MIAMI – Backdropped by a portrait of a rooster standing proudly in front of American and Cuban flags Wednesday, Joe Carollo compared two businessmen to a famed mobster and bemoaned the appeals process over the $63 million lawsuit he lost to the pair, likening himself to a “hostage.”
Aggrieved and defiant, the city commissioner spoke to reporters at his District 3 office one day after Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla — owners of the popular Ball & Chain nightclub — filed a suit seeking his ouster from office.
“They have been wanting to do this since I first ran for office, so what is new?” Carollo scoffed. “Tell me something different.”
The businessmen claim that the massive civil judgment against Carollo, in which a federal jury determined the longtime elected official violated their First Amendment rights as retaliation for supporting a political opponent, means he “forfeited his right to office.”
That derives from Miami’s “Citizens’ Bill of Rights” under its city charter. Fuller and Pinilla noted in the suit that it states the city “shall not interfere with the rights…of freedom of speech” and that any “public official, or employee who is found by the court to have willfully violated this section shall forthwith forfeit his or her office or employment.”
Read the complaint:
“We want a judge to remove Commissioner Carollo within the month,” the businessmen’s attorney, Jeff Gutchess, told Local 10 News. “We are trying to make the city safe from its own government.”
As he’s done frequently since last summer’s verdict, which his attorneys are appealing, Carollo took shots at Pinilla and Fuller Wednesday. The commissioner harkened back to his childhood in Chicago.
“The Miami these guys want, Al Capone would have loved,” Carollo said. “He would have moved here before Miami Beach.”
Indeed, the notorious mobster once had a home on Miami Beach’s Palm Island.
“They want to be able to be Kings of Miami,” Carollo said of Fuller and Pinilla.
Carollo, who’s also facing a possible asset seizure, argues the two are seeking to become code enforcement “untouchables” and don’t have standing to bring the new motion because they live outside of the city.
“These people are not only serial code violators, they are serial people who sue,” he said. “They figure they will squash anybody with one suit after another.”
Carollo echoed comments made earlier in the day by Miami City Attorney Victoria Mendez.
“This is yet another effort by plaintiffs in that case to harass sitting Commissioner Carollo and force the City of Miami to continue spending taxpayer funds unnecessarily to defend itself against the plaintiffs’ unlimited resources and serial lawsuits,” she said in a statement. “The plaintiffs lack standing for this type of action and it is not ripe due to the pending appeal.”
Gutchess called that statement a “red herring,” saying the “Citizens’ Bill of Rights” applies to everyone, not just residents and said the city’s insistence on defending the “indefensible” is what’s actually wasting tax dollars.
Speaking Wednesday, Carollo bemoaned the slow-moving appeals process as the case remains pending review.
“I have been in limbo, I have been held hostage for over seven months since the trial ended, because in order for me to appeal, or anyone to appeal, you have to present a series of motions to the trial judge,” Carollo said. “They have been sitting there for months and months, so I can’t move forward because of that.”
He added, “This is not fair, this is America. You can’t keep someone in limbo as some kind of hostage, you can’t move forward through the legal process and this is how I am being kept.”
Legal analyst David Weinstein tells Local 10 News that Miami residents should expect more to come in court.
“It is not over until it’s over and it won’t be over until a judge in a court of higher authority says it is over, so this is going to drag out for a while,” Weinstein said.