paying his alleged bribes to the jail guards in cash (I don’t think they take checks), then his deposits should be a lot less than the $1.5 million, unless he is laundering money from some illegal activity.

Come on, you feds (or “blithering idiots,” as DeFede imagines Viola calls you). Do the friggin’ math. Remember how you got Al Capone? This isn’t brain surgery. Get off your collective asses.

D.V. Wilson
North Miami Beach

Devoured by Devotion
Lissette Corsa’s article on the statue of the Virgin Mary (“A Miami Miracle,” May 13) reminded me of something I saw on the TV news back in the late Seventies. An old blind man in southwest Miami went up to this tree that had sap running from it. He rubbed his eyes with the stuff and recovered his vision.

Word spread among the Latin faithful and they congregated around the tree. The reports I remember seeing spanned about a week. People brought their sick to the site: retarded children, infirm old folks, and so on. They would pick leaves and twigs from the tree. In the first report I saw, the lower leaves had already gone. By the third report, there were no leaves, just the major branches. In the fourth report (they were aired every night), just a couple of branches were left. Cuban guys in the background were seen with chain saws ready to cut more. In the final report, a Cuban guy had hired a backhoe and lifted what was left of the tree. He claimed he was going to cut it into pieces and make crucifixes he would sell.

The moral of the story, of course, is that this is why there isn’t a holy tree in Miami. I swear this is true. It happened between 1976 and 1979. Check it out.

Andres Vidal
Miami Beach

Beisbol: Swing and a Miss
Jim DeFede recently wrote “A Grand Slam” (May 13), concerning the baseball game involving the Cuban team, and I was saddened to learn his stance on the matter. This game should have never occurred. Instead of the truth, it portrayed communist Cuba as a cute little island that was poor.

In fact it is a ruthless nation with a tyrant who would kill his own people to make himself look good. He lies and acts in front of the camera about how he wants to work with people and help his nation. In truth all Castro wants to do is make himself more powerful and oppress his people further.

Mr. DeFede referred to the “independent journalists” on the island as the real heroes. There are no news people in Cuba, just puppets. Those who were the news people are either dead or in jail.

The rest of the United States doesn’t know what goes on in Cuba. All they know is that Cuba makes good cigars. This nation needs to be informed as to what is going on in the island. That is the purpose of the exile community: to tell the whole truth.

Senen Garcia
Miami

Beisbol: Home Run!
I agree wholeheartedly with Jim DeFede’s “A Grand Slam.” I was pleased to see that flaming asshole Diego Tintorero get dumped on his head. Who the hell does he or any other so-called activist think they are when they can rip the Constitution from its binders and piss all over it?

Tintorero was a member of Alpha 66? Big deal! Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’66 have a better chance at beating Castro.

This country lost 58,000 men in Vietnam. Twenty years later we have opened relations with that government. We have been on friendly, diplomatic terms with China for almost 30 years. Perhaps it’s only fitting we switch gears with Castro. These local fools need to get over their “pie in the sky” dreams of some D-Day invasion and get on with life as citizens of the United States. No one north of Palm Beach gives a damn about Cuba or our local politics.

David Magnusson
Hialeah

Beisbol: Straight up the Middle
Jim DeFede is a voice in the Miami wilderness of the deaf, dumb, and blind sycophants of a political policy that serves only its own selfish interests. Great article.

Carl W. Lemieux
Santa Rosa, California

Editor’s note: The photograph accompanying “A Grand Slam,” which showed Cuban baseball umpire Cesar Valdes upending Miami protester Diego Tintorero, was incorrectly credited. The correct credit is AP/Wide World Photos.

With Musical Anarchists, Attitude Isn’t Everything
Although intended to honor the anarchy of Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa’s music, Brett Sokol’s comments about the Tobacco Road benefit for the band’s partially paralyzed violinist Priya Ray, were churlish (“Kulchur,” May 13).

Robert Price, Priya’s boyfriend and the band’s lead anarchist, has sent barrages of e-mails to friends and acquaintances imploring them to organize just such benefits. Clearly some things are more important than attitude.

Christine Tague
Memphis, Tennessee

Up Periscope, Down with La Rumba
What a disgrace that Bayside’s boat La Rumba is being replaced by a … submarine (“Riptide,” May 6). Who will want to pay $80 to ride in a sub when you can cruise around the bay in a boat, enjoying the sights, sounds, and fresh breeze. I’ll tell you who: some loaded tourist fooled into thinking, “Oh, how cool.”

More important the City of Miami is taking away an attraction city kids love to frequent on weekends (thereby staying out of trouble). But I am sure the city will collect a lot more money because of liability insurance, dock charges, and so on. And let’s not forget the company owner who gets to operate the sub. I wonder who his cronies are at city hall.

Roger Allen Brown
Norland

Hero, Not Greedhead
I am proud to call attorney John Mattes a colleague and a friend. The follow-up story on John (“Riptide,” May 6) and his fight on behalf of almost 300 Vietnamese commandos correctly noted that the United States left these men to rot in communist death camps for upward of 25 years. We not only left them there to rot, but systematically told their wives and families that they were dead, knowing they were alive and well in the camps.

John fought for six years seeking recognition and compensation for the lost army commandos. He uncovered the criminal conduct of the Pentagon and the steps taken to cover up their misdeeds. He persuaded Congress to provide at least some measure of recompense. In doing all this, he incurred extraordinary expenses totaling more than three million dollars.

The “Riptide” news item failed to mention that I filed the lawsuit in Miami to try to force the U.S. government to resume legally mandated payments to the commandos and to try to ensure that John recouped his expenses and was compensated for his outstanding work. It also failed to mention that during negotiations, John offered to forgo the additional $1.3 million in compensation he’d asked for if the United States would grant the commandos veteran status to treat their war injuries. That was the selfless act of a great American, not a “litigious” lawyer. Since then the Pentagon denied the commandos veteran status, and John has filed a lawsuit in Boston seeking that status for them, for which he is not being compensated at all.

Given what will no doubt be the final outcome of the Miami lawsuit, John will now never receive sufficient compensation or recoup his expenses for his years of extraordinary commitment on behalf of the commandos.

Fortunately history cannot be rewritten. Those responsible will have to live with their actions, knowing they contributed to the death of hundreds of soldiers and ruined the lives of countless families. John, however, will always be known as the person who righted the wrong.

Anyone familiar with John is aware that doing the right thing is worth more than the million dollars the government succeeded in denying him on a technicality. John’s clients want to voluntarily pay him for his work, and he will be donating a portion of any money received to more public-interest work.

Thank you, John Mattes.
David K. Tucker
Tucker & Kotler, P.A.
Coral Gables

Dere Went da Judge
As I have known Judge Maynard “Skip” Gross only in a social context in past years, I was dumbfounded to read about his rulings in the David Ziskind case described by Tristram Korten in his article “Daddy Dearest” (April 29).

It’s as clear as the fact the sun rises in the East every day that Ziskind’s youngest daughter is not his biological daughter: The DNA tests proved that. Yet Judge (very) Gross ruled it was in the child’s best interest to never be told, especially not by the child-support-paying Ziskind.

What the hell is going on here, Judge Gross? Why should Ziskind have to pay one penny of child support for a child he did not father just because he could afford to? What kind of unholy precedent is this?

Also shouldn’t criminal and/or civil charges be brought against Ziskind’s lying and obviously philandering first wife (the child’s mother)? Talk about contempt of court, your Honor.

Judge Gross has skipped over all common sense with his outrageous rulings in this case and has proved that the so-called legal system in family court remains in a dense fog. But not as dense as Gross’s mindset.

Harvey Slavin
Tampa

Daddy Most Shameful
Regarding “Daddy Dearest,” it should be a crime when adults set out to ruin the lives of innocent children, as in the case of Amy Ziskind. What kind of man is this David Ziskind? How can he singlehandedly destroy the formative and impressionable years of the youngest child in his family?

And all for what? Child-support payments? How shameful it must be to live life knowing you’ve destroyed the beautiful years of little Amy.

Bobby Pellot
Miami Beach

Burris: Good Story, Bad Science
Adam St. James’s article about Miami Beach High School music teacher Doug Burris (“The School of Hard Rocks,” April 29) was certainly uplifting and inspirational, but where did Mr. St. James get his information about multiple sclerosis? My daughter has MS (finally diagnosed in 1975) and she and I are current about this disease. Mr. St. James appears to know more than the MS neurologists and clinics. It has not yet been confirmed that MS is genetic.

Patients have “an average life span of twenty years after the first symptoms appear”? Mr. Burris was finally diagnosed in 1970; this is 1999, 29 years later. MS itself doesn’t kill. Other problems may develop because of the disease.

Please, please contact the MS Society for up-to-date information and apologize to those who could have been frightened by this article. Shame on Mr. St. James.

Benny Feinberg
Miami

Editor’s note: The MS Society confirms that no genetic link has been proven and that no life expectancy has been established.

Burris: The Universal Language
Adam St. James did with words what the Rock Ensemble does with music: He caught the spirit of Doug Burris. I wish he had been at Beach High to see the Rock Ensemble students, other students, and Beach High staff read his article. We all felt the same things: pride and love.

Beach High is a special place. Our kids were born in 70 different countries. More than 40 percent of our students are foreign-born. Music, however, is one language they all understand. Our Rock Ensemble is like a language-arts class.

I think Mr. St. James started to feel a lot of affection toward Doug as he wrote. That makes us even prouder.

William R. Renuart
Principal, Miami Beach Senior High School

How’s This?: Gravel Pit
I appreciate the wit and irreverence of New Times; however, your staff writers continue to make statements about the Miami Circle that are completely misleading. In Robert Andrew Powell’s Metro piece “Summit Envy” (April 22), the phrase “sacred rock pile” is used in reference to the “pesky Miami Circle.” This is cute but totally inaccurate. At a time when public opinion is still being formulated and legal action is pending, this is just plain bad journalism. A rock pile could be measured, photographed, disassembled, moved, and reassembled elsewhere with relative ease. The Miami Circle is a ring of what appears to experts to be post holes of a ceremonial structure carved into the limestone bedrock at a very specific location near the mouth of the Miami River.

The deep emotional and spiritual relationships between natural phenomena and primitive human society are perhaps difficult to comprehend. But consider the world of the pre-Columbian, seafaring inhabitants of this region. Your world, experienced at less than fifteen miles per hour from a dugout canoe, would comprise Florida’s coastal mangrove swamps, the saltwater creeks of the Keys, the broad, shallow river of grass of the Everglades, and the hundreds of miles of almost featureless estuaries of Florida Bay. The distinctive sweet water of the Miami River, flowing through the only high ground in the area, would be sacred without doubt, its entrance to the bay perhaps the center of your entire civilization.

Okay, don’t consider it. Crank up the radio and turn up the air conditioner another notch! It doesn’t change the fact that the Miami Circle is not a “rock pile.” It’s a feature carved into the bedrock at the mouth of the Miami River. New Times should end its Herald-envy campaign of desecration and stop deliberately misleading the public. The Miami Circle is not a rock pile!

Paul Berry
Miami