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This is how Ladra thinks it really went down:
The Heat are on the verge of becoming, perhaps, the most profitable team in the NBA (if they aren’t already). They have just 
won their third consecutive Eastern Conference championship and are on their way to possibly their fourth national title. They have the Three Kings, arguably the three most popular players in the league, and, like any business that has its growing pains, is expected to hit the gravy teenage puberty years just about now. The team could reasonably make $10 million or $20 million or even $50 million next year or the year after that.
And, it would become increasingly difficult to hide that money among inflated expenses as they have been accused of doing over the past 14 years in order to get away with paying us that $250,000 on our multi-million asset. In fact, Ladra thinks that we might be able to recoup some of those stolen funds if we hire any brand new FIU grad accountant at $29,000 a year to go over some of their expenses like we are reportedly doing with the Marlins liquor fund (more on that later). Or maybe give it to a UM accounting class as a project.
The people who work for Micky Arison, owner of the Heat and the richest man in Florida, are smarter than our county commissioners and they knew all this was coming. They knew it when they made that paltry $250,000 payment last year after 14 years of nada. They saw the future windfall on the horizon and were determined to find a way to keep more of it. That’s really the only reason to make that insult of a payment. So that the commission — maybe with the encouragement (wink, wink) of a lobbyist or two — would instruct the mayor, as they did in January, to renegotiate the terms of an already sweetheart deal.
The richest man in Florida and the smart people who work for him also saw the public outcry on the proposed tax giveaway for the Miami Dolphins stadium last year and the proposed soccer stadium this year and knew their window of opportunity might get closed by a public who was increasingly waking up to the county’s corporate welfare welcome mat. They needed a new deal now so they could keep more of the ka-ching later.
Enter Jorge Luis Lopez, the mayor’s best friend, travel buddy and the Miami Heat’s lobbyist, hired by the richest man in Florida to make this new contract happen. Ladra can see Arison now: “Hey, Jorge. We gotta change this contract because we’re going to make a limoload of money and we can’t hide it anymore. It’s bulging out of our pockets. Our creative accountants are complaining.”
Lopez — who not only has a cushy relationship with Gimenez but, like any good lobbyist, with many if not all the commissioners as a proficient campaign fundraiser — convinces the mayor and commissioners to approve a deal where the Heat gives what looks like a big sum of $1 million a year to parks, in lieu of what looks like could have been $5 or $10 million from them annually in the future from profit sharing, and which could have been used for anything out of the general fund. Oh, and that’s $1 million back from the $6.4 million we give them every year in hotel bed tax subsidies — which we now know could be used for parks or libraries! — and which goes up (rather than down) to $8.5 mil in 2030.
There’s more. Please press this “continue reading” button to “turn the page.”
Mayor, Miami Heat bait and switch to ‘better deal’ for who? added by Ladra on
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