JANUARY 19-25, 2012 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 12 BROWARDPALMBEACH.

COM I FREE
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK TAKES ON THE SHERIFF. PAGE 4 ITS THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON AT RESPECTABLES. PAGE 27
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T
heres a town next to the Everglades, 30 minutes up the
expressway from Miami. Its a strange, meandering place
occupying ten square miles of homes, horse meadows,
and pine trees. Except for part of a big-box mall that
falls within its borders, there are no shops. Theres no road
department or police department, no department store.
But if everything goes according to plan, the 7,400-resi-
dent town will soon be home to 1,400 immigrants in a new
federal detention center run by a private corporation.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has
tentatively approved the plan, but the road of negotiations
that led here is as long as one of the towns quiet, unlit streets.
It began a dozen years ago, when the town was formed
and a prison looked like a brilliant source of tax revenue.
Or maybe it began before that, when developer-king
Ron Bergeron sold a spot of forsaken land to the Cor-
rections Corporation of America (CCA). Or even be-
fore that, when man pushed westward into the swamp,
past sprawling homesteads and retention ponds, to a
place where he could hide such things as prisons.
Immigration policy can be an abstract issue, but the
mechanics need to take place somewhere. Four hundred
thousand people a year are rounded up and shipped out
of the country on buses or unmarked white jets, repatri-
ated to an even more broken place. On the way, theres
paperwork to be done and an average wait time of 28 days,
during which the immigrants remain for processing
in U.S. government custody. But where to put them?
You need three things: a plot of land, a company willing to
build a prison, and a local government willing to bend over
backward to persuade the feds to hold their captives there.
Add in some residents enticed by the promise that
their corporate neighbor, left to do its unpleasant busi-
ness, could help keep their taxes low forever.
Bienvenidos a Southwest Ranches.
Here is a usual Thursday-night Town Council meet-
ing last year: A couple of dozen people fill a town hall made
from doublewide trailers on rented land. Five council
members greet residents and take their seats. The Town
Council includes Freddy Fisikelli, an 80-year-old cattle
farmer who was here from the beginning. He has seen
the town through budget crises, corruption, and infight-
ing. Now hes keeping quiet on contentious issues.
Theres the group of homeowners associa-
tion officials clustered around the back table,
talking among themselves about gossip or
a flooded lot, same as it ever was.
Thats Lee Rosselli by the door:
a standup guy, a sheriffs deputy
whos about to retire. Hes been here forever, and ev-
erybody has a story about him. Hes been known to
help round up cows or tow a tractor in a pinch.
But one night last October, the scene was differ-
ent. A new element was in play, one that could forever
change the way business is done here. Deputy Rosselli
was more agitated than usual. Instead of chatting, he
stood outside the doors. He was refusing to let any-
body in fire code, he said. Too many people.
Out in the parking lot, TV news vans rumbled, their
cameras providing the brightest lights around. Cars con-
tinued to overflow the parking lot, spilling onto the grass.
People got out, carrying signs written in Sharpie on neon
boards. They were speaking intensely, some in Span-
ish, as they formed a procession down the driveway.
The man with a megaphone, standing on the grass with a
determined look on his face, was Bill Di Scipio. He wasnt a
member of the immigrant-rights coalition that helped him
organize the protest, and he certainly wasnt one of the long-
time Ranches homeowners. Hed started out as a curious
citizen, relatively new to the place, looking for answers about
the big detention center supposedly moving in next door.
He was met with silence from the Town Council. A
few weeks before the protest, he had dared to ask why.
Fisikelli, the old farmer, turned to the
town attorney, Keith Poliakoff.
Keith, explain to him why were do-
ing the cone of silence, Fisikelli said.
Weve been asked by Homeland Security and CCA, Po-
liakoff answered.
Greetings
|-\C"\..||.|
Low taxes and big yards, all for the price of a box full of immigrants.
}J l|||" +||-|
from
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That was all Di Scipio needed to hear: A
federal agency and a private corporation were
putting the gag on his elected officials. This was
the perceived injustice that spurred Di Scipio to
start a long public-records fight with the town
and organize several protests. He would push
its usually friendly leaders further into nervous
silence. Poliakoff would become his enemy.
This new guy in town, with his accusa-
tions and curiosity, disrupted a cardinal rule
of Southwest Ranches: Live and let live. He
stirred up a system that had been accus-
tomed to operating undisturbed. And amid
his finger-pointing and name-calling, some
of his neighbors realized belatedly that
along with their low-tax land, they had
purchased a share in the prison business.
B
ill Di Scipio drives his Prius 20 miles
every day to a warehouse in Opa-locka,
where he runs a manufacturing com-
pany. He moved to the Ranches from
Northern California. He had built a success-
ful business and decided he liked the quirky
little town with decent schools and low taxes
in a rural setting. In 2006, he paid just under
$1 million for a 3,000-square-foot home.
At the time, Di Scipio had no idea that Cor-
rections Corporation of America was looking
to build a prison on land it owned in South-
west Ranches. The company had agreed to
pay the town a fee for each theoretical pris-
oner it would one day house, if only it could
get a contract with a government agency.
In June 2011, after Di Scipios home had
lost two-thirds of its value in the slumped
housing market, the town and CCA finally
found a potential source for all those lucrative
inmates: U.S. Immigrations and Customs En-
forcement announced that it had tentatively
selected the site for a new detention center.
In July, Di Scipio got a prerecorded ro-
bocall from the Florida Immigrant Coali-
tion, which was unhappy with that idea. The
Obama administrations ramped-up focus
on deportations, the fact that apprehended
immigrants are increasingly placed in the
hands of a few large corporations, and the fuel-
ing of such deportations by checking arrest
information against immigration databases
have created a perfect storm of unrest for im-
migration advocates nationwide. Southwest
Ranches new detention center was sure to
provide some collateral damage in the form
of broken families and crushed dreams.
Di Scipio stays away from all that. But
when he got the robocall, he had questions of
his own including why he, a homeowner,
hadnt known that this project was in the
works. He decided to go to the Town Council
and find out why. This led to the exchange
with attorney Poliakoff and Di Scipios real-
ization that his questions were unwelcome
at this stage in the negotiations. It looked
to him like the Town Council was ramming
through a major project under a veil of se-
crecy, duping citizens whose property values
would soon plummet. Reaching for the moral
high ground of a truth-seeking journalist,
he taught himself about public-records re-
quests at a time in midlife when another man
might have shut up and bought a Porsche.
One of his first requests was for support-
ing material backing up Poliakoffs claim
that the feds and CCA had asked the town
not to discuss the facility. For a while, he
didnt hear anything. So he grew restless
and asked for more. Emails, billing records,
documents. While the immigrant coalition
worked to spread its own message, he took
his fight straight to the desk of the town clerk.
In his free time, Di Scipio sorts through
the reams of requests hes submitted, which
he keeps in an overflowing binder. When
the requests were met with silence a few
times, he started submitting even more of
them, with intentionally awful spelling and
grammar, under the name Frank Nurt.
Nobody would want to answer these.
Di Scipio grins. They have to.
He knows that public-records
law is on his side, even if he pisses
off town officials in the process.
This is fun as hell, he admits. Men-
tion of his name now elicits an audible
groan from the Southwest Ranches clerk.
Di Scipio is unfazed. I could get
older and sit here and whine or get
out and be the agent of change.
A few months ago, he finally got an answer
to his challenge of the cone of silence. Polia-
koff forwarded him a copy of an email the town
attorney had sent to council members and staff
in June, as Southwest Ranches was still com-
peting with other cities to win ICEs selection.
As you know we are in the final months to
see if we can land the new Federal Immigration
Facility, Poliakoff wrote in the email. Florida
City is flipping over all stones to try to take the
lead, but their strategy with the press is actually
backfiring since residents are now [coming]
out in opposition... which will inevitably cause
Homeland Security to shy away from their site
since they do not want controversy right now.
Poliakoff wrote that officials should
expect calls about the matter, since the
sharks are beginning to circle... If [we
get] a ton of calls we will issue a carefully
crafted press release, but until then, the
less we say the better off we will be.
Poliakoff later claimed his observation
that the sharks are beginning to circle
referred to other municipalities and cor-
porations that had been competing for the
contract until the last minute, and not as
Di Scipio believes to angry townspeople.
Look at the date of that email [June 7],
Poliakoff says today. There was no Bill Di
Scipio. At that time, none of [the protest-
ers] were around. None of them existed.
For Di Scipio, the email was proof
that the town was moving forward at
full steam while Poliakoff did everything
legal to keep residents in the dark.
M
arygay Chaples, a long-haired great-
grandmother with a sharp tongue
and a big gun, lives on a farm on a
corner of Dykes Road in Southwest
Ranches. She came out here 55 years ago,
she says, with the Dykes family and two oth-
ers. The areas early pioneers, they traveled
along the levee at Griffin Road to reach a place
full of nothing but swamp and pastures.
There was nothing to the west or the
south, Chaples recalls, sitting on her side
porch as horses graze in the background.
Nothing to the east, nothing to the north.
This was a one-lane road made of debris
we pulled out of the ditch. It looked like
the Everglades. There were fires Ive got
photographs of my fence posts burning.
Chaples has appreciated the work of
fences ever since. She mediates town dis-
putes and helps people deal with legal is-
sues, having become a sort of liaison to local
government. She has a live-and-let-live
attitude about her neighbors, including the
wealthy celebrities: athletes such as Udonis
Haslem and Jason Taylor, and other people
who dont want to be noticed or taxed.
We dont care, Chaples says.
We dont bother them. But we will
fight for them if we need to.
Shes also a firm supporter of the de-
tention center and takes offense when
relative newcomers get personal.
It really angers us for people to at-
tack the town and our elected officials
and make wild accusations, all because
they dont want a prison, she says.
Her strong belief in property rights hers
is the only place in town still zoned for a
slaughterhouse also informs her
Bill Di Scipio and Ryann Greenberg, who live in neighboring cities, are leading the fight
against the detention center.
George Martinez
Prisonville, Fl from p7
>> p10
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support of CCAs plans. In fact, the company
has owned its land, with prison-friendly
zoning, since before the town existed.
The new jail planned for southwest Bro-
ward County will go in a barren area where the
county puts things that nobody wants, wrote
David Fleshler and John Maines of the Sun-
Sentinel. That statement holds true today the
site is between a county dump and a womens
prison but it was written back in 1998.
CCA had just purchased the 24-acre
property. The company had originally
scoped out the area in 1991 after a request
from the then-sheriff to build a mega-jail
for 4,000 inmates. Those plans fell through,
but CCA stuck around and bought the land.
It could shop around for inmates later
essentially making a long-term bet that
South Florida would turn more criminal.
Before Southwest Ranches incorporated
in 2000, the lawyers for local homeowners
associations lobbied the Florida Legislature
to let the town include the CCA plot
which lay completely outside its proposed
borders, surrounded by unincorporated
land and the city of Pembroke Pines. Town
founders theorized that if they scooped up
this outlying parcel, it would be a flowing
well of money: Once CCA built a prison, it
would pay taxes to fill town coffers. CCA
now estimates that it will pay more than
$1.5 million a year in local and state taxes.
In 2005, Town Administrator John Canada
oversaw the signing of a contract between the
town and CCA. The prison company would
pay the town a one-time fee of $600,000.
Additionally, CCA promised the town a 3 to
4 percent cut of any daily fee it received for
housing prisoners. If nothing else, the contract
could be shown to prospective government
agencies to prove that CCA had a good rela-
tionship with the town and was ready to build.
It was one of the better negotiations
[Canada] did, says Don Maines, a Town
Council member at the time and a supporter
of the detention center plan. That site is
zoned for the worst chemical waste dump
you could put out there. He calls the less-
toxic current proposal a win-win situation.
Town officials estimated that the CCA deal
would bring in a million dollars a year, not
counting taxes. In 2006, the year after the con-
tract was signed, that was equal to more than
one-third of the towns property-tax revenue.
Chaples points out that CCA could go
ahead and build a regular prison there with
criminal inmates rather than pursue the
ICE contract. To me, its a better deal to
have an immigration facility than to have a
prison, she says. Detainees at the facility
would not necessarily have criminal records.
O
ne of Di Scipios requests netted him
a trove of inside information: six
months worth of emails sent and
received by former (now deceased)
Town Administrator Charlie Lynn.
One of the emails was sent by Polia-
koff to CCAs lawyer and copied to Lynn.
Regarding a proposed increase in the fa-
cilitys capacity, Poliakoff wrote: My posi-
tion is, amend the agreement and show
me the money and then we can talk.
Di Scipio posted this email and others on
his anti-CCA Facebook page, with show me
the money highlighted. He began to won-
der about the money that was involved
for Poliakoff and other council members.
Poliakoff explains that show me the
money was a tongue-in-cheek refer-
ence to the additional federal money that
CCA would be required to allocate to
the town if the detention-center capac-
ity were expanded. But Di Scipio went on
to scrutinize Poliakoffs billing records.
The town officially contracts with Po-
liakoffs law firm, Becker and Poliakoff, of
which he is the principal lawyer of several
who attend to town business. In 2010, the
town paid the firm more than $450,000 in
legal fees. In addition, the firm gets $35,000
a year from the town for state legislative
lobbying, regardless of how much lobby-
ing it does. These figures have been in place
since early in the towns history, when Po-
liakoffs father, Gary, was town attorney.
A portion of Poliakoffs billing last year
was for negotiations concerning the CCA
deal. In March a particularly critical
month the firm charged $48,912 in le-
gal fees, a high for the year. At least $3,836
was billed by Poliakoff for CCA matters.
Poliakoff says that he does not personally
get paid a lot and that surrounding munici-
palities pay more, sometimes nearly double
that yearly amount, for legal services. But
surrounding municipalities also have popula-
tions much larger than the Ranches 7,400.
The lawyer also says that the towns
contract with CCA stipulates that the
An early concept drawing from CCA.
Courtesy of CCA.
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company eventually repay all legal fees
incurred by the town on the companys
behalf. Theyre aware that they need
to make the town whole, he assures.
Through the emails, Di Scipio also learned
how Poliakoff and CCA carefully managed
the towns courtship of ICE officials. In early
March, an email thread revealed, Poliakoff
traveled to Washington, D.C., along with
Lynn and Mayor Jeff Nelson. The invitation
from ICE was for town officials to make a
presentation on their readiness for a deten-
tion facility, but CCA was running the show
right down to the accommodations.
After he booked rooms at the J.W. Mar-
riott in downtown D.C., Poliakoff sent an
email to Lynn and Nelson. The rate for the
basic room is $439 a night, but CCA says we
need to stay there. Charlie, you can sleep
in my tub if you want, Poliakoff wrote.
Two days before the Washington presenta-
tion, CCA Vice President Lucibeth Mayberry
wrote instructions for the town officials to fol-
low during the presentation. We would like
the mayor to help us on the site [map] slide...
in explaining why the community views the
prison as a good fit for that location, May-
berry wrote. We need to concentrate on ham-
mering home the positive location of this site.
When Southwest Ranches and CCA
talk about community support, theyre
often talking about the leaders of area
homeowners associations and longtime
residents like Chaples, who have been
invited to several meetings with CCA.
CCA operates 14 ICE detention facilities
of varying security levels. In a white pa-
per presented to ICE about the Southwest
Ranches site, CCA proposes that ICE pay it
a daily fee of $66 to $69 per detainee. If the
town ends up winning the ICE contract, it
can expect to take 4 percent of that or just
under $3 per detainee per day and pass
the rest on to CCA and its shareholders.
In April, Poliakoff drafted a letter of sup-
port for the prison and sent it to Sen. Bill
Nelson and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, whose districts include the prison
site. They signed a shortened version of the
letter, anticipating construction and staff-
ing jobs for their constituents. Di Scipio
publicized the fact that Wasserman Schultz
received a $1,000 campaign donation from
CCA just weeks after signing the letter.
Poliakoff, for his part, has repeatedly played
down the importance of the vocal protesters,
citing an estimate of their number at around
100 people. Youre looking at 170,000 total
residents in Southwest Ranches and Pembroke
Pines, he says. Is [100] a significant number?
A
round the time of the D.C. trip last
spring, the towns basic services of
firefighting and emergency medical
rescue were in turmoil, partly because
of the detention center plans. The town
backed out of its longstanding agreement to
pay the Broward Sheriffs Office to provide
these services, eventually choosing to get
them from neighboring Pembroke Pines.
Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue spokesman
Mike Jachles says that Southwest Ranches
moved to cancel the contract because the
town believed it could get a better price else-
where. But there was another factor in the
towns decision to cancel. Poliakoff had been
trying since the end of 2010 to get BSO offi-
cials to offer their easy approval of expanded
service to the proposed detention center, and
he wasnt getting the answer he wanted.
BSO Fire Marshal Charles Raiken offered a
gruff response to a proposal to expand the fa-
cilitys capacity from 1,500 detainees to 2,200
(CCA later backed away from this number).
The town has not provided this office any
notice or opportunity to officially review this
development, wrote Raiken on January 3.
Raiken concluded that the proposed
expansion... exceeds the capabilities of the
existing and projected contractual fire res-
cue resources available within the jurisdic-
tion of the Town of Southwest Ranches.
Around this time, the contract negotia-
tions with BSO started to break down. Finally,
in June 2011, the town signed with Pembroke
Pines for fire service. The rate was cheaper,
and Pines officials agreed to service the fu-
ture prison site. Conveniently, the city has
a fire station less than half a mile away.
As part of the contract, Pines also agreed
to provide water and sewer services to the
site, which city officials predicted would
bring in nearly a million dollars a year.
The deal was approved unanimously by
the Pembroke Pines City Commission.
Winning over the residents of Pembroke
Pines would be a totally different matter.
M
ike Machak, public affairs man-
ager for CCA, stood at the door
of the public library in Pembroke
Pines on November 5, looking
at the line of opponents gathered on the
cool Saturday morning. A few held signs,
many wore stickers, but the crowd was
quietly waiting for admission to the build-
ing. I expected... more, Machak said.
The meeting was organized by Con-
gresswoman Wasserman Schultz, who had
recently criticized the Southwest Ranches
Town Council for providing a paucity of
information about the detention center
plans. The audience was mostly Pembroke
Pines residents some of whom live closer
to the CCA site than anybody in South-
west Ranches demanding to know why
they hadnt been consulted while schools
and homes were built near the site.
Wasserman Schultz recruited friend Bob
Butterworth, an elder statesman of Florida
politics, to moderate a question-and-answer
session. The questions were to be read from
cards filled out by audience members. Only
three people, out of the dozens in attendance,
indicated that they supported the prison.
Much of the audience had been re-
cruited by Di Scipios anti-detention-center
group, which had publicized the event on
Facebook and the web and put up signs.
What Wasserman Schultz had intended as
an opportunity to spread information, the
activists had seized on as a rare chance to
speak candidly to ICE and CCA honchos.
The meeting devolved into a circus.
Residents asked Mayberry, the CCA vice
president, about a recent news report that
the company had been avoiding property
taxes by renting cows to graze on the prop-
erty. We have done everything we are
allowed to do and take advantage of exemp-
tions as any business would, she said.
Whenever residents complained that
they hadnt been made aware of plans to
build the detention facility, Mayor Nel-
son countered that the process had been
thoroughly vetted and rattled off a his-
tory of the decades-old deal.
Marygay Chaples (left), a longtime resident, has supported the detention center plans
for years.
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In response, a woman stood up and read
the email from Poliakoff that Di Scipio had
discovered, in which the town attorney
had said, the less we say the better off
we will be. If Poliakoff hadnt meant to
sound conspiratorial, his words were cer-
tainly interpreted that way by the jeering
crowd. He did not speak at the meeting.
Things took a turn when Frank Ortis,
mayor of Pembroke Pines, took the po-
dium. The longer I sit in this meeting, the
angrier Im getting, he said. But he wasnt
angry at the raucous crowd, which was
booing him. Ive told you this is a South-
west Ranches issue, he said. We dont
have a vote in it... This is what happens
when you dont go to the people first.
Before he could finish that last
sentence, the booing had changed
to thunderous applause.
PolitiFact Florida later rated his claim
that Pembroke Pines didnt have a vote
in it as mostly false, citing four sepa-
rate occasions when his citys commis-
sion voted to support or not interfere with
development of the detention center.
Pembroke Pines Vice Mayor Iris Siple was
next to take the stage. She said that part of the
firefighting agreement the part that said
her city would provide water and sewer to
the facility had been added by Southwest
Ranches without notice at the last minute
and that she hadnt seen it before voting.
I just sent a text to our city clerk, she
said, asking to add an item to the agenda
for our next meeting, where I will ask my
fellow commissioners to consider using
the agreements... termination clause.
She was threatening, maybe promising, to
withdraw the citys pledged support for
services to the facility. More wild applause.
Today, Siple says shes still research-
ing that option: I voted for [the water
and sewer agreement] because I didnt
realize that it was there. Im not going
to take full blame, because no one else
at our meeting brought it up either.
Poliakoff says the town added the
water and sewer clause just a few days
before Pembroke Pines voted on it be-
cause they wanted to confirm that Pines
had the capacity to service the facility. Its
cancellation may be a moot point, he says:
In the event that Pines did not provide
water, the facility would still be built but
would have to provide its own water.
Poliakoff, who was in high school
when CCA first started trying to build on
the site, says the time to put up obstruc-
tions is long past. The time to say you
object? That was in the 1990s, he says.
But the work of the agitators left its mark
on Pembroke Pines officials. They might
have spent years quietly voting through de-
velopment of the facility with little public
feedback, but on the evening of Tuesday,
January 10, city commissioners made a
grand, if possibly futile, gesture. They voted
unanimously to draft a letter of opposi-
tion to the detention facility and send it
to the president of the United States.
Poliakoff expects a final decision
from ICE within two months. In the
meantime, hes putting together a new
contract with CCA that he says will be
the best possible deal for the town. He
promises plenty of time to review it.
D
i Scipio has engaged the services of a
rookie attorney in Tampa to sue the
Town of Southwest Ranches for $1.25.
Its the first suit Ive gotten where
the plaintiffs attorneys bar number is
listed as pending, scoffs Poliakoff.
Di Scipio claims that the town clerk
wrongly billed him for copies of records that
he should have been able to view and photo-
graph for free under state law. He had only a
dollar and change in his pocket at the time,
so he handed it over for a few pages of copies.
Later, he took legal action, a crowning move on
top of his months of research and frustration.
Poliakoff is treating the suit seriously
and thoroughly. Di Scipio says he was
furious earlier this month when Poliakoff
deposed his wife. As a possible upside for
both parties, the men are not allowed to
speak to each other as the case proceeds.
Ryann Greenberg, however, is more typi-
cal of residents who oppose the prison. A
stay-at-home mom and Di Scipios strongest
ally in the fight, Greenberg lives in Laguna
Isles, a Pembroke Pines development.
On a cold day, she brings her 2-year-old
daughter to the playground by the club-
house, where immigrant workers are laying
new mulch and a fierce wind blows down
the edge of the Glades. Something is burn-
ing in the distance, turning the sky hazy.
Its been a challenging six months,
Greenberg says of her recent past as an
activist, organizing protests and digging
for information. She understands normal
glad-handing politics, she says, but its a
completely different thing to put a prison
next to homes and schools. Recently, she
notes, the real estate firm Coldwell Banker
sent a letter to prospective sellers, saying
it wouldnt be held responsible for declin-
ing home values because of the prison.
You should have done your homework,
says Doug McKay, the vice mayor, in response
to people whose home values stand to be
affected. Most of the people who are now
complaining bought their homes after CCA
had moved in next door. Few of them, least of
all Pembroke Pines residents, were aware of
the long-term plans for Southwest Ranches.
Im not some idiot NIMBY per-
son, Greenberg says as she bundles her
daughter back into her minivan. No-
body knew this was going to happen.
Back at home, she gets the neighbor
to watch her daughter for a minute, then
climbs up the steep grassy embank-
ment behind her house. Across the street
is a post office and, in the distance, the
mound of the old county dump.
In between, where high-tension wires
stretch overhead, is a little piece of Southwest
Ranches: the empty plot owned by CCA. Its
not beautiful or even very natural-looking,
and its obscured by trees on adjacent prop-
erties. An unremarkable sight, for now.
But if you lean over the hedgerow
and squint really hard at it, on a clear
day, when the sun isnt too low in the
sky, you can almost see the money.
Stefan.Kamph@BrowardPalmBeach.com
Prisonville, Fl from p11
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