Miami Mayor Suarez Eyes Presidential Run Amid City Hall Turmoil

Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami has visited early primary states in recent weeks, mulling a Republican presidential run built on the premise that his in-vogue city has boomed in difficult times — “the Miami miracle,” he calls it. Techies have flocked to the city from San Francisco. Bankers from New York. Taxes — and the murder rate — are low.

It makes for a rosy story, not untrue.

At the same time, a very different story about Miami unfolded recently in a drama-filled civil trial against a city commissioner who was accused by a pair of businessmen of violating their First Amendment rights by siccing inspectors on their bars and restaurants as political retribution. Testimony from a parade of former public employees portrayed City Hall as a toxic workplace, rife with dysfunction.

On Thursday, a jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, holding the commissioner, Joe Carollo, liable for more than $63 million in damages.

Miami has long been a city of confounding narratives, the airbrushed image it projects to outsiders often obscuring the complicated realities that lie beneath. But these days, the contrast between the Miami brand and the goings-on at City Hall seems especially stark.

Under the city’s shiny postpandemic hood lie the inner workings of a local government mired in turmoil. The trial and its revelations came at a pivotal moment, as Miami teems with new residents whose arrival has put pressure on services, housing and roadways, and as Mayor Suarez, who took office in 2017, considers trying to leverage the city’s popularity to run for higher office.

The mayor was not implicated in the trial, but a national campaign would bring new scrutiny to the problems at City Hall under his watch, a reminder that Miami has never been as easy to summarize as its marketing pitch.

“Miami is not the glamorous place that everybody believes,” said Manolo Reyes, a city commissioner who was not the one on trial. “We have problems, and we have to solve those problems and tackle them head on.”

There are troubling signs beyond the trial. A federal judge ordered the city last month to draw new commission districts after finding that commissioners — there are five who make up the city’s legislative body — racially gerrymandered the boundaries last year. Last week, a former spokesman for Mr. Suarez pleaded guilty to receiving sexually explicit photographs from a 16-year-old boy after first meeting him in City Hall in 2019.

In April, two Black officers filed a whistle-blower case against the Miami Police Department, saying that they faced discrimination and retaliation after reporting corruption. In January, a retiring police sergeant used her radio sign-off to blast the chief for having “destroyed” the department.

Mr. Suarez — who will face Gov. Ron DeSantis, with whom he has openly disagreed at times, if he enters the Republican primary — does have some data points to brag about: Wages and salaries have risen more sharply than in most other major metropolitan areas. The unemployment rate is lower than the national average. The real estate market remains buoyant, if somewhat less so than during the pandemic frenzy, a contrast with recent downturns in other big cities.

“I focus on the results, and the results are very clear,” said Mr. Suarez, a 45-year-old Cuban American and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in a recent interview. “That speaks to the Miami model being a working model that’s scalable across urban America.”

But Miami also ranks as one of the nation’s most unaffordable cities for housing. It consistently has one of the highest rates of income inequality.

At City Hall, spending has stalled on a $400 million bond that voters approved in 2017 to address widespread flooding, the lack of affordable housing and other infrastructure problems. The Police Department is on its third chief in three years. The city attorney and her relatives are facing questions on whether firms they owned or helped run financially benefited from a county-run program that is now under investigation.

After repeatedly clashing with the city commissioners, who among other things pushed out his police chief in 2021, Mr. Suarez pivoted and worked on raising his profile. He found a niche posting online videos about his recovery from Covid and later promoting the city, famously responding to a venture capitalist who in 2020 suggested moving Silicon Valley to Miami by posting on Twitter, “How can I help?”

He also heavily promoted cryptocurrency, calling Miami the “crypto capital of the world,” before it collapsed last year.

Mr. Suarez has come under heightened scrutiny after a series of revelations by The Miami Herald involving his failure to disclose financial interests, including that a developer paid him at least $170,000 over the past two years to help with a $70 million project.

“I don’t know why my local paper is obsessed with how many jobs I do,” he said on the CBS Sunday news program “Face the Nation.” “I think they should be focused on the job of being mayor, which I think I do a great job at.”

Mr. Suarez, who is in his second and final term, has declined to disclose his consulting clients. He receives compensation of about $130,000 for his part-time job as mayor, though his power — and, critics argue, any credit he can claim — is limited: He has no commission vote but can veto legislation and hire and fire the city manager. (A separate mayor and commission run Miami-Dade County, a far larger government whose mayor does have broad executive powers.)

Former Mayor Tomás Regalado, Mr. Suarez’s predecessor and a fellow Republican, who is considering running for mayor again, called Miami “ethically challenged.”

“The city is going through a very difficult situation in terms of governance, because you have a city commission in which every commissioner believes that they are the mayor and manager,” he said. “And you have an absent mayor.”

The trial pitted Mr. Carollo, a city commissioner and former mayor, against two businessmen, Bill Fuller and Martin Pinilla, who said that Mr. Carollo “weaponized” the code enforcement department against them because they backed Mr. Carollo’s opponent in 2017.

Mr. Carollo, a Republican who at 68 has been a bombastic figure in Miami politics for decades, countered that his actions were intended to preserve residents’ quality of life and ensure that the plaintiffs’ properties, some of which had fallen into disrepair, were safe and operating with proper permits. One night, it was noted during the trial, one of their bars was found to be running an illegal boxing ring.

Mr. Fuller and Mr. Pinilla have extensive property holdings in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood; Mr. Fuller co-owns Ball & Chain, a popular bar and nightclub. The plaintiffs’ lawyer said that their businesses had been cited for code violations 84 times. One business was forced to move and another to close.

The jury held Mr. Carollo liable for $15.9 million in compensatory damages and $47.6 million in punitive damages.

The trial, which began in April, was full of outlandish accusations and startling anecdotes, including that Mr. Carollo patrolled the plaintiffs’ properties late at night and wanted an aide to secretly measure the distance from one of their businesses to a church, looking for grounds to revoke a liquor license.

Mr. Carollo, who took the stand for several days, called the plaintiffs’ witnesses — including a former city manager, three former police chiefs and several former aides to Mr. Carollo — liars with personal “gripes.”

“I’d put my record against anyone in the city,” he said.

In the recent interview, Mr. Suarez was dismissive of the trial. “It’s typical for the press to focus on things that are negative,” he said.

The city spent at least $1.9 million on legal fees to defend Mr. Carollo, who could appeal Thursday’s verdict. But a more serious case looms for City Hall: The corporate entity that owns the Ball & Chain nightclub has filed a separate lawsuit against the city, not the commissioner, for $28 million in business losses.

That trial is pending.