Regalado /Exposito feud makes the NY Times

The cage match between Miami mayor Tomas Regalado and police chief Miguel Exposito has gone national.

Friday's New York Times carries a dispatch by writer Michael Barbaro that boils down the feud for the paper's national audience. A feud that we're all too familiar with here in the Banana Republic.

Barbaro - who's filling in at the Times Miami Bureau temporarily - doesn't offer his readers much historical context in his reporting.

But veteran Miami watchers know that friction between Miami's police chiefs and city hall is nothing new.

Nevertheless, John Timoney - a guy who knows a thing or two about being an embattled police chief - demonstrated that he hasn't lost his sense of humor, telling the Times, “Nobody that I know, and I know lots of people, has ever seen or experienced anything like this.”

The story appears on page 12 of today's Times.

I'm guessing the Herald will put the story a little closer to the front page in Friday's paper.

The Herald's Chuck Rabin reports that Exposito's job is safe for now.

Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito's job is safe for now, but only after two hours of political theater Thursday the likes of which have been missing at historic City Hall at Dinner Key for well over a decade.

At Thursday's meeting Miami Commissioner Richard Dunn told a packed commission chamber, "I have no confidence in the chief's ability to lead the city of Miami Police department."

And Rabin reports that "at one point Dunn likened the friction between police and the historically black Overtown community to that of Fidel Castro and Cuban exiles."

But last August, Dunn and Regalado were singing a different tune as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Chief Exposito as he announced a crackdown on crime in the 'hood.

Commissioner Richard Dunn and chief Miguel Exposito in happier times
However, the question both the Times story and the Herald story fail to answer is, how did we go from this.....



...to this in 5 short months.