Judge Joseph Farina Miami/Dade Court House

March 8, 2012

Judge Joseph Farina
Miami/Dade Court House
73 West Flagler Street
Miami, FL 33130

RE: Some people are genetically inclined to tell the difference between the buttered side and the dry. Some comments on the story about you, your wife, your fellow judges, and why it doesn’t pass the legendary Nechemie “bag test”.

Judge Farina,

Let’s stipulate to several things, shall we?

#1 – Your wife is a wonderful woman. She loves children. She loves pets. She never chooses plastic. She recycles. Drowning polar bears are a great concern to her. She is concerned about GlobalCoolingGlobalWarmingClimateChange. The outrage du jour upsets her. She thinks teachers are underpaid. She never mixes stripes and plaids. She could be a modern day Antigone.

#2 – The legendary Nechemie “bag test” is the only test that the quickly disappearing “Everyman” can respond to. It is deceptively simple. If you are not sure of, forgive me, the ethics of a situation – Let’s leave Aristotle out of this, OK? – you put it in a paper bag. You put the bag in a closet for 24 hours. Open the bag and smell it. Your nose should be infallible. Follow it.

#3 – Your wife, you, your fellow Black robed hypocrites, and all the down the food chain apparatchiks who had to sign off on her deal, a deal that is Homerically rancid, are hypocritical bastards worthy of mention in the next edition of Guinness.

Now to the messy details…

Your wife worked for 30 years in the Miami/Dade court system. She got a higher paying job in the Federal court system. Alas, she was 15 months short of getting her monthly “kiss in the mail”. [Kiss in the mail? Thank you, Howie Carr] would be an annual pension of $42,998. She could take a reduced rate or she could wait until she was 62 to receive the full amount. Ask the woman who mops the john at night what she thinks of those options. People like you give the rest of us 1percenters a bad name.

Who says government is heartless? Not you.

Do you remember when Machiavelli said “The wish of the Prince has the force of law”? You, as a ranking member of the Miami/Dade Courthouse Cabal, “asked” the chief bean counter to put the fix in. You got some of your Black robed buddies to give you cover. One hand washes the other, right? You could be setting a precedent for future Judges to follow. What’s the sense of having “juice” unless you use it? In your case there was no cover of altruism. 42 grand a year, every year, is a great way to get ready for the Rose Bowl.

The deal was simple.

Your wife became a full time Federal employee. At the same time she remained a full time employee of the Miami/Dade court system. Salary wise she was on the clock for one hour a day. She retained the benefit package given to all full time employees.

Crikey, but that smells like I am downwind of the Augean stables before they were cleansed. After all those centuries you still get the dry heaves if you walk past them.

I was born and raised in Bayonne, NJ. That’s on the good end of Hudson County. The county jail was known as the Taj Mahal. The Chief of the Hudson County Police was known as Ali Baba. His badged and armed corsairs were known as the 40 Thieves.
No lactating public mammary was left uncovered. I pass this on to you to show that naïveté is not my strong suit. Still, there was a moral clarity there that is not to be found here. Pity.

It is indeed fitting and proper that the movie “Absence of Malice” has a Miami setting. There is a classic scene in it that fits this occasion.

Wilfred Brimley is the grizzled “lifer” from the Justice Department who does the dirty work. He walks into a room filled with ethically compromised people. Conflicting rights fueled by conflicting interests make for superb drama.

The denouement is simple. At the end of the scene Brimley tells his captive audience, “It may not be illegal but, by God, it’s not right”.

Bingo.

It’s not quite the same as abusing your nephew. It may not be felony but, by God, it’s wrong.

What you are saying is that while all people are equal some people are more equal than others.

You should be driven from your court room by men with whips and snarling hounds. If there is a ship nearby you should be keelhauled.

You are a disgrace to your profession.

I forgot to add that your wife sings in the choir and that she cares deeply, very deeply, about those poor folk in Haiti. She took the advice of Mr. Hinnisy, my favorite publican, when he said. “She saw her opportunities and she took’em”.

Since you raised a stench in the nostrils of honest men and since I see a theft of 380 hours of Federal wages I am sending a copy of this to the United States Attorney and the state Prosecutor. Because you are a Judge and your wife is now a highly paid apparatchik in the Federal system it goes far beyond the bounds of “de minimis non curat Lex”.

It know it’s wrong. It may be illegal. Because you judge the quotidian attempts of citizens to make right angles of the parabolic curve that life is you cannot be thought to be doing something shady and underhanded.

Let’s find out.


“Nothing lost save honor”





Kevin Smith