By Carlos Miller
On July 4th, 2007, a Wackenhut executive dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase filled with taxpayers’ dollars, sprinted through the streets of South Beach while being chased by a giant finger and several sets of eyes.
The giant finger pointed at him in an accusatory manner and the giant eyes never let him out of their site, for they knew damn well he was a thief.
No matter how hard he tried, Mr. Wackenhut could not elude the finger and eyes.
And no matter how discrete he tried to be, he could not avoid the stares of hundreds of South Beach patrons, who were being handed fliers informing them that Wackenhut was being investigated for stealing more than $12.2 million from Miami-Dade County.
That was the first Street Theater Action we conducted against Wackenhut. It wouldn’t be the last.
This week, after a three-year investigation, Miami-Dade County officials determined that Wackenhut overbilled the county for millions in taxpayer dollars.
The thievery was not just limited to the head honchos because NBC6 also revealed this week that Wackenhut security guard Fabriciano Baez was videotaped stealing money from Metrorail fare boxes.
And when Wackenhut guards weren’t stealing money from county residents, they were violating my First Amendment rights by ordering me not to take photos on a platform of a Metromover station.
I even wrote an open letter to Wackenhut President Gary Sanders about that incident, but he never responded.
Perhaps Sanders had been sleeping on the job, as many Wackenhut guards were, as you will in the second Street Theater Action we did, a video I am proud to have produced. He resigned within hours after I had posted the video on the Internet.
Here is the video of the first Street Theater Action, which was produced by a fellow Colombian-American who goes by the youtube username, jcfractal. To see more photos I took that day, click (read more) below.
Click here to see the entire collection of photos from the Wackenhut Action.
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6 responses so far ↓
1 genewitch // May 9, 2008 at 7:46 am
with a name like wackenhut…
2 b.a.c. // May 9, 2008 at 9:15 am
Man that is some great citizen action Carlos. How can others find out about this? Was it put on the Miami Indie Media Center site?
3 Carlos Miller // May 9, 2008 at 9:28 am
b.a.c.,
This action was extremely top secret until it happened. Only a few people knew about it because we wanted to take Wackenhut completely by surprise.
The media was informed of the action that morning, but if you remember the Fourth of July last year, it rained throughout the afternoon, so the action was delayed by a couple of hours. We ended up not seeing any reporters on the scene who were probably busy covering Fourth of July stuff anyway.
Nevertheless, the photos and video were delivered to various Wackenhut executives via email, which was the original intent all along.
And they got so mad that they filed a lawsuit against the organizers that ended up going nowhere.
4 genewitch // May 9, 2008 at 4:13 pm
i was sleepy last night.
Why do the pictures look so strange? is it compression, or did you change the sizes in some strange way? i like the way that everything looks strongly focused and then not, but why does the forground stuff have such jagged edges?
Still like the pictures themselves, of course
5 Carlos Miller // May 9, 2008 at 4:38 pm
genewitch,
Not sure what you mean but you may be referring to the motion in the photos.
I was using a flash but I set the camera to a slightly slower shutter speed in order to capture the motion.
6 Ashley // May 12, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Hi! I got your comment that you also applied for MTF. I found out I didn’t miss the deadline and that I got an interview, so I’m taking the exams this week, sort of squeezed in between being in Miami and going home to Pennsylvania for a week before my interview.
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