A week ago, the Miami New Times did a story about Ruben Sebastian, a county security guard rushing to get home from the grocery store so he could get to work when he was stopped for speeding on the Rickenbacker Causeway.

The traffic stop turned into a situation after Sebastian refused to give the police officer permission to search his car – a RIGHT which ALL Americans are entitled to invoke thanks to the 4th Amendment to the Constitution – things got out of hand when Javier Ortiz, the President of the City of Miami Police Department’s FOP was called on the scene. Ortiz is known to Crespogram readers, along with his BFF Edward Lugo, as Miami’s most thuggish cop.

By the end of the traffic stop, Sebastian was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and a reckless display of a firearm.  The firearm, as the New Times reported, was “the gun he used for his security guard job,” which was “in its holster in the driver’s door side pocket.”

When I first heard about this incident, my initial effort was to contact the State Attorney’s office to get a copy of the Close Out document that would have revealed why the charges had been dropped.

That effort turned out to take several weeks and several requests because it turned out that well before the State Attorney’s office could even begin the process leading to prosecution, Ortiz and the arresting officer, Jay Grossman, notified the State Attorney’s office that they “did not want the state to pursue criminal charges,” and the document that contained that information had understandably slipped through the cracks.

This document, rather than putting a close to the incident, actually raises a whole new series of questions, the first being, just how often has Ortiz and his pals beat up on someone before arresting them on trumped-up charges and then days later notified the State Attorney’s Office that they didn’t want the State Attorney to press charges?

We know from past incidents that not only has Ortiz falseified documents – including the Use Of Force Report that he prepared in the Ultra Music Festival case  – but I’ve been told that in several documented incidents several years ago Ortiz was going around and getting citizens who he had mistreated to sign apology letters as a condition for the charges to be dropped.

The second question raised by this request by Ortiz and Grossman, actually isn’t so much a question as it is an observation that should be of real concern to the members of the City Commission, the Regalado administration, and most of all to the citizens of the City of Maimi, is, how much will the lawsuit that Sebastian filed going to eventually going to cost the taxpayers?

Normally, these kinds of cases go to court, if for no other reason than to allow the cops involved to develop some sort of legal justification for doing what they did, but in this case, the decision by Ortiz and Grossman to request that the prosecution not go forward it a clear acknowledgment that they had no basis for arresting Sebastian to begin with, and that in turn makes it all but a slam dunk case for Sebastian’s lawyer to argue that since there is no evidence to support the arrest,  consequently, what happened to his client was a gross miscarriage of justice.

Unlike the Ultra Music Festival case, where it was the festival’s insurance company that ended up paying the $400,000 settlement in the case where Ortiz, his pal Lugo, and two other thug cops who were both convicted later on of being involved in protecting a  Liberty City gambling operation, this is a case where the taxpayers of Miami will be the ones who pay Ruben Sebastian for the misbehavior of Javier Ortiz and the other officers involved in this incident.

It’s Miami, Bitches

HERE IS A COPY OF SEBASTIAN’S LAWSUIT

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