Kick Ass: Selected Columns Read online

  Wilbanks suggests that this is not a crime wave, but a way of life. His book, Murder in Miami, meticulously charts the fluctuations in Dade County's homicide pattern from 1917 through 1983. It is a sobering document that avoids platitudes and simplistic solutions, which is probably why it's not easily understood by politicians.

  "Everybody wants to make it some alien force affecting our community," he says. "But it's not any one factor. My argument is, it's more of a murder culture."

  Chilling words, but no cause for panic. Yet.

  There are traditional categories of urban murder—domestics, drug feuds, robberies—that always will exist in a volatile, gun-happy community. And while a high murder rate is deplorable, it doesn't always mean that Joe Citizen stands a greater chance of being randomly gunned down on his way to the K mart.

  Mike Gonzalez, dean of Miami homicide cops, says that 75 to 90 percent of all murder victims know their assailant. His favorite axiom: "If you're not a dope dealer, and you don't settle your domestic arguments with a gun, and you're halfway sensible about where you go at night, you haven't got a chance in the world of being killed."

  I asked Gonzalez what can be done to stop the killing, and he talked about controlling handguns.

  "With a gun, it's so easy, so efficient, so impersonal. There are more people killed in Miami than are killed in Great Britain, West Germany and Tokyo put together. And it's because of guns.

  "Everybody buys a gun because they're gonna shoot the crooks, right? How many crooks do you think are killed this way?" the detective asked. "Children in back seats get killed with those guns. Ma and Pa get killed. The evidence is, they don't protect themselves with these guns, they kill each other."

  And that's half our homicides right there.

  Civic Leaders, of course, would much rather rail about drug assassins or crazed Mariels than suggest tough gun laws.

  Gonzalez is no politician, but he's investigated about a thousand murders. What that makes him is an expert.

  On the beach, reality doesn't take a vacation

  August 9, 1985

  We beat the ambulance by two minutes.

  The emergency room at Mount Sinai was filling with gray-suited men wearing plastic IDs, and out front were the cops—motormen, patrol officers, detectives, SWAT commandos, all with the same haggard look in their eyes. The look of the Grim Wait.

  The call had gone out as a hostage situation, then a sniper and then this: "We have two police officers down!"

  Racing across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, we'd heard another voice on the radio: "They're on the way to Sinai. We need a trauma team. We need a trauma team!"

  And both of us, the photographer and I, thought the worst. Somebody murdered some cops, we thought.

  At the emergency room we were told that the number was four. Four police officers shot during—what else—a drug deal.

  In the swank Doral Beach Hotel, of all places. In the middle of a dead summer, in the murder capital of America.

  What exactly had gone wrong was not clear, but it certainly wasn't Crockett andTubbs gliding through a TV bust. Four cops down was life gravely mocking art.

  It doesn't matter how long you do this sort of thing, the sight of the first ambulance always turns your throat to sandpaper.

  Because the first ambulance usually is where they put the one who took the worst shot.The first ambulance tells the story—just how bad it's going to be.

  The doors swung open and there lay Detective Jim Mahle. His head was wrapped to cover two bullet holes in the right side of his skull. But one hand was moving. Best of all, he was conscious.

  Then came Detective Joe White, bearded and shirtless, his white shorts bloodied. His eyes were open and he was holding his own IV bag. Sgt. Mike Lowe, a crimson smear on his forehead, walked into the emergency room on his own.

  Another ambulance delivered undercover man James Scarberry ("I'm OK," he said), and then came the wounded police informant, pale, and moaning into an oxygen mask.

  A few minutes later, a woman in a pink outfit gingerly made her way past the police cordon. A reporter asked if she were related to one of the victims. "No, my daughter just had a baby," the woman said, smiling. "I'm here for a happy occasion."

  Soon a trauma specialist came out to announce that the policemen were going to make it. Miraculously, none of the injuries was life-threatening.

  Over at the Doral, a man with a mop swabbed the front steps. The place was quiet.

  "I got to work and I saw all these cop cars," said Rocky Hile, the downstairs bartender. "I thought they were shooting another episode of MiamiVice. I saw the blood on the steps and I thought: Boy, they really go all out. Then I come in and turn on the news at six o'clock and that's when I found out ...

  "I had a guy at the bar earlier tonight who was on the loth floor when it happened. Heard all the shots and thought it was some kind of celebration," Rocky said. "Then the elevator door opens and there's a guy on a stretcher, all covered with blood. It still didn't occur to the guy that somebody had actually been shot.

  "Until he got downstairs and saw the SWAT team."

  I thought about that poor tourist—gaping at the stretcher in the elevator, finding the elegant lobby taken over by men with automatic weapons. I imagined the fellow turning to his wife and muttering, "You were right. We should've gone to Epcot Center."

  Or maybe not. Maybe he knew what to expect from the South Florida vacation package: four days-three nights-one shootout.

  That evening, by the hotel pool, Pfizer and Co. threw a private party attended by trim executives with new golf-course tans. There was an open bar and a twirling ice sculpture of a sailfish.

  Upstairs, in a suite on the 11th floor, forensic experts hunted for bullet fragments and measured the bloodstains on the carpet.

  Appalling gore fails to daunt film audiences

  October 16, 1985

  Imagine this: It's a sunny holiday afternoon in autumn. Birds sing. Teenagers lounge on Haulover Beach. Joggers trot through the Grove.

  Yet in a dark downtown theater, redolent of foul hot dogs, more than 40 people are watching one of the most abominable movies of all time.

  The film is called The Mutilator. Its profoundly repugnant newspaper advertisement features a gleaming marlin gaff and promises: "By sword. By ax. By pick. Bye bye."

  I have not come to review this motion picture, but rather the audience. I anticipate a cavalcade of geeks, troglodytes and sociopaths—who else would pay $2.50 to watch a bunch of dumb white college kids get hacked into corned beef?

  But a quick survey before the action starts offers these demographics: A well-dressed young couple, sharing Polaroid snapshots; a moody guy in a dingy tank top, girlfriend on his lap; several teenagers, slightly rowdy but too muscular to rebuke; up front, an entire family, including a 6-year-old, a toddler and a nursing infant.

  And, of course, sitting by himself: the obligatory strange pale man with the baggy pants and bucket of popcorn. You know the one.

  The film begins, and even before the opening credits there is a gruesome killing that would send most normal folks scurrying for the door or the restrooms. Not this bunch—a true gore corps.

  The titles flash: The Mutilator. "Written and directed by Buddy Cooper." Enough said.

  Then the actors, none of whose names are remotely familiar (aliases, no doubt).

  Then: "Special appearance by Ben Moore."

  Who the heck is Ben Moore? No one seems to know, but instinct suggests that he plays the title role.

  The plot unfolds:

  A group of boisterous, beer-guzzling college kids talks a pal into crashing Dad's beachfront townhouse for the weekend. The father happens to be a demented lunatic who sleeps under some gardening tools in the garage and has a respiratory disorder so severe that his breathing can be heard all the way to Seattle.

  Beyond this, The Mutilator follows the identical script of Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween and all other teen slasher movies:


  1. The Trampy Co-Ed is the first to die, but only after the mandatory semi-nude swimming scene.

  2. The Dumb Blond Jock is the next to be mangled.

  3. The Goofy Comic-Relief Guy is third on the menu (and the only character whose mutilation seems to sadden the audience).

  4. Next is the Concerned Cop, who gets beheaded.

  5. Then there's quite a tedious Stalking Sequence, with lots of bad camera work and bass violas.

  6. The climax is the tired old Car-Won't-Start-Scene, with Mr. Mutilator clumsily hacking his way through the convertible top.

  7. Finally the killer is gored, stabbed, burned and run over by the young collegiate heroine, who is (I swear) a self-proclaimed virgin and proud of it. She also is a master of kung fu, as any Southern California virgin must be.

  During all this carnage I expect raucous outbursts from the crowd, but the theater is reverently quiet, as if we are watching Olivier do Hamlet.

  According to my notes, the only audible exclamation comes during the decapitation scene when a man in the back row cries, "Oh s—!" Which pretty much sums up my sentiments, too.

  Sitting one row ahead of me is a handsome gray-haired woman with an embroidered shopping bag. She watches the entire film silently, without a murmur or a flinch. In fact, she is sitting so still that I begin to worry that she might have passed away during the marlin-gaff scene.

  But, moments after the final mutilation, the old woman bolts for the exit, understandably eager to escape before the house lights come on. I catch up with her and ask what she thought of The Mutilator.

  She smiles and says, "It's incredible, yes?"

  Oh yes.

  Crowd gripped by "real" crime drama

  April 12, 1986

  One color of death was bright yellow.

  Yellow were the police ribbons that stretched from tree to tree, to keep people away. The ribbons fluttered in the morning breeze, and crisscrossed in mock gaiety the Kendall neighborhood. Outside the ribbons, crowds stood and stared. On the inside, men with radios and clipboards and tape measures and cameras moved grimly from one corpse to the next. There were four corpses in all.

  Yellow was the color of the plastic sheets that covered the two FBI agents, who lay dead in the shade of a black olive tree. Occasionally the breeze would lift the sheets, and a policeman or federal agent would hurry forward to cloak them again.

  The dead killers lay bloody and uncovered.

  Incredibly, seven agents had been shot here. It was the bloodiest day in the FBI's history. A federal prosecutor who knew the dead agents watched and wept. He was not alone.

  From an elevated parking ramp, reporters, photographers, TV cameramen and dozens of bystanders looked down on the tableau, at the intersection of Southwest 82nd Avenue and 122nd Street. Construction workers drank beer and guessed about how it had happened. A lady shopper with an Instamatic snapped a picture.

  It was a bright cloudless day, a day when all the colors of death were vivid.

  The broad bloodstain in the middle of the road was already burgundy, turning to brown in the heat.

  A shotgun lay nearby, five empty green shells shining like emeralds on the pavement. A few feet away was a black-barreled pistol and, beyond that, what looked like an automatic rifle.

  During the chase, two cars had crunched into a bottlebrush tree, its blossoms crimson; beneath its outer branches were two cream-colored FBI Buicks, one pocked by bullet holes. The brake lights were still on.

  Once all this had been noted and absorbed, there was little else to see.The shooting had lasted only minutes. It had been quiet for hours now, and still we stood and watched. The wounded were gone, die dead were silent.

  Up the ramp came several Palmetto High School students, some skipping class, others taking an extra-long lunch break. None of them was clowning around, but the distance from the bodies made casual talk an easier thing.

  A blond teenager in a sleeveless T-shirt watched for a few minutes, then turned to go. "Death in Miami," he said to some friends. "It's nice to know we live in such a nice city."

  Another student, Mark Saymon, asked to borrow a photographer's telephoto lens, to get a closer look. He said this was his third shoot-out scene; the others were a bank holdup and a Farm Store robbery. "Nothing like this," Saymon said. "I can't believe they let that dude lie in the sun."

  The dude was dead, of course. He was one of the suspects. Pot-bellied guy with black hair. He lay on his back. His left arm was taped where the paramedics had tried to get some fluids going before giving up; the chubby guy's clothes were soaked with too much blood. A man wearing rubber gloves fished through the dead man's pockets.

  What grips onlookers at such times is the proximity of recent death. The danger is past, but the aftermath transfixes.

  On television, blazing shoot-outs are followed by commercials. Real-life murder scenes do not dissolve so easily; not in the eye, not in the mind. The color of death is unforgettable.

  There is also a ponderous ritual to investigation; the more victims, the longer it takes. On Friday the dead men lay where they fell for four hours.

  Finally the killers were placed in the back of a light-blue van and hauled off to the medical examiner.

  The agents were taken away in separate hearses.

  The color of death was jet black.

  Gunman, shot 12 times, wouldn't quit

  August 6, 1986

  The epilogue to the bloodiest shootout in FBI history is a stack of four autopsy reports, numbered 86-966 through 86-969 in the Dade medical examiner's office.

  These are detached and clinical accounts, as precise as can be expected considering the mayhem behind the Suniland Shopping Center. Each file has a diagram of where the cars came to rest at 12.201 SW 8lnd Ave. on the morning of April 11. Drawn next to the automobiles are supine stick-figure bodies, four of them.

  Two of the figures represent FBI agents Gerald Dove and Ben Grogan. The others are robbers Michael Lee Platt and William R. Matix.

  The files are a collection of tangible and observable facts, some well-publicized and some obscure. For instance, all four of the men had Type O blood. Three wore Nike running shoes; both Dove and his killer took size 10 1/2.The two suspects died wearing empty shoulder holsters. Platt had a black glove on his right hand.

  William Matix, the man originally thought to have murdered the two agents, probably didn't kill anybody. He fired his shotgun only once. He was shot in the jaw, the neck, the left cheek, the right forearm, the right side of the head and the right cheek. The last bullet tunneled to his spine.

  After the autopsy, Matix's eyes were donated to science.

  A trail of bloodstains proved that Michael Platt murdered the two agents. He used a Ruger Mini-14 rifle, serial number 184-95273. The high-speed slugs can make an entry wound scarcely a quarter-inch in diameter and an exit wound as big as a fist.

  In barely two minutes more than 100 shots ripped through the South Dade neighborhood. Forty of those came from the Ruger.

  Grogan's 9mm Smith & Wesson had been fired nine times and Dove's had been fired 20, which meant the young agent had reloaded during the fight.

  Agent Ron Reisner's gun had been shot six times, while agent Gilbert Orrantia's .357 had been fired 12 times. Badly injured, agent Edmundo Mireles had fired a 12-gauge shotgun five times, then heroically staggered to the car in which Matix and Platt were trying to escape. There Mireles shot them both fatally with his . 357 revolver.

  Investigators did their best to reconstruct the movements—who stood where, who shot whom, who died first—but on paper it's impossible to describe the choreography of terror that morning.

  What's obvious is that the shootings didn't happen the way they do on TV shows; there was no script. Nor were the wanted men mere paper silhouettes on the range at Quantico. Probably all the firearms training in the world wouldn't have prepared the FBI agents for the likes of Michael Platt.

  They shot him only moments after he slithered from his stol
en Monte Carlo and took aim. He was hit again and again, yet he did not fall. Somehow, through an animal reserve of adrenalin or pure fury, Platt kept darting and bobbing and firing the Ruger assault rifle.

  In all, seven agents went down in his sights.

  A sad irony emerges from the ballistic tests. Of the first bullets that Platt absorbed, the most deadly came from the gun of agent Gerald Dove. The shot exploded Platt's right lung—a killing wound, but it didn't even slow him down. He simply ducked around the car, ambushed Dove and Grogan, and kept on shooting.

  To the agents, Platt must have seemed a spectral force.

  The man was hit 12 times: once in the forehead, twice in the right arm and chest, once in the right forearm, once in the upper chest 12 inches below the head, once in the right shoulder, once in the thigh, and multiple times in both feet from shotgun blasts.

  Like his partner, Platt died with one of Mireles' bullets in his spine. Fifth cervical vertebra.

  That was the one that stopped him. Platt and Matix and their weapons were dragged from Grogan's car. A policeman reached into the driver's side, slipped the gearshift to park and turned off the key. Finally it was over.

  Machine-gun shortage rattles NRA

  September 7, 1986

  Some deeply disturbing news from our ever-vigilant friends at the National Rifle Association: America is in the throes of a serious machine-gun shortage. Hard to believe, but apparently true. If you've tried to buy a new machine gun lately or just trade in that rusty old family favorite, you got quite a shock.

  That darned liberal Congress has passed a law banning the sale of all new machine guns. Incredibly, President Reagan signed it. The emasculatory effect was to limit the number of machine guns in nationwide circulation to a measly 127,000, most of which are probably in Hialeah. The NRA, whose aim is to guarantee enough guns for every maniac in the country, has launched a new lobbying campaign to persuade Congress to repeal the machine-gun legislation. The effort couldn't be more timely, following the recent slaughter of 14 innocent persons in Oklahoma by a lunatic using three handguns. To think he could have done the whole job with a single Thompson.