"Miami airport's fuel thief had a license to steal"

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Miami airport's fuel thief had a license to steal
The Miami (FL) Herald


Richard Caride's return to notoriety as a ringleader in the Miami
International Airport jet-fuel rip-off once seemed so inexplicable.

The naive among us wondered how on earth could such an infamous ex-con, a
crooked cop, a convicted killer, a vicious home-invasion robber, manage even
to get hired at the MIA fuel depot, much less be put in charge of the damn
thing?

Then the Miami-Dade State Attorney's office released documents last week
generated by their interviews with Caride, describing his tenure managing
the fuel depot from 1999 until his arrest last spring. The mystery of
Richard Caride re-emergence at MIA can now be answered with a simple
question:

Who else?

Who else but a crook like Caride could manage the blatant thievery, corrupt
politics, kickbacks, fraud, petty schemes, shady contracts, phantom jobs,
false invoices and skimmed payments that engulfed the airport fuel depot?

MASSIVE SCAM

Maybe I had been too focused on the magnitude of the rip-off. Investigators
said Caride and a cabal of 18 airport employees and contractors had siphoned
$5.5 million worth of the jet fuel from the airport storage facility and
shipped it out to the black market. So much money conferred a kind of grand
sophistication on the conspiracy.

But Caride's statements to prosecutors -- he flipped and agreed to testify
against his colleagues -- describe an operation that was corrupt down to the
pettiest transaction. The jet fuel was only their big-ticket item.

Contracts for even petty jobs -- guard shacks or landscaping -- were
opportunity for kickbacks and political payoffs. Caride and his fellows had
work done on personal cars billed as repairs to fuel depot trucks. When
Caride decided he needed a home theater system for his new home, he simply
sought out an electronics company to upgrade the security cameras at the
fuel facility. That contract helped ''sweeten the deal'' for the theater
system.

The $166,000 security camera contract was actually for $100,000 worth of
work, the balance skimmed off along the way. To persuade another miscreant
to cash some questionable checks in the deal, Caride threw in $4,000 in cash
and a Baume & Mercier wristwatch. The wristwatch was purchased by one of his
other contractors, who just billed the fuel depot with a fraudulent invoice.

One begins to see that it would take an agile criminal mind just to keep
track of the intrigue.

Dealing with crooks, of course, has other complications. Caride's home
theater was eventually paid off with a $24,000 fraudulent charge against the
fuel facility, but that deal was complicated when it was discovered that the
equipment had been burglarized from one of his other contractors.

STOLEN FUEL SOLD

Not that Caride seemed much put off by the burglar. He later brought him
into the jet-fuel scheme, selling the pilfered fuel to yachts and even at
Opa-locka Airport, where, despite potential contamination, was sold for use
in private jets.

Caride told how he ''watched the news for crashes'' after that deal.

Caride told of political corruption, generating orders from connected
lobbyists to dole out contracts for made-up jobs. He described lavish gifts
and boxes full of money and expensive measures to keep competing kickback
artists from squabbling.

His story describes an airport facility corrupted by political meddling from
County Hall, of minority set-aside contract rules exploited by
well-connected thieves who did shoddy and often unnecessary work.

Finally, the statements make it apparent that an ex-con manager was not some
aberration, inadvertently hired after some sloppy background checks. Caride
managed the fuel depot precisely because his infamous résumé of murder,
robbery and corruption met the very requirements of a job at a corrupt MIA
operation.

Who else but Richard Caride?


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