Dance of the Reptiles (5 page)

Which isn’t a word often heard when journalists who cover Miami get together and tell stories. People down here do things that are sick, warped, disgusting, twisted—but rarely shocking. Not anymore.

However, a zombie-like face-eating attack would be major news in any city. And had it happened in Des Moines or Spokane, the worldwide reaction would have been one of plain revulsion.

The initial response to the MacArthur Causeway bloodbath was the same kind of horror, but then—after the dateline was noted—almost a sigh of relief: Oh, this was in Miami? Well, that explains it.

Even some New Yorkers I know, who read daily about strange and violent events in their own zip code, expressed the view that South Florida would have been their first guess as the location for a nude face-eating incident. Is it the vibe of this place that promotes such a bounty of derangement, or do the deranged simply move here for the vibe?

The subject frequently comes up in interviews. It’s a legitimate question—how to account for the unrelenting weirdness?

Reporters looking at the life of Rudy Eugene have found
a pot-smoking, Bible-reading guy with money problems and a relatively minor rap sheet. So far there is no indication that the 31-year-old man was fixated on zombie lore, werewolves, vampires, or Hannibal Lecter.

The most likely explanation for Eugene’s vicious behavior was a dose of bad drugs. A police officer speculated it was LSD, which in the old days wasn’t famous for causing spontaneous cannibalism. Maybe there’s a new version on the streets. Another widely suggested culprit is “bath salts,” synthetic crystals sold in some convenience stores that can cause hallucinations and violent outbursts.

Still another possibility is that Eugene wasn’t high on anything. Perhaps he suffered a severe mental breakdown before confronting Poppo, who’d lived on the streets for four decades and had his own problems with the law.

The autopsy’s toxicology report will provide some answers, but it won’t get South Florida off the hook.

Whatever factors compelled Eugene to strip naked and gnaw on another man’s face, the hideous crime truly could have occurred anyplace where there’s bad dope and mental illness—which is to say, anyplace.

It didn’t, though.

And as the story (complete with video) continues to rocket through the blogs, posts, and tweets, the lack of disbelief resonates.

Of course it’s Miami. Where else?

SURROUNDED ON THREE SIDES

April 15, 2001

Bush: Big Business’s Top Shill

Seldom does a president turn out to be just as bad as predicted, but George W. Bush is rapidly making prophets of his shrillest enemies.

During the election campaign, Democrats warned that a new Bush administration would be friendly toward polluters and hostile toward the environment.

That’s what Democrats always say about Republicans, so many voters didn’t take it seriously. Who would have imagined that, in only three months, Bush would start to make Ronnie Reagan sound like Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

In his budget package unveiled last week, George II asked Congress to cripple the Endangered Species Act by suspending the deadlines when government must respond to petitions for protecting imperiled wildlife. Echoing a complaint of the Clinton administration, the Bush White House says the Interior Department is swamped by lawsuits seeking “endangered” status for rare species of fish, plants, birds, reptiles, and mammals.

Bush officials want a one-year moratorium that would effectively forestall any new court order protecting specific animals and their habitats. They say such decisions should come from within the agency, not from outside litigation.

Unfortunately, litigation is the only thing that seems to work. The Endangered Species Act is despised by powerful segments of the business community, and the Interior Department never has been independently aggressive about enforcing it.

If it weren’t for legal action by citizen groups and environmental organizations, no federal protection would exist for the Atlantic salmon, the northern spotted owl, and most of
the 1,200 species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service now lists as threatened.

That’s not to say the law isn’t abused or that the listing process doesn’t need reform. But the notion of entrusting the fate of the nation’s dwindling wildlife to a political appointee—especially Interior Secretary Gale Norton—is laughably brazen.

Critters sometimes get in the way of bulldozers, and that’s unacceptable to those who bankrolled Bush’s presidential campaign—developers, energy companies, the timber and mining industries. They’d love to see the Endangered Species Act trashed completely, and there’s no reason to expect Bush won’t try to oblige. Judging by his brief track record, he’ll do absolutely anything that industry wants.

One of the president’s first executive actions was to throw out the federal rules on how much arsenic can be dumped in drinking water by hard-rock mines. Bush decided it won’t hurt people in Utah and Nevada to swallow 80 percent more of the soluble poison.

Next, he casually reneged on a campaign promise to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. Overruling his new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Todd Whitman, Bush said that adding smog controls would be a financial hardship for utilities.

He made the same argument for weaseling out of the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit the volume of greenhouse gases released into the global atmosphere.

Predictably, the two industries that will gain the most from Bush’s backpedaling—mining and electric power—were responsible for two-thirds of the 7.7 billion pounds of toxic chemicals spewed into the environment in 1999, the
last year for which statistics are available. That report was issued Wednesday by the EPA itself. Naturally, President Asterisk wants to cut the agency’s budget by 6 percent, a big chunk coming from enforcement.

As dangerous to the public health as his actions appear, Bush is refreshing in a peculiar sort of way. He wasted no time showing his true colors, which was considerate of him. We’ve had plenty of presidents who didn’t give a damn about the environment but pretended otherwise.

Not Bush. He’s proving to be a rare species himself—a politician who is exactly what his critics said he was: in this case, a stalwart and unapologetic shill for big business.

His priority is simple and unambiguous: to fatten corporate profits at all costs.

Nobody can say he isn’t decisive. Nobody can say he doesn’t have a well-defined policy.

Look at the bold moves he has made in only three months:

More toxins in the water we drink, more crud in the air we breathe, less wilderness for refuge—and fewer birds and animals to share it with.

And to think this is only the beginning.

June 3, 2001

George W. Does the ’Glades Thing

President Bush travels to Florida tomorrow on a new campaign to prove he really doesn’t hate nature.

Buoyed by his triumphant communing with a giant sequoia tree in California, the president plans to celebrate federal efforts to restore and preserve the Everglades.

Concerned that Bush is perceived as indifferent to environmental
concerns, the White House carefully has crafted a Florida itinerary that will show the president as a caring, sensitive friend of the earth:

November 28, 2001

War Has Been Declared on the Humble Sea Cow

“We need to define just how many manatees you need.”

That revelatory remark was made two years ago by a fellow named Wade Hopping. He’s a big-time Tallahassee lobbyist who was speaking on behalf of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, which represents makers of boats and outboard engines. Asserting that Florida’s manatee population was “stable and growing,” Hopping suggested that the mammal be removed from the endangered-species list.

Incredibly, both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission now seem to be sliding in that direction.

War quietly has been declared on the humble sea cow.

Influential special interests fear that their profits will be threatened by regulations designed to protect the hulking, easygoing animal.

Last month, the Coastal Conservation Association disgraced its own name by petitioning the state to demote the manatee from “endangered” to “threatened.” The CCA claims to stand for the views of thousands of recreational anglers, but on this issue, the group is hauling water for boating and sportfishing suppliers.

It’s part of an anti-manatee backlash that began after authorities decided to beef up efforts to protect the species. Hammered by lawsuits from environmental groups, state and federal agencies agreed to devise broader regulations. Among them: more low-speed boating zones in areas of heavy manatee activity and the creation of several manatee sanctuaries where human activity would be banned or limited.

Another controversial provision would have imposed special fees for new docks, the revenues to be used for enforcing manatee laws. That plan was scrapped after an outcry from developers of marinas.

The new proposals have earned the manatees some prickly enemies: