Miami Beach's Troubled Police Force Pays Officers in the Six Figures

Comments (0) By Tim Elfrink Thursday, Mar 25 2010

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The cops who allegedly beat the gay man in front of Strickland continued that effort. Officers Eliut Hazzi and Frankly Forte had been hired in 2007. Both had run-ins with internal affairs and their bosses before that March night.

Forte had been put on probation as an officer in training for repeatedly botching responses and ignoring radio calls. Still, he earned a full-time job, records show.

Illustrations by Pat Kinsella

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On March 2, 2008 — about a year before his encounter with Strickland — Hazzi was involved in another ugly incident. Santos Ordoñez, manager of Gallery Deja Vu on Ocean Drive, had gone out with friends after work and had a few beers. A little after 11 p.m., he returned to the gallery for his car keys and accidentally set off the security alarm. He called the gallery owner and the security company, but police responded anyway.

The officers — Hazzi and two others — burst in with a police dog and hit him in the face, Ordoñez says. The blow was strong enough to break several teeth. After wrestling the manager into a police car, the cops zapped him with a stun gun, Ordoñez claims. "They never even gave me a chance to explain who I was," he says.

Internal affairs exonerated all three officers of charges of excessive force. The then-26-year-old Hazzi was back on the streets and eventually partnered with Forte.

After the attack in March 2009 that Strickland watched, Hazzi and Forte were reassigned to desk work while internal affairs reviews what the chief called "inconsistencies" in their report. Hazzi, incidentally, earned $108,371.27 last year. Forte isn't among the 200 cops who made six figures.

After Strickland announced plans to sue, Chief Noriega met with members of the Beach's GLBT Business Enhancement Committee on February 9 of this year. "I thought we had a great relationship here," he told them.

But several group members disagreed. Chip Arndt, who runs a gay Democratic caucus, read an email from a young gay tourist who said Miami Beach cops showered him with gay slurs and ran him and his boyfriend off the sand. "You may think that what happened to Howard was an isolated incident, but it wasn't," Arndt said.

Noriega's chief spokesman, Det. Juan Sanchez, who is gay, was given a seat on the GLBT committee. Sanchez has promised to better address hate crime calls to a hotline. And a lesbian captain was assigned to internal affairs to handle complaints.

"I believe we have always maintained a positive relationship with the city's GLBT Community," Martinez says.

The allegations of improper treatment of minorities aren't limited to gays. Officer Rabih El-Jourdi and his nephew say the department discriminated against them. El-Jourdi was hired in 1999. Almost immediately, he says, other officers began mocking his Muslim faith and Arabic heritage.

His first field training officer called him a "camel jockey and a sand nigger," he says in a series of internal affairs complaints. His second one called him a "rag head" and a "shit bird." Once, a few years later, when his patrol car became stuck on the beach, another officer asked, "Your camel got stuck in the sand? I thought you were from the desert and you don't get stuck in the sand," El-Jourdi says.

Two of the officers he says most frequently tormented him — Sgt. Steve Feldman and Officer John Pereira — are, incidentally, two of the highest-paid in the department. Feldman recently earned $190,655; Pereira picked up $133,842 last year.

According to El-Jourdi, Feldman was fond of patting him down and asking "Where is your C-4?" insinuating he was a suicide bomber. Pereira, he says, refused to stop calling him a "camel jockey."

El-Jourdi claims he waited years to report the incidents because he wanted to be a "team player." But then his nephew, Sweetwater Police Officer Feras Mohammad Ahmad, began working in 2007 on the Beach as a reserve officer. Ahmad immediately faced the same racial slurs and intimidation, El-Jourdi says.

In November 2008, Ahmad filed a civil suit against the City of Miami Beach and the Police Department, detailing the charges. El-Jourdi, in turn, made an internal affairs complaint. Internal affairs investigators ruled the complaint "unsubstantiated" — largely because it came down to a he-said/she-said with the other officers.

The city and the cops have denied the accusations and asked a judge to dismiss them.

Martinez, the department's assistant chief, says the MBPD's overall diversity belies any charges of racism. "Currently 73 percent of the sworn personnel of the department are minorities and 56 percent of the supervisors [sergeants and above] are minorities," he says.

Despite all of those problems, Beach cops earn more than those at other, similarly sized departments in South Florida. In Hialeah, a force with 333 sworn officers, 30 cops topped $100,000 in taxpayer-funded salaries and overtime last year, according to city records. That's only 9 percent of the department, compared to 49 percent of officers on the Beach.

It's even more than tony Coral Gables, where 30 percent of the force earned $100,000 or more, or North Miami Beach, where the number was roughly 40 percent.

The City of Miami has 84 cops whose base salaries top $100,000 — including Chief Miguel Exposito's $196,000 a year — which is 7 percent of the force's 1,110 cops. But that number doesn't include overtime work, which the city claimed it was unable to calculate.