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Stay out of the way: Rose is out there, on patrol
© St. Petersburg Times, Pistol Packin' Rose comes at you in a linen pantsuit and a handshake just this side of a vise grip. You wince, squeeze back, sit down in a wooden chair in Rose Ferlita's office in Tampa City Hall. The councilwoman for all of this gritty city, and mayoral candidate in the wings, owns a .38, a .45 and a 9mm Glock, the weapon cops carry. She has her reasons. She's a druggist who has long run her own pharmacy -- just the place for a dope-starved addict to come calling -- in an iffy part of Seminole Heights. When a thief stuck a gun to her head once, she said flat out he'd have to shoot her because she wouldn't leave with him. He must have had trouble bearing the idea of her company. He didn't shoot Rose, and he didn't carry her off. Rose doesn't so much act as command. Who could be shy in a town where everybody knows you? Her name is a hundred years old. Her grandfather was once the most celebrated baker in town. She has a habit of hauling city inspectors along on rides through neighborhoods, ordering them when and where to clean up trash and junk cars. Naturally, she named her cleanup trips after herself. The Rose Patrol, she calls it. No one can one-up her. Bob Buckhorn, also on the council, also running for mayor, is against dirty dancing. So what does Rose want? A crackdown on ladies flashing their lovelies at Gasparilla. What's fair is fair, especially as Rose defines fair. She managed to get her old campaign manager a city job -- as her secretary. She'll be handy when it comes time to make those fundraising calls in 2003. What happened last Wednesday could also come in handy two years from now, at least among the shoot-first, ask-questions-later crowd. Luckily, Rose did not shoot. The pistol-packin' councilwoman was not packin' when a close friend called her cell phone as Rose drove home. The woman, who lives on Davis Islands, had seen a strange man coming out of the house across the street with bags in his arms, and he was putting them in a car. Bags of what, the woman didn't know. Rose, being Rose, the mistress of getting things done, called a cop she knows, who said she'd get some patrol cars after the guy. The man, by the way, was black. The cops didn't show, and they didn't show and they didn't show, so Rose began to follow the car with the black guy and the stuff in it. She tailed him for 5 miles, from the south side to the west side. When the cops finally showed up and pulled over Ali Kalfani, they found nothing on him. Kalfani had been at that home on Davis Islands, where a friend lived, doing his laundry. That's what was in those bags. For this, he was the subject of a classic case of racial profiling. Rose, being Rose, finds that conclusion absurd. "I was concerned about the incident, not the ethnicity of the subject," she told me. She did acknowledge the man has feelings. "Am I sorry that that young man went through this? Absolutely. Am I sorry I did this? Absolutely not." Only Rose could give respectability to having it both ways. "Would it have been more prudent for me to let somebody else handle it? Yes. But I don't walk away from stuff." No kidding. She leans in at you. She has large brown eyes that seem to miss nothing and calculate everything. You have never met anybody who tries so obviously to use selflessness and civic virtue as a cover for their self-interest, and then clobbers you over the head with a shot of political practicality. She says: "Why would I do something to shoot myself in the foot when I'm running for mayor?"
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Darrell Fry Mary Jo Melone Eric Deggans From the Times Metro desk |
