You know, pretty standard stuff.
But it's much more complicated — and interesting — than that. The real story, the one you haven't heard, involves the future of a popular beach, where a dark political shadow is gathering near the glistening sun and lulling surf. It includes allegations of bribery and an ongoing State Attorney's Office investigation. And it's full of powerful people applying pressure to parcel out a piece of publicly owned paradise.
To understand why Deerfield has become a cauldron of conflict, you must go back to the start, to early January 2004. That was when Commissioner Gonot first learned about a proposal to build a restaurant on the publicly owned Deerfield pier.
He says it was a setup from the beginning.
An ex-friend and campaign supporter named Ben Troxell asked him to meet for dinner at the upscale and popular Pete's Restaurant in Boca Raton. The pretense: that the restaurant had spectacular holiday decorations and Gonot should see them before they were taken down.
While they ate in the opulent eatery, the owner of the place, Pete Boinis, joined them. Boinis and Troxell were buddies. Boinis began talking about his plan to sublease the city-owned Deerfield Beach Pier and build a first-class two-story restaurant there.
Gonot says he thought it sounded like a decent idea. Boinis, after all, was no schlub. He'd owned Pete and Lenny's nightclub, which for many years had been one of the most popular party spots in Broward County. Gonot says Boinis told him he still carried a bullet inside his body from the club. The shooting had something to do with a dispute between partners.
Boinis was also a multimillionaire who was known to be good friends with important people like the late founder of Wendy's, Dave Thomas, and South Florida residents Lee Majors and Pete Rose.
So Gonot was impressed, but he looks back now and thinks how perfect it all was, how the whole evening at Pete's was obviously planned to help Boinis get his hooks into him. "Never believe in coincidences," the commissioner says.
During the next several months, Deetjen and Mayor Al Capellini promoted Boinis' plan vigorously. Gonot also supported it, with the stipulation that his vote would ultimately depend on the details of the plan.
Over time, those details trickled in, and they weren't encouraging. Gonot learned that the restaurant was planned to be 18,000 square feet of space with 500 seats. To the commissioner, that sounded too large for the beach area, which is already often paralyzed by traffic. But Boinis, during his periodic visits to City Hall, assured Gonot that he'd take care of the traffic and parking problems.
Even as beach activists lined up against the project, Gonot continued to give his tacit support to it. It was the plan's financials that changed his mind. The commissioner learned that Boinis was to get a 54-year lease and would pay $150,000 a year in rent — exactly what the current tenant was paying. Gonot saw no advantage for the city, especially since by the time taxpayers took over the building — in the 2050s — it would probably be next to worthless.
But what about those renovations to the pier? Well, Gonot found out that the renovations Boinis was promising, which the developer said would cost as much as $2 million, were to be reimbursed by the city through reductions on his rent.
"It became clear to me that this was a sweetheart deal," Gonot says. "This was a bad deal for the city."
As he struggled with his decision, a lawyer named Kirnan Moylan asked him to lunch. Moylan represented billionaire Toyota distributor James Moran, who was listed as the 562nd richest man in the world this year by Forbes magazine. Moran, whose JM Family Enterprises is based in Deerfield Beach, is one of the most powerful men in South Florida.
Gonot says he walked into JB's restaurant on the beach expecting to find Moylan alone. But there with the lawyer was Deetjen, the city manager.
"Kirnan let it be known that JM Family Enterprises is watching the pier restaurant situation very closely and they think it could be a good thing for Deerfield Beach," Gonot recalls. "He said if I was to be opposed to it, that wouldn't be a good thing because, if the tax base doesn't grow, Moran will look to move elsewhere."
Deetjen, meanwhile, backed up Moylan's point of view.
"I'm thinking, 'What the hell is Larry doing there?'" Gonot recalls. "He's supposed to be working for me, and he's helping twist my arm on what I should do."
After the lunch, Gonot told Deetjen and City Attorney Andy Maurodis that he felt that the city manager's presence at the lunch was inappropriate. Deetjen, who maintains that the Boinis deal was a bargain for the city, says he attended the lunch at Moylan's request and wasn't there to influence Gonot. "At that lunch, we focused on what the project could bring Deerfield Beach," the manager says. "I just wanted to make [Gonot] aware of the facts. My job is to make sure that all commissioners have the right factual information."
Gonot says that after that lunch, Boinis really turned the screws on him. The developer asked the commissioner to meet him at Muddy Waters restaurant on Hillsboro Boulevard. Gonot says Boinis made him many offers there.
"He said, 'I can get you lots of money for the race. You'll have all the money you need, and not only that, you'll have all the money you need for the next election.'
"Then he said, 'I'd like to see you as mayor. In 2009, you will have plenty of money for the mayor's race. '"
But first, Gonot would have to support the pier restaurant deal. And if he didn't? Gonot says Boinis brought up Amadeo "Trinchi" Trinchitella, the powerful Deerfield Beach commissioner and Century Village condo political boss who was a strong advocate of the pier project.
"Boinis said, 'I would hate to see anybody run against you. Trinchi's secretary is talking about it, but I'm sure we could make that go away,'" Gonot recounts.
"I took that to mean, if I don't support his pier restaurant, she is going to be running against me."
Numerous phone calls to Boinis went unanswered. Deetjen says the developer probably doesn't want to talk about the ongoing case.
Gonot says that after that lunch, he notified Maurodis and went to the State Attorney's Office, where he met with public corruption chief Tim Donnelly.
"There cannot be a quid pro quo for a vote," Gonot explains. "He gave an inducement. He could legally support me, but he cannot provide me an inducement for my vote."
Donnelly told him that he would conduct an investigation and gave him a tape recorder for his phone and permission to record any calls with Boinis. State Attorney's Office spokesman Ron Ishoy says the case is still active.
Boinis, who was in the Bahamas last week, didn't return phone calls. Instead, he had his attorney, Jeffrey Greenberg, phone me. "Mr. Boinis denies that he ever offered Gonot anything in exchange for a vote," Greenberg said.
Greenberg added that the State Attorney's Office is investigating criminal allegations against Gonot, though he wouldn't elaborate. Gonot said he learned from Donnelly that Boinis claimed to prosecutors that the commissioner had tried to bribe him rather than the other way around.
For his part, Gonot didn't get any incriminating phone calls on tape. He says he never even tried.
"I just wanted Boinis to back off," he says. "I wasn't out to take this guy down. I didn't want to set the guy up. I just wanted him to back off."
But, sure enough, Trinchitella's "secretary," Anita Cruz, who worked as an accountant at Century Village, ran against Gonot and raised thousands of dollars from the pro-development crowd. Boinis himself contributed at least $3,000 to the Cruz campaign.
Fate then played a role. Trinchi died in February 2005. A month later, the Boinis proposal finally came up for a vote. Because Gonot, who was the swing vote, held firm that he would never support it, the commission wound up voting unanimously to kill Deetjen's unpopular plan.
A week after that, Gonot trounced Cruz in the election, even though she outraised him by 50 percent.
One might think that would have ended it, but it didn't. Boinis still sits in the wings, waiting for a chance to reintroduce his plan to take over the beach pier.
"This is personal with these guys — they aren't going to be beat," Gonot says. "Typically, I thought businesspeople know when to move on, but they won't stop. These guys never stop."
