Bringing Adam Home - Les Standiford [5]
And there were other concerns to divert the attention of a nation, as well. The first IBM personal computers were rolling off assembly lines, the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer was set for July 29, and thirty million tongues were wagging that Luke and Laura from television’s General Hospital would soon follow suit.
So far as any national obsession with crime went, the burning question in most American minds for most of the previous year was, “Who shot J. R.?” The final episode of the highly successful television series Dallas had ended that spring with a cliffhanger in which an unknown assailant fired a bullet into the body of overbearing Texas kingpin J. R. Ewing. More viewers than in all previous television history—an estimated 83 million—watched J. R. go down, and, due to an ensuing Hollywood writers’ strike, they would have to wait until late November to learn who pulled the trigger.
As for “ordinary” crime in Miami Beach, there was no shortage of it, not given what had recently taken place in Castro’s Cuba, just ninety miles from Florida. In April of 1980, some 11,000 Cubans seeking to escape the clutches of the Communist regime sought refuge on the grounds of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, setting up a clamor that resounded in the world press and had the Cuban émigré community in South Florida seething.
Faced with yet another political and public relations nightmare while also loath to do anything that did not somehow redound to his own benefit, Castro hit on a solution that he considered genius. He would open the nearby port of Mariel, he announced, and allow any Cuban Americans with relatives who wanted to leave the island to come down and pick them up. The response of the Cuban community in South Florida was overwhelming. The ensuing Mariel Boatlift put just about every one of the area’s seaworthy craft (and a number that were not) into service shuttling refugees across the narrow Florida Straits.
But the apparent gesture of mercy in fact came with a heavy price. In order to rid himself of undesirables who put a strain on his own social services infrastructure, Castro emptied his jails of criminals of every stripe and his mental institutions of the most deranged, shuffling these individuals into the desperate throngs that filled the docks at Mariel. In the month of May 1980 alone, almost 90,000 Cubans arrived in Miami, many of them without relatives, without education, without prospects . . . and many of them with long histories of violent and criminal acts. It was the beginning of the Scarface era in Miami, and the truly despicable of the Marielitos found easy pickings among the frail and the elderly in South Florida, and particularly in Miami Beach, which had long been a haven for retirees.
In fact, the incident that was often talked about when Joe Matthews’s name came up among those in the know was one that had taken place at about this time in South Beach, long before it became a glamorous place.
For far less than the cost of a night’s lodging in the Delano or the Carlyle today, a retiree in 1981 might have been able to lay down a month’s rent for a room in any of the crumbling Art Deco relics that occupied the stretch of Ocean Drive from Fifth to Fifteenth. In those days, the tourists and the players were still staying well northward up the beach, and there were no buxom models or chiseled skateboarders to dodge on South Beach, no plethora of fern-draped sidewalk cafés to choose from, no daisy chain of Maseratis nosed to Lamborghinis nosed to Aston Martins clogging the streets, no $25 valet parking, no pricey boutiques selling furs for pets.
In the de facto retirement village of South Beach, you had your room, and your hot plate, and after some soup for supper, you could