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What pushed politician over the edge?
A Miami leader's suicide has some wondering whether his treatment by the media and prosecutors contributed to his death.
By DAVID ADAMS
Published July 30, 2005
MIAMI - He was a distinguished public servant and Vietnam vet lionized by constituents in his heavily black district.
His fall from grace and subsequent suicide Wednesday stunned a city where politicians are better known for brushing off corruption.
Two days after suspended Miami City Commissioner Arthur Teele shot himself in the head in the lobby of the Miami Herald building, some friends and supporters say prosecutors and the media are partly to blame for driving him over the edge.
"We can't ever have anybody to go into office and retire with dignity," Teele's friend Paulette Simms Wimberly told one Miami TV station. "They got to drag them down like they're pit bulls, like some kind of road kill."
Journalists are accused of persecuting Teele over the last year with reports of alleged corruption, as well as allegations that he associated with prostitutes and used cocaine. Prosecutors also are defending themselves against accusations that they fueled the media coverage by including lurid details of his sex life in public documents turned over to defense lawyers. Earlier this year, Teele was convicted for assaulting a Miami police officer. Federal corruption charges came earlier this month, as the government indicted him on 26 counts of fraud and conspiracy in a contract-rigging scheme.
Prosecutors and media executives strongly defend their actions, saying they were only doing their job.
Allegations regarding prostitutes and cocaine stemmed from police surveillance and witness statements regarding Teele's lifestyle, said Ed Griffith, spokesman for the State Attorney's Office.
"In the flow of an investigation involving the movement of illegal cash one must always trace the outflow of money," he said. "Where it leads is defined by how it's spent. The money at the core of the case was all cash money. He (Teele) was living beyond his means."
Under Florida's liberal rules of discovery, prosecutors must provide the defense with all material gathered in an investigation.
Some local attorneys contend the government does enjoy some leeway in handling sensitive personal information, allowing attorneys to see it without making it public.
"The state could have protected it and kept it close to the vest," said Richard Sharpstein, a prominent Miami attorney who represents Teele's co-defendant in the federal case. "Instead they gleefully and willingly leaked that information."
Sharpstein alleged that the state was upset when federal prosecutors stole their thunder by filing new charges.
But legal experts said state law placed local authorities in a difficult position. Unlike federal law, which has more restrictive discovery rules, state law cannot limit the information made available.
"I don't see what the controversy is," said Robert Jarvis, who teaches legal ethics at Nova Southeastern University. "You have a responsibility as a prosecutor to follow up all leads, and you have an obligation to turn over everything to the defendant."
A tall and imposing figure, Teele was a long-serving powerhouse in Miami's black community. He grew up in Tallahassee where his father was a history professor at Florida A&M University.
A church-going Republican, he was a political moderate who became a voice for the city's poor. He was married with one child.
He rose to prominence under the Reagan administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation. After moving to Miami he won two terms on the Dade County Commission in the 1990s and was elected its chairman three times.
He ran unsuccessfully for county mayor before being elected to the Miami city commission in 1997. He was re-elected in 2001. As a city commissioner, Teele remained an influential voice, serving as head of the Community Redevelopment Agency created to renovate Miami's blighted inner city areas.
He was under surveillance last year in an investigation of CRA-related corruption when he chased and threatened a police officer. After his conviction for assault, things only got worse, as federal corruption charges followed.
The ethical issues swirling around the media's coverage of Teele are just as thorny.
Since his death, local media have defended their coverage of Teele's legal troubles.
The day he died the weekly Miami New Times published a 10,000-word cover story titled "Tales of Teele. Sleaze Stories." A subhead read: "Male prostitutes and multiple mistresses, drug money in Gucci shopping bags, bribery and extortion conspiracies. And you thought you'd heard it all about Art Teele."
The story was compiled from police surveillance documents and witness interviews by police investigating Teele over the last year. The paper did not seek Teele's response to the allegations.
"Had we contacted anyone for comment we would have been obligated to contact everyone mentioned in the report - dozens and dozens and dozens of people," Jim Mullin, editor of the New Times, told the Miami Herald.
Holding public officials accountable is a fundamental part of the job of journalism, said Aly Colon, who teaches media ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, which owns the St. Petersburg Times.
"But journalists need to think long and hard about the impact and scope of their reporting about public officials and what is pertinent to the public work they do," he said. "It's getting increasingly harder to draw that distinction for the public as well as the press."
That Teele, who was 59, chose to end his life in the Miami Herald's building could be seen as a symbol of his frustration with the media. In fact, a distraught Teele made his way there Wednesday afternoon to drop off a package for popular columnist Jim DeFede.
The politician and the reporter had grown close over the years. Normally unforgiving over the slightest whiff of corruption, DeFede respected Teele's political talent.
Teele called DeFede two or three times on Wednesday. In their last conversation, at about 6 p.m., Teele telephoned DeFede from the Herald's lobby. The conversation lasted a few minutes.
After hanging up, Teele told a security guard, "Tell my wife I love her." Then he put a SIG Sauer revolver in his mouth.
"He mainly called because he wanted to talk to me about the allegations about his homosexual affair," DeFede told one local TV station, referring to the series of phone calls. "He was upset by what that was doing, the impact that was having on his son and he just more wanted to talk about that. He was very emotional and very distraught."
After learning of Teele's death, DeFede confessed to editors that he had secretly taped one of their last conversations that day. That raised separate ethical and legal issues. Under Florida law it is illegal to record a phone conversation without the other person's consent.
DeFede was fired.
DeFede's dismissal led to a mini revolt by staffers, who joined former Herald reporters in signing an open letter calling on the paper's editor to reinstate him.
By Friday evening more than 200 people - almost all journalists and media professors - had signed it. Among them were dozens of Herald staffers, including author and satirist Dave Barry and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.
[Last modified July 30, 2005, 01:34:20]
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Former Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede was fired for secretly taping a conversation with Arthur Teele.
