FORMER CITY MANAGER JULIO AVAEL WAS JUST NOT VERY GOOD AT PICKING POLICE CHIEFS

In last week’s column, I looked back into history to re-report to you how former Key West Police Chief Bill Mauldin was tricked into resigning after getting caught sexually harassing his public information manager. But in researching that story, it occurred to me that the Mauldin scandal was just a part of former City Manager Julio Avael’s strange legacy when it came to the appointment of police chiefs. He just wasn’t very good at it.

In Key West, the city manager appoints the police chief. The City Charter is very specific in spelling out that the mayor and the the commissioners have no say in this. So the city manager has complete discretion to hire and fire his “boy” at his pleasure. Avael served as city manager for 12 years, from 1996 until 2008, when he was finally forced to retire from city government in disgrace. One of his first actions was to fire Police Chief Ray Peterson, one of the best police chiefs in the history of the city. Peterson’s crime? He reportedly had called in the FBI to investigate corruption in city government.

To replace Peterson, Avael promoted John Kirvin to police chief in November 1997. That appointment didn’t work out all that well. Kirvin lasted less than three months in the job. He resigned in January 1998 after somebody phoned in a death threat.

For his next appointment, Avael decided to go all out. He named a blue ribbon panel of local leaders to conduct a nationwide search which resulted in the hiring of Gordon Anthony “Buz” Dillon, the police chief in Alpharetta, Georgia. That turned out to be a disaster. Dillon apparently thought that the job in Key West was his retirement job. He refused to wear a uniform, came to work late and left early, and played a lot of golf on city time. And he didn’t hide the fact that he thought that Avael was a dunce. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to remind you that Dillon was the police chief who had me arrested for publishing something he didn’t like. “Journalist arrested” stories tend to be news and, in my case, the story hit the national wire services and I was interviewed on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Dillon was also invited to be interviewed but, as O’Reilly pointed out, “he was apparently hiding under his desk.” The ACLU came in to sue the city and we made new free speech law in Florida and recovered $240,000 in damages. Chief Dillon had not bothered to tell Avael in advance that he was planning to have me arrested.

Finally, enough was enough. Avael fired Dillon in 2004.

In considering his next police chief appointment, Avael apparently had no interest in another blue ribbon panel and national search. He simply promoted Capt. Bill Fortune to replace Dillon– although Avael was well aware that, back in history, Fortune had been forced to resign as a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy after he got caught having a sexual affair with a 17-year-old boy, a member of the sheriff’s cadet program. We at the Blue Paper reported that story after obtaining a 200-page report from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

When Fortune retired, Avael hired local retired guy Bill Mauldin as the new police chief. Mauldin had told Avael that he had been a police chief in South Carolina– but he sort of forgot to reveal that he had been chief of police of a small town police department with only 10 officers. It didn’t take the rank-and-file police officers here long to realize that Mauldin was a real amateur. We at the Blue Paper were first to report that Mauldin was apparently in over his head. He resigned on April Fools Day 2008 in the midst of the sexual harassment scandal.

Is it any wonder that Julio Avael, at one time during his tenure as city manager, actually considered appointing himself as acting police chief?

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Dennis Reeves Cooper founded Key West The Newspaper (the Blue Paper) in 1994 and was editor and publisher for 18 years, until his retirement last year.