‘Miami Design Preservation League walking tour waits while firefighters hose the blood off the Ocean Drive sidewalk from this morning’s fatal spring break shooting.’

Until now, narco-billionaires seeking to avoid capture by the authorities through living in gated/patrolled high-rises have always risked exposure when leaving their cars, giving the keys to the parking valet, and then walking, in complete view of other people, into the building, into the elevator, and down the hallway of their floor, where they risk running into neighbors.

Beyond the obvious fact that narco-billionaires are unlikely to be pleased that strangers (even building staff) are getting inside their cars, where they can look around and find god knows what, there’s the larger point of all the exposure involved in walking into the building.

Bentley Residences has solved every one of these problems, allowing international criminals to enter all the way into their apartments without ever getting out of their car. Owners drive into sophisticated car elevators that lift them directly into their apartment, where they leave the car in a glass-enclosed garage which allows them to look at it while eating dinner (see images in this article).

“If you take away those two shootings, which of course are major, then it [is so far] vastly improved over 2021,” said resident-activist Matthew Gultanoff…

Police chased and caught a man who they said threw a 9 mm handgun into some shrubbery. The man told police he fired in self-defense. Video surveillance seemed to support his claim and Derrick Antonio Mitchell, 19, was charged only with three weapons violations, carrying a concealed firearm, tampering with physical evidence and possession of an altered firearm.

The “only” is priceless. Miami Beach has declared martial law. I mean a state of emergency/curfew.

The med school and sports program have, over many years, been the main source of scumminess at that benighted institution (go here), but now international relations has gotten into the game, with the last chair of the department (he has, uh, retired) just convicted of money laundering. His Venezuelan BFFs steal international funds meant for the poor and hide them in Swiss banks and Professor Bagley got his share of the goodies which having been caught in the act by a government agent Bagley’s way sorry and fuck it hasn’t he suffered enough?

Bagley’s defense attorney, Peter Quijano, said the former professor [shouldn’t get jail time because he] had already suffered “devastating collateral consequences” as a result of his conviction, the end of his UM career and the death of his wife earlier this year.

Dude was in his seventies when he started killing poor people unable to afford medicine because he stole their money, so his career was going to be over anyway, so let’s forget that devastating consequence. The fact that his wife died because of what he did (of embarrassment? heart attack from shock? He might at least have told her he was doing something that might end in jail time.) is totally on him, and if anything he should get more time for collaterally killing her along with all those Venezuelans.

I mean, UD totally understands that he figured this would be an easy way to score some really significant supplemental retirement funds, a fitting valedictory for a career specializing in international crime, but, you know, he took a risk and he lost. It happens.

The judge sentenced him to jail. Another feather in UM’s cap.

Ten minutes later, the American economy imploded, and apparently a decision was made to deal with the enormous shortfall that ensued by, in all sorts of ways, bilking patients and Medicare.

A UM med school executive blew the whistle, and last year UM had to pay the government millions and millions of dollars, and Shalala, of course, fired the naughty whistle blower.

Now the whistle blower has filed a wrongful termination suit for millions of dollars, which he’ll probably get.

When you add the Nevin Shapiro scandal to this one, Donna Shalala certainly has a lot to answer for.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

With its latest accomplishment – caught by the feds stealing gobs of money in a wide range of inventive and patient-anguishing/bankrupting ways – UM Med maintains its national position as America’s most corrupt medical school ever. With a rogues’ gallery of leaders and doctors, the school has, over decades, enriched itself in ways so deeply and consistently depraved that at some point you have to grant it grudging credit for having utterly transformed a place of healing into an abattoir. The state of Florida is to be sure already the USA’s epicenter of elderly people and medical fraud; it took decades of clever planning and moral squalor for UM to make itself the epicenter of the epicenter.

“Tens of billions of dollars are lost annually to fraud, waste and abuse, and Miami is the Medicare fraud capital of the United States,” [the whistleblower’s attorney] said. “Today’s announced settlement and the schemes described in the DOJ press release are ironic considering they were committed by an iconic South Florida institution under the leadership of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services [the appalling Donna Shalala], the very agency that promulgated the Medicare rules that were violated.”

Wanna know exactly what they did? Details here.

Sing it.

Put down your books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun!

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we shooting for?
Don’t ask me – we’ve run out of time.
Next stop is Columbine.

And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

Anyone really setting out to chronicle the endless history of filthy athletics at the University of Miami would have to use as their model the 200,000 verse Indian epic. But given modern journalism’s space constraints, the task instead is to summarize as briefly as possible the long venerable ages of trashiness that are UM.

UD thinks Jerry Iannelli does a respectable job in this New Times piece, written in anticipation of an FBI indictment against UM’s basketball program.

They flew him in just so he could give a little homily at a new prayer room in the UM hospital, and Israel’s chief rabbi duly poured on the donor-schmaltz (“You and your mother are doing a lot of good, and your father in heaven is so proud of you today.”). Now he’s giving homilies from his jail cell, where this career criminal (the police have been after him since 2005) has finally been imprisoned.

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And… I gotta say! This is the most a-fucking-mazing university page I’ve ever seen! And it’s still up on Georgetown University’s site, and all they have to do is update it with the information that he’s in jail now!

I’m quoting this in full. I am not making this up.

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel.

Fuckin’ A! We want this paragon in our Berkley Center for Religion Peace & World Affairs and you know what fuck you if you think just cuz he takes charitable donations meant for suffering people and stashes them in his sister’s house we should let him go. NO. Here’s his revised faculty page and did we say fuck you?

Yona Metzger is the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, making him one of the country’s two chief rabbis along with Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar. In June 2013 he suspended himself from official duties while under investigation for money laundering. Metzger was born in Haifa, Israel in 1953 and was ordained a rabbi after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a chaplain. He was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate in 2003; his appointment was controversial, as he is the only chief rabbi to have been appointed without prior experience as a rabbinical judge. Metzger has also faced allegations of sexual abuse and extortion, though formal charges were never filed. Metzger has followed in the steps of his predecessor Yisrael Meir Lau by pursuing dialogue with other religions. He has met with Muslim and Hindu leaders, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Benedict XVI during the latter’s visit to Israel. Metzger just entered prison for 3 1/2 years for fraud, breach of trust and tax offenses. But watch this page – he’ll get out early (holy man) and will be able to resume his affiliation with the Center. Meanwhile, you can visit with him here, as he talks about the importance of being charitable.

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The larger spiritual context:

In practice, the office of chief rabbi has become the grand prize in a corrupt system of political spoils. Indeed, as his successor and that of his Sephardi colleague were being chosen, incumbent Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger was already under house arrest on charges of bribery and corruption…. For decades the haredim have benefited from the fact that their singular priority—funding for the network of institutions that enable their self-enclosed lifestyle—was so narrow that they could negotiate their way into almost any government coalition. The installation of Yona Metzger as Ashkenazi chief rabbi in 2003 was a perfect expression of their cynicism and contempt for the institutions of the state: He was a rabbinic nonentity with questionable ethics, but he was an entirely reliable cutout. (Earlier in his career, Metzger had agreed to be disqualified from serving as a municipal rabbi in order to forestall disciplinary charges; when he was put up for chief rabbi, he argued that he’d never been disqualified from serving the whole country, which showed chutzpah even by Israeli standards.)

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Here’s El Supremo with his bestie Glenn Beck, bemoaning the “bad public relations” from which Israel suffers.

The article itself couldn’t be more ordinary and banal; yet another American university football player has beaten the shit out of one of his fellow students. Yawn.

This player, on being kicked out of a bar, “deliberately shoved a ladder, knocking off [a fellow student who is an employee of the bar], who fell headfirst onto the pavement.” The student’s a senior; he had almost managed to get out of Miami U without getting his brains knocked out by a sports hero. (As you know, UD has proposed that big-sports universities should issue protective helmets to all of their students for just this sort of eventuality.)

What makes this article interesting is that in an earlier draft the writer seems to have spent a good deal of time recounting all the schools that wanted to recruit the bruiser, and sharing his stats on the field. Commenters gave the reporter hell about this.

Not sure how being told which colleges recruited him is relevant in an article on alleged felonious assault.

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You had 4 people overseeing this article and not one of you thought, “huh, maybe we shouldn’t glorify a soon-to-be felon with 4 paragraphs of his athletic achievements”???

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This article is horrific and indicitive of a mindset focusing on sports stats of a felon vs. empathy for his victim. What about the victim who had brain swelling and bleeding? This is his second arrest for assault and the Miami coach couldn’t even mention care or concern during his press conference? This is sickening.

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And how is the man who fell from the ladder and landed on his head?????

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Glorifying felonious assault article with a pitch about a guy’s stats and recruiting history is why this paper is a joke around campus.

But of course the larger local booster press writes these things up precisely in that way: Five paragraphs describing the power and skill of the player, and how it’s going to be missed if he’s suspended, and then one final paragraph updating the victim’s condition. Why should student publications be any different?

One of their players was just jailed for domestic violence; another is out with a concussion. After the worst loss in the school’s history a few days ago (58-0), the school fired the football coach. Virtually no one attended that game, so UM has to figure out how to get someone – anyone – to buy a UM football ticket.

Plus they’ve now got to pay the coach his no doubt enormous buyout.

And meanwhile they don’t have a coach.

…and has that ever paid off. Scenes from their most recent game.

There was booing …from the sparse crowd even before the first quarter ended, and the stands – where some fights broke out – were largely empty by the midpoint of the third quarter.

Miami, playing in an empty stadium, was held to 146 total yards and just six first downs. The 58-point loss was the worst in Miami’s history, surpassing a 70-14 loss to Texas A&M in 1944.

UM’s athletic director, surveying this empty stadium, blithely reminded everyone to “make sure we continue to support our team.”

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Yeah, it’s all gonna be okay. Maybe we’ll get a new coach.

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Miami’s AD doesn’t understand that if you want people to go to your games, you shouldn’t make them puke forever.

A walk down memory lane!

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And sure… the place has deteriorated a bit since those glory days…

Yes, yes, you’re right – as UD readers constantly point out, one day it’s the University of Georgia, another day Penn State, another day Southern Methodist, and yet another day Alabama State… So many of this country’s universities are in various high-profile aspects disgusting that no one university wears the crown for long.

But. But – If UD were asked which university, not only in its sports but in its academic component most consistently struck her as disgusting, I think she’d have to say, on balance, and on reflection, and on reading today’s story about Miami’s deeply loved and curiously successful baseball coach Lazaro Collazo (You can still find Miami heavily breathing upon its beloved here. Why take down the page? Taking down pages of disgraced UM people would threaten the sports budget.), that it’s Charles Nemeroff’s and Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami.

“When you’re talking about PEDs in the black market, we’re talking about some clown in his basement, with a bucket and a burner, and a very dangerously limited knowledge of chemistry… And these chemicals were going in our children’s bodies.”

Yes, the University of Miami’s finest was for years allegedly peddling and administering performance enhancing drugs to the kiddies. Drugs made, as the DEA agent I just quoted notes, according to the highest standards.

See, that’s why UM gets scuzziest. It’s not just about money. It’s about hiring and sanctifying people like Collazo.

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Ugh. You want the underbelly? You really want the underbelly? Okay. You asked for it. Welcome to the University of Miami.

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Update: Ooh. They took down the page!