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.
Click here to see the entire collection of photos from the Wackenhut Action.
