ACEABLE stop photographing them while they were questioning an individual on Biscayne Boulevard. The incident motivated Miller to launch his website, now known as PINAC News, which focuses primarily on exposing police misconduct and corruption, as well as advocating for people’s right to video-record police officers. Al was among Miller’s early supporters. “Al gave me a $50 donation at a fundraiser after I had been arrested and when PINAC was only weeks old,” Miller says. “I always appreciated that because I knew he was on a budget.” In 2010, Al dove into Miami’s blogosphere when then- Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado fired the city’s film office coordinator and replaced him with a political crony, Craver writes in his obit. From that moment, Al found his voice as the potty-mouthed blogger who showed no fear in calling out local government officials and exposing their malfea- sance. He also mastered gaining access to public docu- ments and sharing them with his audience — as well as with journalists willing to brave his acerbic personality and work alongside him. Melissa Sanchez met Al the year he launched his blog. At the time, Sanchez, now a Chicago-based reporter at Pro- Publica, had just begun her new job as the City of Miami beat reporter for El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sis- ter to the Miami Herald. “I was really drawn to him and fas- cinated by his background,” Sanchez says. “A lot of the stuff he wrote about was sometimes mean-spirited and difficult for some of my colleagues at the Miami Herald to swallow. But I worked for El Nuevo. I spent a lot of time with him.” During her four-year stint with El Nuevo, Sanchez re- calls regularly meeting Al at his Miami Shores condo to go over stories they were working on over cups of coffee. “I in- troduced him to other Spanish-language reporters and they all liked him,” Sanchez recounts. “He always treated us with respect, which is not something we always got from English-speaking [ journalists]. He had high standards for journalists in rooting out corruption.” In November 2020, Crespo announced he was retiring from blogging and was going to focus on developing a treat- ment for a television series based on the dysfunctional Mi- ami city government. According to Craver, the working title is the tagline Al used to end many of his stories: “It’s Miami, bitches!” Al kept his diagnosis private and sporadically posted new stories on the Crespogram, including a series of posts in September 2021 about a Miami Shores cop who shot and killed a mentally ill woman who was holding a pellet gun. “When you lose someone like Crespo, you realize how few people there are like him in this community,” Miami documentarian Billy Corben tells New Times. “And you re- alize how desperately we needed him and need more peo- ple like him. That makes him irreplaceable.” “I can’t tell you how much everyone in Miami who cares about good government, transparency, and accountability will miss Al Crespo,” Corben shared on Twitter upon learn- ing of Al’s death. “Bank robber turned filmmaker turned lo- cal blogger, public records crusader, and our greatest gadfly.” Roger Craver relayed that in lieu of flowers, Al requested that everyone vote at every opportunity: “Evil and corrup- tion exist not only in Miami but throughout the nation, and the votes of caring citizens is democracy’s best protection.” Al Crespo will be laid to rest in the historic Key West Cemetery alongside other members of his family. Photo by Carlos Miller A RARE CHARACTER Current and former Miamians remember Al Crespo. BY FRANCISCO ALVARADO C harles Albert Crespo, who died August 16 at age 80, was a civic crusader and an authority defier of the highest order who wielded public-records laws like a saber and spared no ethically challenged public official his well-calibrated rage. DAVID WINKER Miami attorney “Al was a character out of a Carl Hiassen novel. He got out of prison and made a very significant contribution to society. He would go to the City of Miami Commission meetings and say the city commission is a criminal enterprise and no one sued him. They just didn’t want Crespo on their ass. And I never got the sense he was bitter about what he did. It’s like he knew this place is nuts so just enjoy it. Al embraced the messiness of democracy.” ROGER CRAVER former Miami resident “Al was just a rare character. He devoted all the time and en- ergy he had in trying to keep government on the straight and nar- row. He burrowed into what was going on in a city that needs all the burrowing you can do. Of course, he did so with a vocabulary that put off some people. If we ever needed more of him, it’s now. He will be missed.” CHUCK STROUSE Florida International University journalism professor and former Miami New Times editor-in-chief “There was no bullshit about Al. Absolutely none. I am not gonna say he never exaggerated, because he did sometimes. But 99 per- cent of the time, the people he went after deserved it. No one spoke more truth to power than Al. Unless you were someone in power like Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, whom he went after like a buzz saw, you had to love the guy. That’s what a good rabble rouser does.” ELAINE DE VALLE blogger at Political Cortadito “He’s the original government watchdog. He didn’t have a jour- nalism background but he was really good at developing sources and making public-records requests. He opened the space for blogs like mine. He was hot and cold with me. Some days, he loved me. Some days, he hated me. He chewed me out as often as he praised me. He made me better. Sometimes, he was vulgar with- out it being necessary, but he made it okay to be rude. He was no holds barred and he didn’t mince words.” MARC CAPUTO former Miami Herald and Politico reporter now at NBC News “Don’t get me wrong. I hated the fact that he would go after some of my friends, colleagues, and peers at the Herald, but Al was incredibly helpful to me last year when I did my first-ever longform journalism piece in my 25-year career. It was a profile about Miami police Capt. Javier Ortiz. Al was the decoder ring for the criminology of the Miami Police Department and all of its crookedness, corruption, evilness, and decay. We still live in an open society where sunlight is better than darkness. Miami is go- ing to be a little bit darker now that Al is gone.” BILLY CORBEN Miami filmmaker and civic activist “Al is the definition of the person who comes to Miami to be somebody else, and he owned it. He was living proof that you can reinvent yourself and be better. He had the guts to go into [politi- cians’] playgrounds and sandboxes and do what you have to do to bullies: Push them down in front of everybody. As a former bank robber, he recognized the same fuckery as a professional criminal in the government here in Miami and he called it out.” [email protected] 99 Al Crespo at a 2008 rally for Barack Obama in Miami miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | miaminewtimes.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | MIAMI NEW TIMES NEW TIMES MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2008 SEPTEMBER 1-7, 2022
