Thursday, November 26, 2009

details, what are they good for?

This Miami Herald article, while covering a something quite interesting, is devoid of important details. The owner of a construction company is arrested because he allegedly bribed Opa-Locka commissioners to receive government contracts.
Oh! Great Herald, which commissioners were those? Were they arrested? When did that all happen?

Aside from that, a lot of these questions would be answered if there were simply links in the online article to previous, related stories featured in the Herald, or other reputable sources.

The only article available on the internet (when searching for either Faustin Denis or Dante Starks [the two men arrested in relation to this case]) is from local CBS 4. But as you can see it's not really any better, and doesn't seem to have any writer credit.

After doing a tiny bit more digging I did find this article from a local blog post a few years back. It mentions Commissioner Terrence Pinder as one person receiving the bribdes from Dante Starks. No mention of Denis. This post does not have any corroborative links, though, so I don't think if they're the same Dante Starks, etc.

However, a little more digging in Google News and I found this article from 2007 mentioning the two again, and an archived Miami Herald article whose headline alludes to Pinder in fact being the/a Commissioner involved in the scandal.

I'm too tired to try digging deeper, but I want to point out how much I found with such little effort as an example of why traditional newspaper journalism can and should die.

Anyway, as the CBS article mentions, there is currently no information from "officials" as to whether Commissioners will be investigated or not. Neither the CBS nor Miami Herald article mention Pinder, although Dante Starks and Pinder are linked together in the 2007 blog post.

Me thinks Pinder was not the only person receiving kickbacks, mostly because in a bureaucracy it's not common for just one person to make decisions, and if these bribes were to avoid a legitimate bidding process, someone else must have been involved lest they would have noticed how strangely things were working in these many construction projects.

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