Former Miami Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi is out of the limelight and out of politics, losing the mayoral election last November to Manny Cid. But he’s not out of the legal debt stemming from that elected office.

Pizzi has been sued by Carlton Fields Jorden Burt, one of the lawfirms that represented him during his battle with the town of Miami Lakes to get his seat back. They say he owes them $56,795. Pizzi says he doesn’t owe them squat.

“Carlton Fields was paid every penny they earned,” Pizzi told Ladra Wednesday. “I’m not going to pay them a penny more. And for them to do this two years later is absurd.”

Let’s bring the newcomers up to speed, shall we?

Read related story: Chatty Michael Pizzi claims innocence, blames Michael Kesti

After Pizzi beat federal charges of bribery stemming from a bogus grant scheme set up by undercover FBI agents, he sued to be reinstated as mayor, even though the town had elected someone else during his trial after he was suspended by the governor. A court forced the governor to unsuspend him and then forced the town to take him back. Then the court found that the town was liable for his legal fees in that fight to regain his office.

Those fees originally were somewhere around $600,000, but the town refused to pay more than what they paid for their own legal fees during the case, which was approximately $460,000. A settlement with Pizzi and the attorneys in question meant that they would each have to lower their fees by a certain percent. Apparently, Carlton Fields was not happy and never signed on to a discount figure. It’s unclear if they got any of the pie. 

And, no, Pizzi didn’t pocket the money himself. It’s the first thing Ladra thought, too. But the town paid the lawfirms directly after reaching the settlement. And it was apparently Pizzi’s decision to leave Carlton Fields out of it. So they sued him.

Read related story: Michael Pizzi and his legal dream team — at what cost to who?

The lawsuit, filed in February, includes an agreement Pizzi signed in August 2014 agreeing to the schedule of fees for video taping, secretarial work, messanger services and a slew of other incidentals, plus the $870 an hour for Peter Webster, the attorney who represented Pizzi for the petition to the state to have him reinstated. The motion says that Pizzi saw the invoices every month and never objected, further approving the fees.

Pizzi played possum with Ladra.

“It’s ridiculous. A big law firm trying to get money they’re not entitled to,” Pizzi said. “I’m offended by their conduct.”

The former mayor, who is still fighting County Hall on the megamall on behalf of a group of residents, says that the firm should sue the town. After all, he is not responsible for those fees. The attorneys won him that battle.

Pizzi said that Carlton Field was paid a portion of their “exorbitant” fees. “If they feel they are entitled to any more money, they should have filed a claim against the town.”

The documents filed with the lawsuit show the total balance as $56,795, so it’s unclear if they were paid anything.

Read related story: Michael Pizzi sues Miami Lakes for $3.2 million in legal fees

Meanwhile, the town is still fighting Pizzi’s attempts to have taxpayers pay the $2.5 million legal fees for his federal bribery trial, for which he had more attoreys than O.J. Simpson (read: too many). The town says nana nina.

“We don’t believe any of the conduct was in the course and scope of being mayor of Miami Lakes,” said Town Attorney Raul Gastesi. He is talking about when Pizzi backdated bogus documents and took a $3,000 campaign contribution in an office closet. At the very least, he added, half of the charges in the indictment stem from actions Pizzi took as town attorney in Medley.

A court agreed with the town and ordered Pizzi to be deposed so he could answer questions about the fees, which the town believes are also excessive. Pizzi has refused to be questioned and appealed that decision.

Of course he did! He is facing $2.5 million in lawsuits!

The four-way Coral Gables commission race becomes a two-way race as longtime activist and everybody’s favorite tia abuela Marlin Ebbert heads into a runoff with land use attorney with hipster facial hair Mike Mena.

And Mena heads into it stronger, having garnered 44.5% of the vote Tuesday to Ebbert’s 33%. Retired Gables Police Sgt. Randy Hoff did not fare as well as Ladra thought he would with 18%. Maybe Ebbert’s name recognition — she ran against Vince Lago two years ago, getting 31 to his 53% — and a Miami Herald endorsement helped. Perhaps the baggage of Hoff having been a police union boss who advocated for employees on the retirement board was too much for residents to bear.

As Ladra predicted (and it was the only thing I got right), Serafin Sousa was a distant fourth with under 5 %.

Read related story: Hoff, Mena stand out in 4-way commission race

Mena, who Ladra was told was recruited into the race by Commissioner Frank Quesada, had far more money to campaign and has been doing so aggressively (he is the opposite of Chip Withers) with a dozen or so mailers and teams of young people knocking on doors every day. He had raised more than $136,500 as of March 28, compared to Ebbert’s $21,600.

He will likely raise more far more money than her over the next two weeks as well. Expect the campaigning to start Wednesday as absentee ballots will likely be mailed out again in the next few days and the runoff is in less than two weeks, April 25.

Does it really matter who wins now? The pro development foces (read: Quesada and Commissioner Vince Lago) have the third vote they need to continue to drive their agenda now that former Mayor Raul Valdes-Fauli won his seat back, beating Commissioner Jeannett Slesnick in the ugliest of the three races. The answer isnt simple. Ladra says no. And yes.

No because Ebbert will likely end up in the same 4-1 position that Slesnick found herself in many times. Yes because she is friendly with Commissioner Pat Keon (both women are members of the Gables Garden Club) and maybe can talk some sense into her on the dais. And Lago has voted against development a couple of times so it just might make a difference once or twice a year.

Plus the message to newbies like Mena should be that they need to serve on a board or committee at the city level before running for full fledged commissioner.

But Ebbert would have to get practically all of Randy Hoff’s share to beat Mena.

If only the 2,687 who voted for her Tuesday and the 3,643 who voted for Mena show up or cast ballots for the April 25 runoff, well then, better luck to Ebbert on her third, next try.

Former Coral Gables Commissioner Wayne “Chip” Withers lost his bid to come back to office by unseating an incumbent Tuesday.

But did he really try? That’s questionable (read: not so much).

Commissioner Pat Keon, who had five times as much more money as he did, won handily, 57 to 43 percent in one of the two commission seats on the ballot. The other will head into a runoff April 25 between longtime grandma activist Marlin Ebbert and land use attorney Mike Mena.

Keon’s campaign was almost laughable. While she had raised at least $222,000 as of March 28 to spend on print, radio and even TV ads, she also basically took credit for the Gables tree canopy in an email blast and for a resolution that forces the city to program inclusive recreational activities for special needs kids. Really? Naturally both are good things, and I applaud the inclusion legislation. But was it necessary? And, even if we live in a world and county where it is, isn’t that, like the protection of trees, a no-brainer? Isn’t it far more difficult to make the right decision when developers are pressuring you to approve an oversized project despite the overwhelming objection of a huge majority of adjacent residents?

Read related story: ‘Chip’ Withers vs Pat Keon because of the Paseo project

In fact, Keon’s Achilles heel was just that: She doesn’t listen to the people. She’s oblivious to their fears about the lack of police presence or their disgust with some metal flower sculptures that 1,600 people signed a petition to have relocated from the Segovia Biltmore circle. She is arrogant and has this “I know better than you” tone in everything.

But Withers never used that against her. He thought he could run a shoestring grassroots campaign that banked on his name recognition instead of any real fundraising to get the anti-development, arrogant incumbent message out.

This is also proof that you can’t get elected by just los cuatro gatos impressed by Modesto “Mitch” Maidique and your immediate neighbors, no matter how many of them you have. It was pretty obvious, and several sources confirmed to Ladra, that Withers had been recruited by the Riviera Homeowners Association to run against Keon because of her vote to approve the Paseo project on U.S. 1.

They never put their money where their mouth is and were, basically, outmessaged. That’s the only reason she got more than 1,200 votes ahead. It should have at least been closer.

Former Coral Gables Mayor Raul Valdes Fauli will have that word “former” removed from his identification after he is sworn in as the new mayor again.

Valdes-Fauli beat Commissioner Jeannett Slesnick in the mayoral race Tuesday, 51 to 49, after Mayor Jim Cason said he would not run for a fourth term. As expected, it was a tight race and a slim victory — by a scant 187 votes. And it’s almost all absentee ballots.

Only 15 people more voted for him than for her on election day. The other 172 additional votes he got were via AB.

A total of 8,415 people voted in the mayoral election Tuesday (there was a drop off of about 200 an 300 in the two commission races), which is on the high end of a typical turnout.

Read related story: Coral Gables candidates will spend more than $1 million

“I always said I was going to need 4,000 votes. I just needed a little more,” Slesnick told Ladra late Tuesday night after several people had left her campaign party.

She said her business partner will be happy to have her back at work full time, but that she will stay involved in Gables issues. “I never stopped being involved,” she said, and she wasn’t talking about Valdes-Fauli but she may as well have been since he disappeared for 13 years until endorsing Cason two years ago and then getting rewarded with a charter review committee seat.

“We had a great turnout today and we ran a really good campaign. They were all volunteers except for one person. Everybody else was volunteer from start to finish,” she said. “I ran a very clean campaign and I’m very proud and I don’t know anything I could have done differently.”

With all due respect and my apologies for not writing enough about the race or earlier, maybe she could have gone a little negative? Valdes-Fauli sure did. And it seemed to work for him.

The former mayor waged war in this campaign, which was more of a grudge match for Valdes-Fauli, who lost his seat in 2001 in a bitter defeat to former Mayor Don Slesnick, the commissioner’s husband. Jeannett was cast as not much more than a shill for her husband, whose administration was mired in scandal and financial chaos, which was sort of the case but certainly not Don Slesnick’s fault.

Read related story: Mucho mailers mean to mislead in Coral Gables election

“I’m sorry he had to take the brundt of the campaign madness,” the good wife said. 

But Valdes-Fauli got his licks in on her, too. Using innocuous votes against her, saying she voted for the Paseo project when, in fact, it had already been approved and she was voting for subsequent measures, some of which downsized the project. She did her job. Another cast her as “Speedy Slesnick” because she voted against a feel-good measure to lower speed limits to 25 MPH on some streets whe her point is that what the city needs is police officers to enforce the already pretty good 30 MPH limit. 

The worst attack, however, was the whisper campaign about Slesnick being anti-Hispanic or anti-Cuban, which is a ridiculous and, frankly, insulting card to pull. It becomes especially injuring when it is pulled by a Castro apologist who recently visited the island, had some eye-opening experience and now advocates for closer relations with the Cuban regime. Que descaro!

We’ll know more in coming days about the demographics of the vote, but I bet that a lot of Hispanics were targetted and came out.

Read related story: Coral Gables mayoral race takes a nasty, ethnic turn

This victory is not just a victory for Valdes-Fauli — and for Sergio Pino, one of the developers that funded his campaign (with at least $10,000). This is a victory also for Commissioners Frank Quesada and Vince Lago, who endorsed the former mayor and will now have a third vote to push their agenda through.

And if people were concerned about over development before, they can just kiss the old Gables good bye, because it’s not about to get any better for the next two years. It doesn’t really matter anymore that Commissioner Pat Keon got re-elected or if Marlin Ebbert pulls out an upset and beats Mike Mena in a runoff (more on that later).

A majority is three votes. They have preserved that with Tuesday’s vote.

By the time the Coral Gables mayoral race is over on Tuesday evening, the two candidates will have spent at least a half a million dollars, maybe more. Ladra is not sure but is willing to bet that’s a record.

The six candidates in the two commission seat races raised almost exactly the same amount of campaign cash combined as of the last reports available, through March 28: $474,000. You just know that by April 11, that number will go up — making it a total of more than $1 million spent on this Gables election cycle.

Read related story: Jeannett Slesnick winning Gables mayoral money race

Obviously the two cash cows are in the mayoral race. Commissioner Jeannett Slesnick and former Mayor Raul Valdes-Fauli have each raised almost a quarter of a million themselves — $247,819 for Slesnick, and $246,494 for Valdes-Fauli between his campaign account and his political action committee, Coral Gables First. Practically every dime of the $73,794 contributed to the PAC is from outside Coral Gables and most of it is development and real estate money — like the $10,000 in bundles from developer Sergio Pino‘s mulitple companies — except for $20,000 from a Mercedes Benz dealership in Brooklyn that seems to come out of nowhere.

But Valdes-Fauli has been burning through his piggy bank faster than the commissioner. Slesnick still has more than $107,000 to spend next to his $60K as of March 28. That could make a big difference in the last two weeks.

Read related story: In Coral Gables election, only a clean sweep will change course

The next heavy hitters are incumbent Commissioner Pat Keon, who has raised almost $222,000 to former Commissioner Wayne “Chip” Withers‘ $39,411 as of March 28 (but Ladra doubts he will catch up). Also on that date, she had about $125,000 left to spend while he had about $14,200.

In the open seat race that Slesnick had to resign from, the four candidates have raised $211,800. Well, three candidates, since Serafin Sousa has only raised $1,000 and we don’t even know if he loaned it to himself or who gae it to him because he doesn’t know how to fill out a campaign finance report and nobody cares enough to ask him to fix it. So, its $211,800 between three candidates — and more than half of that belongs to land use attorney Mike Mena.

Mena, who was reportedly recruited by Commissioners Frank Quesada and Vince Lago, has raised $136,540 as of March 28. He had spent a ton of that ($119,178) and only had about $17,362 left as of Matrch 28. Meanwhile, retired police officer Randy Hoff has been far more thrifty and had $18,497 left from his $53,666 booty on the same day. Activist grandma Marlin Ebbert hasn’t even spent that much, with $12633 of her $21,595 going out, leaving her with just under $9,000 to get her to election day, unless she picks up a few contributions.

Read related story: Mucho mailers mean to mislead in Coral Gables election

Ladra knows that it’s not a guarantee that the candidate with the biggest bank gets to win on the ballot. Look at Miami Commissioner Ken Russell and Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez. But it helps.

If the money helped them get the message out, then Keon and Mena might be sittine pretty tonight. If anti development forces were able to rally the troops and get their turnout up, then, and only then, it won’t matter.