Armed Man Arrested In South Beach With NYPD Gear

ARMED MAN ARRESTED IN SOUTH BEACH WITH NYPD GEAR

January 26, 2012
MIAMI BEACH

By David Arthur Walters

Miami Beach City Manager Jorge Gonzalez wanted residents to think they had more than enough police officers on the force to deal with crime on the beach, and he cited the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics to prove it, as if dealing with the seven major crimes on that report is all police officers have to do. But that is not even the half it. There are at least two dozen other crimes such as felony drug and weapons offenses that the police are concerned with, not to mention a myriad of misdemeanors including traffic violations. The city manager repeatedly refused to release statistics or address the frequency for those incidents for fear of scaring tourists away and investing more money in law enforcement.

To make matters worse, in the interest of increasing tourism revenue and reducing enforcement costs, he reportedly instructed the police department to stand down from enforcing minor, quality of life ordinances, a policy that is bound to eventually result in an increase in the major crime index. That policy of toleration and neglect has made South Beach, especially Washington Avenue, a sort of Wild West rife with crimes not on the major crime report, many of them missing the attention of mainstream media.

Residents and merchants outraged by the lawlessness are finally being heeded even though 85% of them have become too cynical to vote. Two city commissioners have made a motion to fire the city manager for his lax management style. And there has been a repeated call, completely ignored by the city manager and the commissioners, to amend the city charter to mandate the election of a police commissioner who would be directly responsible to the electorate instead of the city manager, who is, presently beholden to a part-time commission and weak mayor.

The police department is currently looking for another chief due to the retirement of the present one, and is bending over backwards to please merchants and residents; for example, by putting more flatfeet on Washington Avenue in order to crack down on minor offenses. On New Year’s Day that policy netted an arrest for serious crimes that will not appear on the FBI’s UCR-1 report; a drugs and weapons crime, which was not reported by mainstream media.

“Washington Avenue Beat Officers Lozano and Romero,” stated an MBPD Incident Advisory to merchants and residents, “while on normal walking patrol, approached an improperly parked vehicle with one male occupant in the driver’s seat with all the windows down along the 900 block of Washington Avenue at 4:09 pm. The vehicle had a visible NYPD jacket in the back seat and the subject was wearing a NYPD T-shirt. The officers made contact with the driver and discovered that the occupant was not a police officer. The officers asked the subject if he had any weapons and the subject responded ‘no.’ The subject gave the officers consent to search the interior of the vehicle. As you can see from image 0877, the top stock of a Tec-9, 9mm machine gun was clearly visible and within a arm’s reach of the subject. The subject was arrested. The Tec-9 had a fully loaded magazine. Search incident to arrest, revealed additional police paraphernalia.”

Police Report 2012-293 (the 293^rd report on the first day of the new year!) identifies the subject as one James F. Cannata, 49, of Bronx, New York, who was charged with possession of a machine gun (Tec-9), possession of a small bag of marijuana, possession of a submachine gun (Tec-9) and seven counts of possession of ammunition. The ammunition appears to be hollow-point bullets, designed to expand and stay within the target to do more damage, reducing the possibility of through-and-through penetration and therefore collateral damage. The weapon charges fall under Chapters 790.235 and 790.221 of the Florida Statutes. 790.235 prohibits the “possession of firearm or ammunition by violent career criminal…regardless of whether such person is or has previously been sentenced as a violent career criminal….” The weapon may be any kind of weapon or device including a tear gas gun or chemical weapon. The penalty carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison. A police department source declined to reveal the man’s criminal record; given the nature of the charges, he must be a convicted felon. Section 790.221 prohibits the “possession of a short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotgun, or machine gun,” and carries penalties that vary according to the convicted person’s criminal record.

The police report is somewhat flawed inasmuch as the weapon seized is not a Tec-9, a semi-automatic handgun once favored by Miami’s Cuban and Jamaican drug gangs and made notorious by such events as the Columbine High School Massacre. A semi-automatic weapon is one that reloads itself and requires repeated pulls of the trigger to fire it. Converted to a fully automatic machine gun, the firing continues as long as the trigger remains pulled. The Tec-9 converted to fully automatic sprays bullets all over the place hence is inaccurate and dangerous to people near the target; in fact the Miami Beach Police Department range master once turned down a gift of several Tec-9s that had been confiscated from drug dealers by the U.S. Marshal’s Office, because the weapon is too dangerous for police use. Intratec, the manufacturer of the Tec-9, has gone out of business.

The gun actually confiscated from Mr. Cannata is a Kel Tec Sub 2000 foldable semi-automatic rifle manufactured by Kel Tec CNC Industries of Cocoa, Florida, a company that happens to be the third-largest handgun maker in the United States. It is popular with police officers in some jurisdictions because their pistol magazines can be used in the rifle, which provides them with greater accuracy at a longer range than a pistol. It is not made as a “submachine” gun, which would be a fully automatic machine gun that uses pistol magazines; we are not aware if this particular gun was converted to fully automatic. Campers and hikers like the Kel Tec Sub 2000 because the carbine can be folded up and put in a backpack, just as Mr. Cannata had his folded up and stuffed in a bag in his car..

All and all, we surmise that Mr. Cannata was posing as a New York cop, to himself at the very least, for to so in Florida would be absurd. We notice that he was not charged with impersonating a police officer—he admitted he was not a cop despite the paraphernalia in his possession, including a NYPD lieutenant’s badge.

We can only imagine what brought him to Florida and South Beach. The fine weather and the reputation of South Beach as a Wild West were undoubtedly factors. Who knows? Maybe he was on vacation from ripping off drug dealers in the Bronx. A police department source discounted the notion that he was hanging around Washington and 9^th to rob the Bank of America or the Seven-Eleven. It is even speculated that he a deep-undercover cop. Records online, at the Miami-Dade County Clerk’s Office, show that he was released on his own recognizance on January 7 even though he is being prosecuted for nine felony counts and one misdemeanor count, and that he has applied for indigent status.

The City of Miami Beach, which the FBI in recent years ranked as the third most dangerous small city in the nation, used to try to protect its South Beach from bad influences, or at least to keep those influences secret so that potential tourists and the celebrities that once drew them to the beach would not be frightened off, as European tourists were after a world-famous fashion designer, Gianni Versace, was murdered on the doorstep of his Ocean Drive home. The advance of civil rights primarily in favor of vagrants and criminals had already been an impediment to keeping the beach safe for the vast majority of people, yet much could still be done to protect the beach from being flooded with miscreants of all sorts, including wealthy criminals from all over the world and its very own corrupt public officials. An elderly gentleman who lives in a million-dollar condo on the beach believes there is still a chance to turn South Beach into a Singapore, by setting up checkpoints to search for drugs, weapons, and wanted persons, and by strict enforcement of local ordinances.

But city officials, eager for more revenue, discovered that a reputation for liberality and tolerance for the city’s crown jewel, South Beach, is not such a bad thing after all, and opened up the gates to the backwash. South Beach is a virtual Wild West Back East, and Washington Avenue is Main Street for the showdowns. It is no wonder that cops seem trigger-happy given the pervasive threat to law and order on the beach. Florida is a gun-loving state to begin with. There are more guns than residents in Miami; try as you may, you cannot take the Miami out of Miami Beach because “this is Miami, bitch.”

Bad news is good news nowadays. The man who died in a hail of police bullets during Urban Week was wanted for shooting a victim in the head during a filling station robbery upstate. This Wild West Back East has few real cowboys, but that is all right. Just send in the clowns. Hip-hop to gangsta’ rap. Impersonate gangsters the best you can, bringing a gun for good measure. The talent scout shot dead by a cop in front of MED Pizza, a block and a half from the police station, because he refused to drop a loaded gun that he was pointing at the cop, had no criminal record. His bodyguard also packed heat.

Who would come to South Beach unarmed if he knew what was really taking place on Washington Avenue? “Yo, man, let’s go to South Beach tonight. Bring your gun.” The night worker at MED Pizza calls the late-night Washington Avenue crowd “The Bullshit People.” A fully armed actor just might pull the trigger to fulfill his role. Watch out, Marshal Dillon, this is the Wild West Back East.