It looks more like a bop.
Videos of the incident between CJ Gimenez, the congressman’s lobbyist son, and Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla at the Coral Gables Morton’s Steakhouse is out. And it doesn’t look so much like a slap as it does a bop on the head. Kinda like the NCIS guy is famous for.
The first of five Coral Gables Police CCTV videos released Friday shows that Gimenez is speaking to two men at another table on the Miracle Mile side of Morton’s, says goodbye and starts walking down the Ponce de Leon Boulevard side. The actual slap is far away and out of focus. You can zoom in, however, for a grainy, blurry view.
In it, Gimenez stops at a table where four men are having lunch. He bends over a little, apparently right in front Diaz de la Portilla’s face, not from behind him as the commissioner and his bodyguard have said. That must have been when he called ADLP an obscene version of the word coward.
Then Gimenez stands up straight and starts walking away. But he can’t resist himself. He just has to bop Diaz de la Portilla on the head as he goes by. Many readers have admitted they would, too.
Read related: CJ Gimenez slaps ADLP at Morton’s in Coral Gables; gets arrested, jailed
Then the video shows that Diaz de la Portilla stands up to confront his assailant, suddenly realizes he has a bad hip or something, and sits his ass back down. You can also see the Miami Police sergeant-at-arms-bodyguard — who, by the way, was sitting at the table having lunch with the commissioner, his bagman and a lobbyist at the swanky eatery — get up and stop. He turns to ADLP, who is now sitting back down and seemingly catching his breath. And it looks like it’s all over.
Maybe they’ll call the police and report it. They know who it was. CJ lives and works in the city. The cops can go and charge him later, with a promise-to-appear in court form for him to sign. Like would probably happen in any other case like this.
But nooooo. It looks like Diaz de la Portilla tells the big, beefy bodyguard — who turns out to be the same sgt.-at-arms that crashed a city car with the commissioner in it in January — to sic CJ. There’s no audio, but it seems like he says “Go get him.” Or something to that effect.
The bodyguard cop chases Gimenez down half a block. Pushes him backwards and makes him trip and falter. Grabs him by the wrists. Hard. Wrestles him to the ground. Gets back up and grabs him by his coat and jostles him a little. Knocks down a city street trash can in the process.
At the 1:51 mark, it looks like the cop punches CJ in the gut.
Overkill? Ya think?
If the videos show anything, it’s that Det. Stanley Paul-Noel — on loan as a sgt.-at-arms because all the other ones in Miami are busy covering the mayor (more on that later) — overreacted. It’s not like the Miami Police department never escalates matters. This is a classic example. If CJ hadn’t shown some restraint, albeit a minute too late, it could have ended much worse. Paul Noel is an armed bodyguard cop.
Ladra still thinks the detective had no right to detain Gimenez, despite the mutual aid agreement between the two cities that was certainly not entered into for this kind of thing. In fact, perhaps the former Miami-Dade mayor’s namesake can have the officer charged for battery and wrongful imprisonment. Because that’s what it looks like in the footage.
The videos — and there are five of them from different angles — show that it wasn’t handled like a typical flick of the wrist, as Diaz de la Portilla himself characterized the slap. It’s like he doesn’t want the world to know that he was bitch-slapped by CJ Gimenez.
Read related: Questions surround strange arrest of CJ Gimenez for ‘battery’ in Coral Gables
There were five or more police cars that responded. Add the bicycle units and there were more than 15 officers on the corner at one point. It looked like a robbery scene. Eight officers were still chaperoning when they put Gimenez into a police SUV. Eight!
In the defense of the Gables Police — which is soooo much faster than other police departments with public records (thank you!) — the call went out as an “officer needing assistance,” which is not what it was. That’s because the first 911 caller — and there were only two because the first and third guy are the same — said he was watching a scuffle involving a police officer.
“There’s it seems to be a police officer attempting to detain or arrest somebody but nobody’s wearing a uniform and a fight is breaking out,” said the first caller, according to audio released by the Gables Police on Friday.
The caller said one of the men said he was a police officer “but I didn’t see any identification,” he added. “Neither of them are in uniform. They are in street clothes.”
The second caller sounds like a restaurant employee or someone who could be at the table with ADLP: “We had a commissioner here and somebody ran up to him and kind of assaulted him and we had another Coral Gables Police officer here and he restrained him and he just needs some assistance,” the caller said, mistaking Paul-Noel for a Gables cop.
By then, he said, Gables officers were arriving at the scene.
Maybe the second caller is Carlos Lago, brother of Gables Mayor Vince Lago and a lobbyist with several items before the city of Miami. Carlos Lago has not returned calls from Ladra and apparently has not wanted to talk about it with anyone other than confirm he was there. But he is probably in the best position to tell what happened. Under oath, of course. So is Humberto “Bert” Hernandez, a former Miami Commissioner embroiled in the 1997 absentee ballot fraud scandal who was eventually jailed on mortgage fraud charges who now acts as ADLP’s confidant (read: bagman).
Carlos Lago and Humberto “Bert” Hernandez know what really happened at the Gables Morton’s.
Ladra hopes that police got statements from them.
Alas, the charges will likely be dropped and we may never know. Not only because the arrest is improper, but also because that means ADLP will get deposed and CJ’s lawyer can ask him what they were talking about at lunch and who paid for it and where Diaz de la Portilla lives and what happened to all those COVID-19 relief gift cards that were given to his office and a bunch of things he doesn’t want to talk about. Lago probably doesn’t want to be deposed either. Or have ADLP deposed. Or have Hernandez questioned, under oath, what he does for Diaz de la Portilla.
They won’t press it.
But the incident shines a light on the sgt.-at-arms program in the city of Miami and how it can be abused to go after political enemies.
Gimenez and ADLP were once close pals and worked on campaigns together. After all, Diaz de la Portilla got his underdog dad first elected to the county mayor’s seat in the famous 2011 recall race. People want to believe their falling out has something to do with The Dean getting Tania Cruz Gimenez arrested when they were in Boston on a business trip. But even after that 2012 arrest, they continued to work on campaigns.
Read related: Carlos Gimenez raises funds for Diaz, his daughter helps ADLP
Tania Cruz supported ADLP’s disastrous run for Florida Senate in 2016 — even though her father-in-law supported Jose Felix “Pepi” Diaz — and both the Gimenez family and Diaz de la Portilla worked on the 2017 campaign for Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo. CJ and ADLP were both at the 2018 hearing where Carollo won the challenge against his candidacy because he allegedly didn’t live in the district. Tania Cruz was one of Crazy Joe’s attorneys.
It was only after Diaz de la Portilla was elected in 2019 that the bottom fell out. Las malas lenguas say Gimenez got pissed because he didn’t get the access he wanted as a lobbyist. The relationships soured so much that the Gimenezes were intimately involved in promoting the recall effort against Carollo in 2020.
ADLP doesn’t like Gimenez either. In a Spanish-language tweet where he said CJ’s nails “brushed” his hair, Diaz de la Portilla calls him a little girl.
When asked what lead to the slap, CJ told camera crews waiting for him outside after spending the night in jail at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center that he was sick of Miami’s corruption. That’s probably not the only reason.
But have you seen a city of Miami commission meeting lately? Maybe it was the straw the broke the camel’s back. Anyone would want to bop ADLP on the head.
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