Doin' the Curry Hurl

Okay, you may be wondering why a blog created by three able authors has seen one lonely Valentine’s Day rant since we started Miami Malady more than a month ago. It probably has something to do with the fact we’re lazy bums who spend our professional lives telling people how we’re going to write the definitive Miami novel while smoking too many blunts between deadlines. But then Victor Curry said something to the Miami Herald this past weekend that stirred the acidic bile in my gullet. In fact, I want to vomit all over Miami-Dade’s local NAACP president.

In case you’re not paying attention to what goes on at County Hall, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez forced high-ranking black bureaucrat Roosevelt Bradley to resign as the transit agency’s director. On Saturday, Curry opened his inflammatory trap and accused Alvarez of dissing the black community by dismissing Bradley, whose department will oversee billions of dollars worth of transit improvements over the next 30 years, yet remains plagued with mounting deficits, insider deals and low employee morale.

According to the Herald, Curry said: “It’s the same old song – once money is allocated to a certain department, we have to make sure that African-Americans do not serve in leadership roles to oversee it…We’re just afraid that Mayor Alvarez is not going to deal fairly with the black community.”

If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive, he’d pimp slap Curry for being such a petty, simple minded demagogue.

Through Curry’s jaundiced eyeglasses, it doesn’t matter that Bradley was seeking to add $19 million to an already dubious $84 million consulting contract with Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas – the powerhouse engineering firm at the forefront of the Big Dig disaster in Boston – to hire more engineering firms because, like, umm, ten engineering firms is never enough.
It doesn’t matter that Bradley violated Florida’s nepotism laws when he promoted his first cousin Wade Jones from bus operator to supervisor. It doesn’t matter that Bradley re-promoted Jones just two months after his cousin was demoted for creating a hostile work environment for the women he supervised.

It doesn’t matter that the Miami-Dade Inspector General discovered Bradley circumvented county hiring practices to give a high-level security job to an unqualified woman accused of stealing $800 from her last employer. It doesn’t matter that Bradley subsequently fired the whistleblower who spoke to the Inspector General’s investigators.

For Curry, it only matters that Alvarez shoved a black man out from a position of power. It’s as if Curry wants to use slavery, segregation and Apartheid as reasons to ignore corrupt behavior in black leaders who violate the public trust. And that’s just wrong. It was time for Roosevelt Bradley to go. And it is time for Victor Curry to shut up. - NA