The Bad Karma Motel

Seven Seas proprietor Thomas Lin submitted a long letter apologizing for the problems at his motel. He pledged to fire the night manager, to move in and run the place himself, and to make improvements in security. But the Seven Seas and Lin had already been put on probation once (in 1992), and this time the NAB voted to close down the motel for six months and levy a $500 fine plus $2500 to offset investigative costs.

The owner of the Shalimar, Paul Yang, admitted he knew prostitutes frequented his motel but said he felt sorry for them and had been trying to help them. The board shut down his motel for nine months, levying a $250 fine plus $2500 in investigative costs.

At the request of the Mesas' newly retained lawyer, their case was postponed until the NAB's next meeting, December 28.

The following morning, CI Number Eleven boarded a flight to Tennessee for a Thanksgiving family reunion. According to the city's expense records, her plane ticket was paid for by the City of Miami Police Department because she'd had to remain in Miami to testify at the hearing instead of traveling north by bus.

Orlando and Manuela Mesa discovered the confidential informant's identity in December, when they were shown police videotapes of the buys Sandy had made in their parking lot. Instead of throwing her out, however, they invited her to stay. Their lawyer even offered to write up an unspecified "employment contract" for her.

"She walked into the office and said, 'I'm the CI, I'd like to help you out because I think [the Mesas] are getting a raw deal,'" recalls attorney Jonathan Schwartz, a former assistant public defender in Dade. "I'm thinking to myself, what better way to deal with the enemy than to make friends with the enemy?"

Schwartz and the informant are in agreement about some of what subsequently transpired between them: Sandy admits she told the lawyer that she hoped the NAB would be lenient on the Mesas; like her own parents, they had emigrated from Cuba and worked hard to make it in the U.S. She also confirms that some sort of employment contract was discussed.

From there, however, relations between the parties deteriorated, and their versions of events devolve into a contradictory tangle of cloak-and-dagger maneuvers reminiscent of a low-budget TV thriller. According to law enforcement sources familiar with the case, the matter is the subject of a pending police investigation.

After he first met with Sandy, Schwartz says, his clients and the informant were on good terms: She continued to live at the motel rent-free, and they encouraged her to help them identify and evict people she knew were criminals. Schwartz gave her a beeper (he says he gets them free and felt it was a good way to keep in touch). But he suspected Sandy was taping many of their conversations, particularly those in which she allegedly asked for money in exchange for not testifying against the Mesas at the upcoming NAB hearing. "I said, 'We can't do that; that'd be bribery,'" Schwartz recalls.

Sandy says she did wear a wire, a statement corroborated by a law enforcement source, who explains that a police investigation was initiated in late December, after Sandy told her supervisors that she was being offered money to not testify A by Schwartz and by James Angleton, owner of the recently sanctioned Economy Inn. (Angleton says Sandy approached him and asked for payment not to testify, whereupon he refused; he also told several people familiar with the matter that he believed she had been tape-recording their meeting.)

The TV-thriller mood took a dark turn two days before the NAB hearing. On the day after Christmas, when she returned to the Camelot after attending a mass for her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, Sandy discovered that her journal and probation papers were missing from the nightstand beside her bed. Someone had scrawled "Rat Bitch" in red on her door. In a statement made to police weeks later, Norma Guerrero, who had been working as a maid at the Camelot, alleged that on December 26 she had seen the Mesas and manager Vivian Rolon enter Sandy's room with a master key. The Mesas took snapshots of the room, Guerrero informed police, and carried away "the journal and other items." That incident is still under investigation.

Sandy didn't show up to testify at the December meeting of the NAB, which resulted in a second postponement. That didn't stop attorney Jonathan Schwartz from attacking the informant in absentia. "She is a pathological liar, a thief, she lives hand to mouth," he told the board. "She's a woman who will take advantage of anything. She spent the whole day in my office yesterday trying to get us to bribe her." He further labeled the CI "psychotic, schizophrenic, drug-crazed...a proven scumbag," and made a point of mentioning her full name several times, despite her confidential status.