Henry Hill Equals Chris Paciello; Not!

So on Saturday night, before Hyperkinetic and I went bar hopping, we smoked a few bowls and sat down to watch “Kings of South Beach,” the A&E movie that depicts the rise and fall of one time South Beach wunderkind Chris Paciello. The cable television network that gave us Dog The Bounty Hunter billed the flick as a cross between "Donnie Brasco" and "Scarface." Crap is what it is.


I’ve seen better acting from my autistic mutt, which is sad considering Jason Gedrick (playing the title role) and Donnie Wahlberg (as the deep cover cop who takes down Paciello) are two of Hollywood’s most underrated actors. Gedrick just broods throughout the entire movie. He never really gives any depth to Paciello’s character. He fails to give us a sense of Chris’s inner , what drives him to bury his New York goombah past to become South Beach kingpin. Wahlberg is a little bit better as Andy Burnett, a fictional character based on the real Miami Beach police detective who befriended and eventually took down Paciello. A real laugher was using Steven Bauer (Manolo from Scarface) to play mob boss Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico. At least get someone who looks like a Guido play the man. Someone like Chaz Palminteri or Joe Mantenga would have filled the role nicely.

I also didn’t get why the producers changed everyone’s names. Paciello was “Chris Troiano,” while his celebrity groupie socialite partner Ingrid Casares was “Olivia Palacios.” I guess the producers were afraid Ingrid’s daddy was going to sick his lawyers on them. And the script was full so much cheese, they could package it up and sell it to people with WIC cards.

In one of the early scenes, Troiano is strolling through Risk, Paciello’s first nightclub venture that law enforcement authorities believed was torched so the insurance money could be used to open Liquid. He spots Olivia making a beeline to the ladies room to snort some blow. He chastises her for getting high. “You’re no good to me with your nose full,” Troiano grouses. “I don’t want you making trouble. Trouble costs me money.” It doesn’t get better.


Another problem with the script is that it embellished Paciello’s penchant for violence. In real life, people knew Paciello had a nasty temper, once beating the shit out of a boxer inside his nightclub for supposedly calling a friend the N-word. But the movie takes the violence up a notch. The movie introduces two fictional Russian mobsters who try to shake Troiano down for a piece of Liquid. In one scene, Burnett is behind the wheel of Troiano’s red Ferrari. Troiano is riding shotgun. The two Russians pull up next to them in a BMW and spray bullets at Troiano and Burnett. Troiano climbs halfway out of the passenger’s side door and returns fire. Later on, the two Russians end up dead in the trunk of the car (supposedly on the orders of Allie Boy who wants to protect his money laundering operation through Troiano’s nightclub ventures).
It’s too bad this movie utterly sucked. Chris Paciello is the classic tale of a Miami rebirth. This city has a history of scalawags, scoundrels and sociopaths who come here to remake their image and become pillars of society. In his prime, Paciello (who is out of prison and living in Los Angeles) owned two of the hottest nightclubs on the Beach. He was expanding his empire north. He gave thousands of dollars to local charity like the Make a Wish Foundation. He was banging celebrities like Sofia Vergara and Niki Taylor. But eventually his criminal past caught up to him. It’s the kind of stuff that made Henry Hill a legendary mob snitch and "Goodfellas" one of the all time greatest mob movies. Unfortunately "Kings of South Beach" doesn’t come close. -NA

Black on Black Grime

Why is that every time Miami-Dade’s black political establishment brazenly plays the race card, no one calls them out for being hypocritical bigots? The local media, even Jim Defede, whose days steamrolling our fair county’s most dubious citizens are long behind him, is afraid to denounce the ignorant ramblings spewed by County Commissioner Barbara Jordan and her political godmother Betty Ferguson, both of whom have been sounding off riot bells so Roosevelt Bradley can get his job back. These supposedly revered African Americans don’t deserve any credibility given their track record of holding their own people back. Yet, there they are, whipping up a frenzy, dividing blacks and Hispanics, by portraying Mayor Carlos Alvarez as the Cuban American incarnation of George Wallace.

Just this past Saturday morning, the B&B Gurls (as I’ve come to call them) were the guests on Cheryl Mizell’s Community Voices program on 99 Jamz. Jordan promised that she was going to conduct a review of every department to make sure that Alvarez holds every director accountable as he did Bradley. She never mentioned that the mayor also ousted planning and zoning director Diane O’Quinn Williams and demoted Employee Relations chief Donald Allen, both white people. And she conveniently left out that Alvarez replaced Allen with a black woman.

“The mayor has to man up…bring back Roosevelt Bradley…and apologize to this community if he wants a healing process to begin,” Jordan pontificated. And I’m not even going to repeat the bullshit that oozed out of Ferguson’s mouth. Of course, Mizell ate it all up and pandered to them, never really challenging anything the B&B Gurls had to say.

Had this been Natacha Seijas (not that I sympathisize with the Wicked Witch of the West) on Radio Mambi or La Poderosa ranting about Cubans getting the shaft, the English speaking media would be all over her. The B&B Gurls get a free pass because they’re black. Ferguson gets extra special star treatment because of her late husband Wilkie's legacy in the community, yet she is one of the most despicaple two-faced agitators in South Florida. What’s so laughable is that Ferguson last week participated in Bishop Victor T. Curry’s pastoral sit-in (featuring a token white minister) outside Alvarez’s office where she compared Bradley’s firing to the ouster of ex-aviation director Angela Gittens in 2004.

Now, if there was ever a black government agency head who deserved the unflinching, unyielding support of the NAACP and Miami’s black political leadership, it was Gittens – a black woman who stood against the influence peddlers and the political insiders who have enjoyed making Miami International Airport their own piggy bank. The funny thing is that the B&B Gurls did absolutely nothing to prevent her departure. Why?

Well, Gittens was an interloper from Atlanta and someone who wasn’t going to play the old game of steering minority contracts to the favored black entrepreneurs who helped Ferguson keep her county commission seat for more than a decade and assisted her protégé Jordan assume power in 2004. Gittens was nothing like Bradley, who rewarded his first cousin Wade Jones with a promotion for managing Jordan’s successful election campaign – an inconvenient truth the commissioner always fails to disclose. And Ferguson was counting on Bradley to make sure that the future north alignment of Metrorail (that will run from NW 27th Avenue to Dolphins Stadium) followed her preferred path.

As long as the B&B Gurls continue spreading their campaign of racial disinformation, the ethnic chasm between Miami-Dade’s black and Hispanic communities will only grow deeper. –NA

Tequila Afternoon Delight

Around 5:30 p.m. Friday, I descended on a Spanish-style mansion on Miami Beach’s Pine Tree Drive hosting a fete by Myspace queen Tila Tequila, who was recently featured in a NY Times article about the Internet’s largest social network messing with its users with new restrictions hampering their abilities to design their pages and promote new projects. In Tequila’s case Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson allegedly pressured her to take down her Hookah, a musicplayer/music store developed by Indie911. Myspace places restrictions on what third party software its users can have on their pages.

But the girl was here to party. And there was plenty of free booze flowing too, which is how we like it at Miami Malady. In the shaded part of the courtyard, behind the turntables, Tequila was bumping and grinding all over Don Diablo, Amsterdam’s baddest DJ, who was dropping a hard house and electro mix for the small set of invitees. At one point, Tequila leapt onto Diablo -- who caught her by her butt cheeks -- and dry humped him. She sashayed her way to a group of male friends by the pool and gave them juggy hugs. Tequila turned around and smacked a buxom blonde with fake supersize Double D’s on her ass. When asked how she was doing, the smoking hot waif replied: “Aw, ya know, kind of wasted.” Now that’s classy with a capital “K.” Then I snapped these pictures of Tequila that made me want to love her long time. –NA

The Sparkly Snatch Speaks

On Wednesday afternoon I ventured to the Miami Beach Resort and Spa on 48th Street and Collins Avenue, ground zero for the 2007 Winter Music Conference, the week-long-electronic-illigal substance-enhanced-baccanalia-disguised-as-a-music-industry-pow-wow. I was up on the 18th floor, checking out the VIP reception hosted by the Florida Chapter of the Recording Academy.

Although I must admit I really don't know any dance music industry VIPs so it's not like I can tell you who was there except for Chris Dekkor, the guy behind Miambient, a downtempo music party taking place at the Standard this weekend that actually sounds like a cool free alternative to the mindbending cacphony at Ultra.

Of course I couldn't help but wonder how many Blue Nikes Dekkor's pal Alex Theory (the dude on the far left) ate before sliding into those skin-tight black pants with the pink-and-red flames. After Dekkor and Theory shoved off, I noticed this heavy-set, fair-skinned, long-haired brunette jiggling to the thumping amalgam of dub, electro, reggae, and ska that best describes Agape, the band playing the reception. Typed across her WMC badge was the name: Glitterpussy.

I strolled over to this portly dame (who was with Seth Green-in-Party-Monster-lookalike Sean Cooney) and inquired about her pooncat moniker. She replied: "Because it sparkles like it's never been used."

Sorry I asked. -NA

Spray em if ya got em

Don't be messing with those kids at Boyd Anderson High School now. Earlier today, the Miami Herald, and the Sun-Sentinel reported a melee at the Lauderdale Lakes school that sent fifteen people to three different hospitals after a student sprayed Mace, pepper spray or some other kind of irritant on classmates during lunch. Unfortunately I haven't found any video footage of the sprayfest, but I did find these funny-ass clips of some members of Boyd Anderson honors class showing up at a rival's house to whup her ass. Word is the skinny girl with the ratty weave got a full-ride to Harvard and the other bitches was jealous.-NA

The Unruh of Uruguay

It took a foreign journalist to top former WPLG reporter Jilda Unruh's ballsyness for getting the story. Unruh is best remembered for accosting reformed crackhead and school district lobbyist Ric Sisser in his hospital bed while he was being treated for congestive heart failure.


Now comes Martin Sarthou, a television reporter for Teledoce of Uruguay, who this past October was able to sneak his cell phone camera past security at the Miami federal courthouse and used it to film extradition proceedings in October 2006 involving Juan Peirana Basso.

Uruguayan prosecutors accuse Basso with taking part in an $800 million banking scandal involving institutions in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. Sarthou's images were broadcast on Teledoce, including pictures of Peirano being led into court in handcuffs and leg shackles, according to court documents. Cameras are banned in federal courthouses and only limited personnel can bring in cell phones or other electronics in southern Florida federal courts.


Basso's lawyers warned Sarthou not to disseminate the images, but they were broadcast anyway as "unique, exclusive photos" in a report on Oct. 27. According to a translated script, Sarthou said the network "deemed it important for viewers to have access to the images and the extradition proceedings.


Last Thursday, Sarthou pled guilty and was sentenced for criminal contempt of court by Chief United States Magistrate Judge Ted E. Bandstra. Sarthou was fined $1000 and barred from entering any federal courthouse in Key West, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Fort Pierce for one year. - NA

Ethics! Shmethics!

On Thursday, the Miami-Dade ethics commission is expected to decide if Miami Mayor Manny Diaz and former City Commissioner Johnny Winton violated local conflict-of-interest laws when they, along with former City Manager Joe Arriola and a fourth individual, bought a prime Coconut Grove property. The legendary Tristam Korten wrote an excellent article in the Biscayne Times questioning why it’s taken so long for the county’s ethical watchdogs to crack down on Miami’s political cosa nostra.

To recap, the four men partnered up to buy a 1.3 acre Grove parcel for $3 million in 2005. The Miami Herald first reported the transaction a year later, shortly after Winton proposed and voted in favor of a $53,000 pay raise for Diaz. But the most Diaz and Winton can expect from the ethics commission – if it rules against them – is a public black eye and a fine. After all, the ethics commission doesn’t have any authority to lock em up for being a pair of greedy goombahs. - NA