As their son’s killer was sentenced to life in prison last week, the parents of two vacationing Brits murdered in Florida expressed anger over receiving no message of condolence from President Barack Obama, even though the President had recently expressed sympathy in the slaying of a 17-year old black teenager, also in Florida.
The two young British tourists, still in their early twenties, were murdered by a sneering teen with a tattoo reading 'Savage' across his chest, who ‘capped’ them after ignoring their pleas for their lives, squeezing off round after round until his gun was out of bullets.
Unknown to the grieving parents was that Obama’s embarrassed silence may not have been a matter of race, but of place: Sarasota, where the young Brits were slain, has been called “the meanest city in America” for the less fortunate by one newspaper, USA TODAY, and "heartless" by another.
A “balmy, palm-studded resort town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico,” is how the city of Sarasota likes to see itself. A more apt description might be “playground of the parasitic rich.”
In fact loathing for the homeless is so intense the city removed benches from downtown parks to prevent them from sitting on them.
“Cities like Sarasota are unsympathetic places for those down on their luck,” stated London’s Economist. “ One of the reasons they grew so fast in the boom years were their low taxes, leaving little money for social programs. Homelessness is often seen as a threat to migration and tourism.”
Hometown paper, hometown values
Nowhere are Sarasota’s philistine values more readily visible than in the pages of the hometown paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Despite the tragic dimensions of the crime, in the week leading up to the trial the paper ran numerous stories speculating on the impact of the brutal deaths on tourism from Great Britain.
“Tourism: New publicity over killing of two British visitors is a concern” read one headline. “With the trial of accused killer Shawn Tyson now under way, Sarasota County officials are closely monitoring reactions across the Atlantic through a London-based public relations firm.
“British tourist killings: Will trial affect tourism?” asked another. “A year after the killing of a pair of visitors threatened to derail travel to Southwest Florida from the United Kingdom, tourism officials are once again bracing for an onslaught from the British press — and a potential hit to the area's most important industry.
The next day the paper’s headline answered its own question: “Trial's effects likely to be slight.”
What saved Sarasota from further negative scrutiny were the nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, just two weeks after the murders, which took much of the tabloid heat off Sarasota. "That helped," Haley says. "We were going through a couple weeks of ever-more salacious stories, and then they basically went into 24/7 royal wedding coverage."
The paper's insensitive coverage is the legacy of David B. Lindsay Jr., the long-time owner and publisher, who ran a highly-unusual sideline for a newspaperman. He was a “a merchant of death,” selling arms to some of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
Lindsay left an indelible mark on life in his former fiefdom of Sarasota County, where he was a powerful force upholding a 70 year-old tradition of allowing covert operations to be carried out in secrecy under strict media blackout on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Take, for example, the Saudis of Sarasota County.
The Saudis of Sarasota County
What makes all this more than merely a local concern is the powerful and profoundly negative effect Sarasota has had on life in America in recent times.
Sarasota has long been a welcome port of call for grifters, from seedy American spy E. Howard Hunt, to, more recently, convicted felon Jonathon Curshen, henchman and fellow felon to Marc Harris, the drug trafficker and former Congressional aide to deceased North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.
Sarasota is well-known as the home of Katherine Harris, the pivotal figure who as Florida Secretary of State refused to count the votes in what many perceive as the stolen Presidential election of 2000.
More recently the city made headlines last year with revelations about a wealthy Saudi couple living in a gated community there who before 9/11 received regular visits from Mohamed Atta before abruptly abandoning their home a week before the attack, leaving behind cars, furniture, and food on countertops.
There was no mention of the couple in the Sept. 11 commission report, or in FBI briefings to congressional investigators, according to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham. Author Anthony Summers finally drew attention to it on the eve of publication of his book about the 9/11 attack. The dodgy Saudis, now safe from questioning in Riyadh, must have felt right at home in Sarasota.
Living behind "The Orange Curtain"
The city boasts a brand-new spare-no-expense $50 million jail built to incarcerate vagrants and others down on their luck.
The new Sarasota County Jail is privately-run, either because of the history of ethically-challenged Sarasota County Sheriffs, or, more likely, because incarceration is a major local industry.
Sarasota is home to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in America, recently re-branded “The GEO Group” to escape bad publicity, much as notorious Blackwater Security became Xe Services when the war in Iraq wound down, or cancer mass merchant Philip Morris, now known as Altria.
Despite widespread protest and scandal after scandal, private prisons are a growth industry. But if the three-strikes rule applied to corporations—and why not, since Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney insists corporations are people— CCA, ironicaly, might be locked up in one of its own prisons.
According to an investigation by NPR, CCA pitched the construction of a new prison in Arizona to house illegal immigrants, but local officials were not convinced that the prison could be kept full. They were unaware that CCA was at the same time drafting, promoting and lobbying for a bill in the Arizona Senate to require police to lock up anyone unable to prove they were in the US legally.
While its hard to think of a more cynical way to earn one's fortune than to devise means of placing more people in prison, its not at all hard to see why CCA’s founder is a long-time resident of Sarasota.
No doubt he feels right at home.
[…] That’s when Bannon turned to Badolato. Bannon would also surely get help from Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, in getting fixed up, voter registration-wise. He realized Sarasota offers a certain amount of cover, if you’re trying to keep your name out of the papers. The place has a decades-long reputation as a center of intrigue. […]
Sarasota….worlds capital of mean/cruel/heartless people….Fakewood Ranch…WORSE!
Dear Dan: This was a great article on Sarasota and the cruelty there against the homeless. As you probably know I’ve traveled the nation the last 3 years and have found that GEO Group has wrecked and bankrupted CA – now renamed Copland. The Corrections Officers and cops make more money than doctors and are constantly passing new legislation for more retirement and death benefits Governor Jerry Brown is fed up with the federal court orders and all this started in Florida up in Bay County in 1988 when CCA took over the Bay County Jail and built private prisons the brainchild of George Bush, Sr. and FL Sheriff Cuban Nick Navarro who was also Felix’ AKA Cuban Max Gomez’s boss in his narcotics division on loan from the CIA.
Carr Penta former Deputy Director of Intelligence of the C.I.A. who retired under Bush 1 confirmed this to me and Felix wrote a book about his and Nick’s time together. CCA and GEO Group and other spin-offs are now trying to build massive 10-15,000 bed prisons in Florida and other states to house immigrants and the poor for violating new laws that make it a crime to be out of work and homeless. The churches and local support groups are just as cruel in Virginia the national religious groups are advocating arrest and imprisonment of the poor and that the poor must be forced to find JESUS as a cure for lack of jobs and homelessness.
Bush’s C.I.A. and the Republican Nashville Mafia envisioned this when they started rounding up blacks and poor whites in operation Rockpile in the late 80’s where the cops would grab those black people and put crack in their hands and arrest them for buying crack cocaine the cops manufactured for those sweeps. The CCA stockholders were the Who’s Who of the National Republican Party and Arthur S. Grants from Nashville was President and Florida Lt Governor Bobby Brantley was the Vice President and an so the C.I.A.’s plan to build private prisons and fill America with them is in full swing nationwide as well as vicious arrest of toddlers and teenagers who live with their parents in the streets, the remedy is jail.
In Pensacola, Panama City, Tampa Bay and Miami it is now illegal to shave in a public restroom and carries a one year jail term to be be homeless in those areas by local city legislation which is the law. The Sarasota and Longboat Key Republicans are a bunch of assholes and haunted rich and I’m glad I didn’t stick around last August when I was there.
John Burt Caylor editor@insider-magazine.com
Thanks Dan- I’ll never go to Sarasota again.
so, you’re saying, if your mother or girlfriend or grandmother is chasing you, you should, what?
squirt some chemicals on them? that’s harsh, man. mace-ing your own grandmother is harsh.
turn in your badge.
…so you're sayin that if some dude (or dudess) attacks me I'm supposed to…what,cringe and beg? Run and hope they're not faster than me?
Really?
How does that work out if it's your mother, your little daughter, your girlfriend, or your grandmother?
You are an idiot.
[…] Sarasota, Florida: “The Meanest City in America” This entry was posted in Non classé. Bookmark the permalink. ← Mario Dumont : le Plateau-Mont-Royal en déclin commercial en raison du maire Ferrandez […]
GREAT ARTICLE, as always.
You forgot to mention ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council's role in getting the infamous AZ SB1070 legislation. CCA/GEO are one of the 300 members.
After getting those 21 states to pass Stand Your Ground legislation so desired by WALMART,. ALEC will be moving into other states/communities pushing their privatized prisons legislation.
Do the Koch brothers hang out in Sarasota? They're the Big Money behind ALEC as many are becoming increasingly aware .. I'm sure that CCA's founder is big on ALEC, like BIG.
Why privatized prisons? CUZ it's a perpetual money machine, the "perfect" investment now that the NDAA is coming.
http://www.USUncutMN.blogspot.com