MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

JOSE SMITH DISMISSES CLUB MADONNA ALLEGATIONS

City Attorneys Letter to SunPost Dignifies Reporters Hit-Piece By David Arthur Walters MIAMI MIRROR MIAMI BEACHThe fact that Jose Smith, City Attorney for the City of Miami Beach, bothered to respond to SunPost columnist Charles Braham-Baileys rehashing of the Club Madonna affair with a scathing Letter to the Editor is newsworthy in itself because his letter served to dignify it. Smith was one of the half-dozen commissioners and city attorneys sued by strip club owner Leroy Griffith because Griffith felt they had conspired to deprive him of his civil right to a fair hearing of his plea to change the city code so that liquor could be served up along with totally nude women at his South Beach club. Other clubs were doing that illegally time to time, so why should he not make it legal? Griffith took his cause to court time and again over the last decade, suing the city and its commissioners and attorneys, and even a commissioners wife. He filed his latest complaint, this one against the city, in September of this year.

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Besides being SunPosts Best Elected Official 2013, Smith has nearly 30 years of public service to his credit, serving on various boards until he was elected city commissioner in 1997. He was appointed city attorney in 2006. He has his detractors, but he has been publicly praised for serving the city with honor and distinction, and has been recognized as one of South Floridas Top Government Attorneys, and a member of the states Legal Elite. My personal impression of Griffith is that he is a nice octogenarian, a businessman, a family man, no more of a lecher than generic man. He left home while in the sixth grade, found employment working concession counters in theatres, where he was taken under wing by a theatre entrepreneur. He wound up with an interest in numerous burlesque joints when burlesque halls were taking the foreplay tease out of striptease and getting right down to the down and dirty. That is, he fell into a lucrative way of making a living, stuck with it, and became a strip club magnate. Smiths Letter complains that Bailey penned an un-newsworthy, one-sided, false and defamatory hit-piece, accusing him and his colleagues of extortion, and that Baileys piece had cast a sinister rhetorical cloud over closed-door consultations between commissioners and city attorneys. The Bailey article was indeed a one-sided hit piece, and Smith hit back with a one-sided reply, which I appreciated even though he left out a stock term he usually employs to describe the other sides position when composed by a layman: delusional. Neither do we see baseless nor groundless in respect to Griffiths latest lawsuit, but at least frivolous is there. I doubt that he employed both false and defamatory to recognize that the archaic meaning of defame is to disgrace regardless of the truth or falsity of what is said, but rather to imply that Baileys statements are not merely false opinions but are legally actionable misstatements of fact made with actual malice or knowledge of their falsehood or reckless disregard of truth, which is required when public officials are involved so as not to discourage public participation in public issues. But it does not appear that Smiths use of defamatory means that he really intends to slap Bailey and the SunPost with a strategic lawsuit to stifle public participation, since advance statutory notice is now required in media cases. As a matter of fact, I rather enjoy Baileys opinion column. I grow tired and bleary-eyed over the well-balanced, mealy-mouthed reporting of professional journalists paid to keep their prejudices hidden not to offend too many advertisers and news sources like powerful public officials. The young fellow is more of a columnist than a reporter. He has plenty of spunk, likes to take the high moral ground like the muckrakers of old, calling the shots as he sees them. Yes, he can be faulted for starting with his conclusions,embedding them in his premises. I suspect he is not even aware of that yet. As for me, death threats, threats of lawsuits, being proved a fool, and an interest in the truth no matter how much I dislike it, have rendered me more prudent. I researched the Club Madonna Affair extensively and published my historical account as background material for anyone
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interested including journalists and historians. My account was fair and balanced. My ulterior motive was not to smack down city officials, but to collect background material and eventually induce Griffith to cooperate in a biographical feature to be offered to Playboy or Penthouse. Griffith knew that, but said nothing about it. He advertised Baileys piece and ignored mine. I do not blame him. I would too if I were in his shoes. Nevertheless, if anyone would have liked to hit Smith right before the elections, it would have been me. Change was in the air, and Smith was one of the old guard; he was, according to a lawyer active in the citys governmental affairs, virtual counsel to Jorge Boss Gonzalez, the longstanding city manager involuntarily retired in the wake of several F.B.I. arrests. But I am skeptical by nature, and tend to dig deep enough to prove my nature right. I could not find anything particularly damning to hit Smith with. All in all, I still concluded that there had been some extortion in the vernacular sense, some arm-twisting to obtain something, and even, speaking technically, in the criminal sense. Smiths Letter claims that the law enforcement agencies and prosecutors found no evidence of criminal activity. I have not seen the F.B.I. investigative report if there is one. There was enough evidence to turn the matter over to the State Attorney, whose corruption investigator, Joe Centorino, passed it along to the Miami Dade County Commission on Ethics and Public Trust, which Centorino now heads. Ethics Commission Advocate Michael Murawski found impropriety, but thought no charges should be brought since the commissioners, most of whom were attorneys, were under the advice of attorneys. The COE did take the matter up, but sat on the fence. An Instruction was issued warning commissioners and attorneys throughout the county to avoid appearances of impropriety. Griffith lodged a complaint with the Florida Bar, but he declined to provide me with a copy of the Bar file, which was destroyed, along with the record that there ever was a complaint, by the Florida Bar, in accordance with its policy of protecting lawyers from the accumulation of information that might demonstrate a pattern of misconduct even though previous complaints had been dismissed. We do know that prosecutors have discretion over decisions to prosecute crimes. Even where they believe crimes have been committed, they are unwilling to prosecute charges where it is highly unlikely that they will get a conviction. In my opinion as a layman, there was evidence of extortion in this case, but hell would probably freeze over before any judge or jury would convict the commissioners and lawyers involved. It looked like a fair fight, with both sides insisting they did not strike the first blow. I determined that the struggle was tit for tat. And I was impressed by something Smith said at the conclusion of one of the sinister secret meetings in 2005:
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We hear these extortion threats all the time in litigation, he pronounced. There isn't a lawsuit that doesn't sound like extortion, so I'm not worried about that. If that's what he (Griffith) wants to do, let him have a good time. Indeed, there were two sides in the wrestling match, and different versions of who struck whom first. Griffith said his first suit was filed on advice of the city manager, Jorge Gonzalez, who told him that legal action would get the matter into closed-door executive sessions where he might negotiate a favorable outcome. However, the city manager did not recall that advice. As for extortion, there is the question of which side first linked legislation favorable to Griffith to the payment of $30,000 in the legal fees of Jane Gross, a commissioners wife whom Griffith had sued for defamation because he did not like what she said about him when she rallied children and teachers from a school nearby the club to protest against the possible corruption of the little ones by unseemly sights on the way to or from school. I do not blame Jane for her concern. Naturally, children are intensely interested in sex. Some people never grow up, and we do not want kids to get the wrong idea early on, that promiscuous sex is a good thing, or, heaven forbid, that it is all right to rent out ones body for enjoyment. After all, we are not animals, at least not in the West, where fundamentalist religion originating in the East deems sex a dirty thing that is adulterous inasmuch as it distracts from the worship of the singular absolute power. Sexual conduct must be strictly regulated. At the very least, sexual relationships must be monogamous, and prostitution limited to marriage if need be until absolute sexual equality and freedom is achieved. Bodies and souls may be rented out to employers, but erogenous zones or allusions thereto may not come into play in the workplace. Most importantly, weak women and innocent children must be protected from strong lecherous men. That is why we have a Club Madonna, a sort of animal sanctuary set off for adults to indulge their instincts, a club declaring to the surround that the surrounding community is civilized, just as the sight of prisons serves to enhance the feeling of freedom outside their walls after a grinding week on the low-paying job. Jane would not have liquor served therein, where people would see the awful truth and run amok as satyrs on the streets. Most people are surprised to hear liquor cannot be served there. South Beach is afloat on liquor. Good Jane and her husband Honorable Saul Gross reportedly had interests in liquor businesses on the avenue at the time. I have heard about what goes down in liquor-licensed clubs. I do not want to see it in my old age, yet I do not care about the nonsense people want to pay for as long as the cops keep the streets outside clean. Smith protests against the sinister cloud that Bailey cast over the executive sessions in 2005. The ominous sign indicates left-handed dealings, an evil intent. In all fairness, the metaphorical casting is indeed unfair, in my opinion.

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Anyone who reads the transcripts of those meetings as well as subsequent public commission meetings will get the definite impression that Griffith will never, never, never get the liquor license he wants, because he sued not only the city but a commissioners wife, making it a family affair. Ethics Commission Advocate Michael Murawski observed that such antipathy would not have occurred if Griffith had sued someone who was not a member of the family. So we naturally associate this Miami Beach family meeting with crime family summits, or perhaps with the kind of meetings President Nixon egotistically had taped at the White House. The language at the Miami Beach meetings was far more civilized than that. Smith and others present knew well enough from the Floridas Sunshine Law that the recordings could be made public. The Ethics Commission had some difficulty laying its hands on them, but that is what lawyers do: Jaworskis Special Prosecution Force had difficulty getting the vulgar recordings, and then there were gapsmy copy of the Miami Beach transcripts indicates something occurred off the record, maybe nothing relevant. I once tried to flatter Smith by comparing him with mob lawyer Bruce Cutler, who happened to be an excellent assistant district attorney and homicide prosecutor before he took up criminal defense. I did not really mean that the ruling elite of the City of Miami Beach is a criminal organization. Still, the former police chief and other officers did make a racketeering or RICO allegation against it, and such terms appear in documents appertaining to city employees convicted of crimes. Anyway, lawyers have their reasons for including that kind of charge as a matter of course when more than one person is allegedly engaged in criminal conduct. The unfairness of the familial metaphor is evident when we consider a meeting, say, of the Gambino family, and insult that family by comparing it with a family meeting of government officials, say an F.B.I staff meeting. Incidentally, a Chicago crime boss advised me when I was a runaway kid to stay away from both kinds of organized crime: the illegal Outfit and the legalized government. As for Griffiths most recent suit against the city, I believe his lawyers will be unable to obtain reconsideration of his civil rights issues in federal court, where his state suit has now been removed. Smith is correct is saying that Griffiths suits were dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the determinations were final judgments not easily subject to reconsideration. Why bother reporting the true facts? he asks in his letter. Well, the true facts is that those cases, with the exception of the suit against Jane Gross, were dismissed by the plaintiff with prejudice by virtue of a settlement made with city attorneys, whereby he expected to get the fair treatment he alleged had been denied. In my opinion, he foolishly settled the most important federal case. His trust that he would get a fair deal was childlike, nave. The judge is likely to see foolishness instead of fraud. As for the dismissal of his complaint against Jane Gross, Griffith was about to offer additional evidence to set aside the dismissal when he made a deal on that one too.
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The other ground alleged in the current case is an interesting effort to obtain civil damages for criminal conduct that has not been proven criminal in criminal court. To do that one has to show, for example, that there was not a single extortion attempt, but a pattern of such attempts, which would make of it a racket. Griffith alleges in his complaint that the attempt to extort $30,000 from him continues, but I have not seen that evidence if it exists. Why does Griffith want to beat this dog to death? Ironically, considering what many people think of the morality of the strip club business, he is a man of principle, and he believes it is only fair that he be allowed to serve liquor in his club. He was once a magnate in the industry, and he is perhaps one of the most ethical of them all strip club owners despite his struggle with the I.R.S. and love of gambling. And he is probably loaded despite his losses. What is his alternative for Club Madonna? Contribute $30,000 to sex education at the school. Put on pasties and thongs, get the liquor license, and convert it into a high-end burlesque club. Burlesque is being successfully revived in some quarters. Yet Griffith has a been-there, done-that attitude, and the decline of burlesque he witnessed along with the failure of a few local clubs has rendered him pessimistic. Still, I believe he could succeed with the right team. Perhaps then Smith would provide him with some good legal advice. Smith stated in his Letter to the Editor that his record as a commissioner makes it perfectly clear that he would never vote for a liquor license for Club Madonna. He seems to have forgotten that he voted in favor of Griffiths cause at the first reading of the ordinance proposed by Griffith in 2004, but then, after Jane Gross orchestrated the demonstration against it on the second reading, changed his vote, as did Mayor David Dermer, under whom Smith would soon become city attorney. But the timing there still supports Smiths position that he was not personally guilty of extortion, because the suit against Jane Gross took place after he changed his position. ##

SunPost Weekly Letters November 21, 2013 Baileys Club Madonna Hit-Piece is One-Sided and His Allegations Are False and Defamatory To The Editor:

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I was surprised to see Charles Branham-Baileys one-sided hit-piece accusing city officials of extortion. His allegations are false and defamatory. First, I do not understand why something that happened in 2005, and was the subject of extensive media coverage, is now newsworthy. Second, the matters discussed were fully investigated by the FBI, the State Attorneys Office, the Miami-Dade County Ethics Commission and the Florida Bar. These agencies concluded that there was no evidence of extortion or criminal activity. So what is new? Furthermore, multiple lawsuits filed by Mr. Griffith have been dismissed by the courts, with prejudice. Was that mentioned? Of course not. Why bother reporting the true facts? While Mr. Branham-Bailey attempts to cast a sinister cloud over the attorney-client sessions held in the summer of 2005, no impropriety occurred. Indeed, the record clearly shows that City Attorney Murray Dubbin Dubbin advised that Griffiths lawsuit against Jane Gross was part and parcel to the overall dispute [with Club Madonna], and, that it was Mr. Griffith who was doing the extortion, not the city. The record also shows that, as City Commissioner, I made it perfectly clear to everyone that I would not vote in favor of granting Griffith an alcohol license, REGARDLESS of whether Griffith paid Jane Gross attorneys fees! How is that extortion? Mr. Griffith recently filed his fourth frivolous lawsuit against the city. Like the others, this one will also be dismissed. When that happens, I sincerely hope that Mr. Branham-Bailey gives the judges dismissal order the same coverage he is now giving Mr. Griffith.. Jose Smith City Attorney Miami Beach

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