Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When he returned to the job last fall, however, he assumed much greater power. Miami voters had approved a "strong-mayor" charter in September, sold on the idea that it would be a tonic for the city's fiscal troubles and chronic corruption. Rather than being just another commissioner, the mayor has broad-ranging authority, including the veto...
Another chaotic week ends, leaving Miamians to wonder how long before the white-suited men with butterfly nets come to take the mayor away...
Best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen wrote those words, but you won't find them in yarns like Tourist Season or Strip Tease. Instead, Hiaasen was describing the real-life mayor of Miami in his newspaper column last month. "Mayor Loco," Hiaasen calls...
...Mayor Xavier Suarez isn't pleased with the title, and for weeks he has threatened to sue Hiaasen and his paper, the Miami Herald. Last week, to emphasize his pique, Suarez phoned the Herald's advertising manager and left another warning on voice mail: "I note that we are subsidizing you and your newspaper with ads related to official notices of the city," Suarez growled. Echoing a bit of cold war lingo, he then urged the manager to "tell your maximum leader of the free world for the publishing company [translation: Herald president Joe Natoli] to be a lot nicer...
...sounds like a plot twist in one of Hiaasen's novels, tales of besmirched pols and gritty heroes in South Florida--"except this is the sort of behavior that if you put it in a novel, critics would say it's unbelievable," Hiaasen says. Second-time-around Mayor Suarez has been back in the job only since November, when he narrowly--and perhaps unfairly--beat the incumbent. (After the election, law enforcers arrested a Suarez campaign volunteer for offering to buy absentee ballots. The Herald and state officials have been examining other irregularities, which could lead to a rematch...