By Fred Grimm
The Miami Herald (Florida)
Copyright 2007 The Miami Herald
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
The mythic South Florida desperado might have finessed the situation. Discovered with a contraband-stuffed ambulance in the middle of Arkansas, our quick-thinking bad boys of the cinematic kind would have convinced the local cop that they were on a humanitarian mission: transporting a load of medicinal marijuana to a deathly ill patient in Southwest Ranches.
The mythic South Florida desperado turned out to be a myth. They were not cinematic. They were not quick-thinking.
“They were not the three sharpest pencils around,” said Sam Williams, police chief in Maumelle, Ark., where the local estimation of South Florida bad-boy culture has fallen considerably since a white-and-blue ambulance rolled into town last month.
BAD UNIFORMS
Nor did these outlaws look sharp in their emergency medical technician uniforms when they broke down in Maumelle on March 14.
According to the indictment handed down in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale last week, an inquisitive Maumelle policeman noticed that one of the three EMTs accompanying the ambulance “wore sergeant chevrons upside down.” Another had gone grandiose, decorating his epaulets with the star “usually associated with the rank of general.” A third wore a plain T-shirt.
Chief Williams suggested that someone in need of emergency medical intervention might rethink his situation if he looked up and saw an emergency medical team sporting such an array of gang tattoos. ‘Might say, ‘Never mind.’ ”
Their ambulance, which in a previous incarnation had seen legitimate life-saving duty in Houston, was drafted for a cross-country ruse.
The March 27 indictment charged that Anthony Avilles, 30, of Miramar, Robert Abreu, 26, of Pembroke Pines, along with John Henry Willhite, 36, of Houston, left Los Angeles on March 12 with a MapQuest printout of an L.A.-to-Fort Lauderdale route.
Sadly, for South Florida’s gangster rep, a failed transmission stranded the EMT gang outside Maumelle, population 13,251. A passing trucker pushed the ambulance to a Shell station in town, but he found the ambulance crew so weird he called the local police.
The Maumelle patrolman noticed the odd uniforms, an expired registration and a nervous demeanor. “They just looked suspicious,” Chief Williams said.
The policeman asked if he could search the ambulance. There was no Scarface bluster.
They gave a weary consent. Williams said, “It was like they had been on a long, hard journey and were just ready for it to be over.”
VALUABLE CARGO
It was over. The policeman found 385 pounds of pot hidden in cardboard boxes and a duffle bag in ambulance compartments.
The meek desperados not only confessed, but according to the indictment, they agreed to make recorded phone calls to their unsuspecting boss, William Veto Lavinia, at his mansion in the uppity Landmark Ranch Estates subdivision in Southwest Ranches.
The 36-year-old Lavinia, according to the indictment, never caught on, though he slyly referred to the ambulance cargo as “the patient.”
He promised a Maumelle mechanic he would be “well compensated” if he kept his suspicions about the “patient” to himself. Lavinia never guessed that the mechanic was actually Chief Williams. “The thing is, I don’t know if a transmission belongs in the roof of a car or the tire,” the chief said.
Williams said Lavinia just kept incriminating himself — 11 calls in all.
The conspiracy-to-distribute indictment notes that Lavinia, as he destroyed the outlaw myth, told his crew just how lucky they were that the ambulance with its precious “patient” had broken down in some Podunk town in the middle of Arkansas.
The cops in Podunk found that was especially hilarious.