By MARY JO MELONE
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 9, 2001
Despite its reputation, not everybody in South Tampa owns a different pair of running shoes for every day he flexes his golden calves on Bayshore.
For every Mercedes in a driveway, you'll see two dented vans meant for hauling kids or lumber.
For every family in a home grand enough for what designers call window treatments, many others live in one-story concrete block houses with yards containing a swing set and a few orange trees.
Theses homes were built 40, 50 years ago, but nobody clamors to call them historic. The clamor is to demolish them and erect houses so much grander they about fill the entire lot.
Out goes the orange tree. In goes the spa. And the stairwell -- there never was much call for a stairwell in a ranch house -- should spiral if possible, as it does in Lynne McCarter's house.
The area's reputation has led so many people to want to move in that the land the little houses stand on is worth more than the concrete, the carport and the plumbing. The little houses are coming down. Houses like McCarter's are going up.
Real estate people call this process infilling.
In the case of McCarter's house, a name has not yet been adequately devised.
Sweetheart deal comes close, with its multiple meanings. For McCarter and her City Hall boyfriend and boss, Steve LaBrake, had the house built on the cheap by a contractor who gets a lot of municipal work.
Yes, call it The House That Love Built. The mayor does.
"I'm not God," Greco told Channel 28 recently, "and I want to wait and see what all this brings. Have they done something wrong or is it just a matter of these two people fell in love?"
Remember. He said he's not God.
He also is not the mayor.
All these years he's been undercover as Dear Abby. When you thought he was issuing proclamations, he's been writing advice columns for the lovelorn.
So, being careful about the tender feelings of those in love, Greco is having LaBrake investigated by a very nice man, at least somebody who is very nice to Greco.
It's the mayor's cousin and best friend, City Attorney Jim Palermo.
Would I kid you?
Palermo is investigating LaBrake over LaDeal. Now, LaBrake and Palermo once were involved in a real estate deal of their own. But that is a trifle, nothing that should get in the way of love's unimpeded course.
Or in the way of protecting Steve LaBrake.
For that is what Dick Greco is doing, for reasons only he knows.
I merely guess.
Nothing has been more dear to this man's heart since he became mayor than building, building, building. Or rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding.
Ybor City.
Tampa Heights.
International Plaza.
New houses in place of old ones in South Tampa.
Building is what Dick Greco knows. Before he was mayor he worked for one of the country's biggest mall developers, DeBartolo Corp.
And nothing has been truer of Dick Greco than that he hates the details. LaBrake has been in charge of all of it for him, authorizing permits, approving plans, certifying construction.
Once it is no longer useful for him to say poor Steve LaBrake is just in love, Greco will hang everything on him and say he, the mayor, just didn't know what was going on.
Love will no longer move mountains or even get houses built on the cheap in South Tampa. LaBrake won't know what hit him. And Dick Greco won't understand why it will be said of him that if you put his sense of ethics next to a pile of dirt, the pile looks nice and clean.