Murder in Miami is a production of iHeartRadio. We touched upon the potential for corruption that swirls around the drug trade in our last bonus. It's a topic that came up with former Miami Day detective Jeff Lewis and was particularly evident during Miami's darkest policing period in the late nineteen eighties, when at one point, nearly ten percent of the entire Miami Police Department was suspended or fired after
a drug related scandal. It seems to me like that was a perfect storm because you had this influx of drug money pouring into the area and you had a need to increase the policing of it, just in terms of the sheer number of the volume of officers who were hired at that time. And did that negatively impact the force?
I think it was both a positive and a negative. Both our department and the City of Miami Police Department were in a rush to hire police officers to fill the void, both departments on a national recruiting effort, and at that time also I believe, like some departments up North New York in that area, they were laying off officers.
So it kind of worked out and Miami Dade ended up with officers from all over the north and northeast, as well as the City of Miami, although I think the City of Miami ended up with more local individuals
becoming police officers. The problem with that was I don't think they were able to do thorough background investigations or really delve into who they were hiring just because they needed to again fill the void, and as a result, the individuals slipped through the cracks that turned out to be actually criminals doing police work, and that came to fruition later on with the River Cops case, an area
and some other incidents involving police officers. Now, the plus side was they also ended up hiring quite a few excellent police officers that I worked with that came on with me, became detectives and became ranking individuals within the department and were able to guide the department. It was a plus an a negative. Fortunately, I think the plus side came out ahead in the long run.
Could you just, in a nutshell explain what the River Cops case was?
Yes, the River Cops case was a group of City Miami uniform police officers working the midnight shift would go to the Miami River and rob the locations that were
board the Haitian traders that were coming to Miami. Usually they had multiple kilos of cocaine on board, and they would literally load up their police cars with cocaine and take it out, and then from there they would distribute it, sell it, make money doing it, and a lot of those robberies weren't reported because theations didn't want to get
arrested for dealing drugs. And this went on for a little while until they hit a boat where the Haitian victims actually jumped off the boat they would care for their lives, and in doing so, a couple of them
drowned in the Miami River. This occurred within our jurisdiction, so our homicide unit, led by Alex Alvarez, assumed the investigation and subsequently arrested twelve or thirteen City Miami uniform officers for this homicide and drug dealing and ensnared probably another one hundred or so that were caught up one way or another in the Sea Mining Police Department. Some not rightfully so, but you know, some were guilty by association. It was a big mess for the City Mining Police Department.
In our department because everyone looked down on the police at that particular time, and this was again during the height of the criminal activity, so it kind of hindered us a little bit as well. But eventually they were all arrested and exposed and were shut down by our police department.
Am I mistaken in believing that also around this time there were actually criminals who would dress up in police uniforms and do you know, home break ins And.
What happened was eventually, as we found out and working in robbery, was that that was in fact occurring where the criminal element and this was basically initiated after the
Marrial moment. One hundreds of thousands of Mario Alitos will be from prisons and mental wards in Cuba and they came to Miami and they needed a job and they didn't want to work, not all of them, but a lot of them, and they figured out the easiest way to rob a drug dealer was to dress up like a police officer, get a uniform or get a shirt that said the police, draft up a fake warrant, put the gun belt on, get a fake badge. Anybody could
get a badge. You can still get badges today and do it and pose as police officers, and we started getting these cases. We really didn't know what to think at the time because we were a little baffled by it. And then we figured out that it wasn't a police impersonators doing these home invasion robberies. And they were probably thousands of these different groups acted as police officers to do these home invasion robberies.
Wow, I can't imagine how difficult it would have been to have been, you know, a good honest cop in that time period where you had not only you know, an element of rogue criminals within the department, but then actual criminals impersonating police officers. All right.
It was definitely unique. And of course, you know, once we figured it out, we started our investigations and sometimes working with the FBI or the DA or ATF and we started arresting these gangs and you go in and start recovering the equipment and the uniforms and the guns, and some of them were better equipped than we were. Some of them had better firepowers, more firepower than we did. And they had police radios. I mean, they would buy cars and make them look like police cars at the
police lights. They would do traffic stops on drug dealers. I mean, these guys really took it to the extreme, and they made a lot of money doing it because again a lot of these robberies were not reported initially because the drug dealers didn't want to be identified as drug dealers or they didn't want to make themselves known to law enforcement. So unless somebody got hurt or shot or actually killed during one of these robberies, we had
no knowledge of it. And then what would happen when we started making arrests and we started getting cooperation from some of these individuals. They would identify locations to us that they had robbed, and we'd checked those locations, we would find out that there were no police reports made, and of course we'd identify those individuals and pass out on to the narcotics detectives.
Wow, insane, It was crazy. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get the stories that matter to you.