13. VULNERABLE MEN - 2007-2009 South Beach Miami police is at least somewhat a gay department. One popular local policeman used to bring a girl cop with him to Tequila Chica’s at 15th and Ocean, as a cover while he picked up guys. I saw another cop sitting in his patrol car in the empty beach parking lot at 83rd street on a weekday morning. He was pulling up web pages on his laptop. I checked the public wif1 with wireshark, and all the http requests were to gay porn sites. I saw a gay-looking cop in line at Ace Cash Express near 7th and Washington, paying off his paycheck advance. I asked him "What is the most common crime that nobody would guess in Miami Beach?" He said it is these awful young girls who take advantage of old male tourists. They go back to their hotel rooms when they are drunk, and steal their watches while they are in the shower. I asked is it like the same group of people every time, like operating as a gang? He said no, they wish. It is just pathetic little bitches, a different one every time. This in a city, Miami, where I met at least 40 hookers under the age of 18. My first weekend after I moved into my awesome new house in South Beach, I walked down the block to Lincohi Road and met some young people. They came over to see my new place. It was a good looking young blonde guy from upstate New York 21 years old named Joe, an 18-year-old girl named Ginger, and another guy. After a while the girl left, and soon the guys were gone too. As soon as the guys were gone, the girl came back and knocked. I think I knew those people for another year or two before I figured out they were all hookers. It is an invisible industry that can walk right into your house, and people from other places don’t recognize it. There was another teenage girl who worked at a snack bar. She was a model whom a local lesbian business owner put up in a studio apartment because she was a customer magnet. She was short. When she was 16 or 17, she was posing as a 12-year-old in clothing catalogs. She was a junior model. Every typical guy who came into the snack bar would offer her money for sex. Sometimes I heard it. A guy would say "How about you get up on that bun for $300?" Most of the time I wouldn’t. Shaq would sometimes come in to the snack bar, and I knew he would take a shot at her. There was a girl Dominica Westling who moved to South Beach around the same time I did. I paid her to do a promo video on Ocean Drive, and she invited me to hang out at the Cardozo. I declined. Girls with stubby legs prefer tall guys, which I am not. But Shaq got Dominica. There was even a rumor that Shaq almost bought her the five-storey which condo which I later moved into. So when Shaq came into the snack bar, I made sure to sit a long way away, to give him space to sit right in front of the junior model, and say whatever he wanted. I knew she needed the money. The junior model never said anything about it until years later. She finally told me Shaq offered her $20,000 and she didn't take it. In her late 20's, she said this in a tone of regret, in a conversation about missed opportunities. When the junior model found out I went to strip clubs, she told me she knew a stripper who got pregnant. She got pregnant off a rich Arab guy, and he bought her a Mercedes. Half these girls in North Miami would get pregnant and become single moms by age 20 anyway. There was one Ruby who had three or four kids off two or three guys, and the welfare checks were enough to rent a big house where they could all have parties and take mushrooms. So the story of a local girl who was unusually successful in life, by getting a Mercedes out of the deal, traveled a long way fast. There were underage girls making money everywhere. The prettiest girl at Gold Rush told me a strip club manager in Atlanta paid $5,000 to have sex with her when she was 16, out of $8,000 total. I turned her down. When my 17- year-old niece came to visit, she could not walk across the lobby of the Fountainbleau without old guys offering her money. One day, one of the regular girls at Club Madonna saw me do my usual routine of coming in to look at all the girls, and then leaving. I ran into her on the sidewalk. She said “Go to Tootsie. You will fmd what you are looking for.” I 11-37