YEAR’S END DISPATCH — 2025

What the City of Key West said, what the year actually produced, and how memory was managed

Happy New Year from Above the Fold. / LARRY DICKMAN

From FBI interview summaries and City Hall end-runs to Tourism Development Council purges, hunger votes, and a collapsing press corps, 2025 did not expose a system in crisis.

It exposed one working exactly as designed — until records, persistence, and prosecutors forced daylight.

Ed. Note: Many say they are sick of hearing the word corruption. They say it gives the Southernmost City a black eye.

I agree — although I’d say it’s closer to two black eyes, a cauliflower ear, and a broken nose.

So in the spirit of positivity and rebirth, Above the Fold is adopting a New Year’s resolution:

We will stop using the word corruption.

We will begin using racketeering.

It is far more precise given what we now know — and what may yet be revealed by a new grand jury in 2026.

Stability, According to City Hall

How continuity was sold as progress

According to the City of Key West, 2025 was a year of stability.

Stability, the city said, is progress.

Progress is continuity.

Continuity is success.

What the year actually delivered was a steady accumulation of records — FBI FD-302 interview summaries, grand jury findings, audit reports, court filings, and public-records disclosures — documenting how power moved when it assumed no one was paying attention.

Process as Performance

When procedure followed outcome

City operations functioned as intended, officials said, because process was followed.

What surfaced instead was that process routinely followed outcome.

Public meetings were held to demonstrate openness.

Public comment was welcomed.

Decisions followed deliberation and legal guidance.

In practice, City Commission meetings became endurance trials stretching six hours or more, with consequential items scheduled late, public attention thinned by design, and outcomes arriving fully formed.

Meetings Without the Public

How timing became a gatekeeping tool

Special meetings — the ones the public most needed to attend — were held during hours few working residents could afford to take off.

Votes on food-insecurity funding failed narrowly, even as families testified about stretching three meals into five and pantries warned of rising demand.

Unity or Coordination

What Sunshine Law compliance looked like in practice

Coordination among officials and partners, the city said, reflected unity — not collusion.

The reporting showed a different architecture.

Sunshine Law principles were praised publicly and navigated around privately, with intermediaries carrying messages direct communication made risky.

That pattern emerged repeatedly in FBI interview summaries tied to the building-department scandal and the broader Bubba Bozo Trio affair — where rumor hardened into sworn statements and corroborated timelines.

The Public Execution

How a city manager was dismantled in plain sight

One episode stripped away any remaining pretense of coincidence.

The public termination of City Manager Al Childress was not a routine personnel decision, nor the result of sudden dissatisfaction. It was a choreographed event — timed, framed, and executed in public — by what records and testimony increasingly describe as the Bubba Bozo Trio.

Childress was isolated first. Authority was undercut quietly. Then, in a meeting designed for maximum exposure and minimal defense, he was dismantled in full view of the community. The vote was swift. The outcome predetermined.

What distinguished the episode was not that a city manager was fired — but how it was done.

Public humiliation replaced evaluation.

Optics replaced procedure.

Coordination replaced deliberation.

Immigration Enforcement as Economic Self-Harm

When fear replaced workforce policy

As immigration enforcement intensified, the impact reached far beyond so-called bad actors.

Nurses.

Hotel housekeepers.

Line cooks.

Meat cutters.

Care workers.

Workers legally present in the United States were swept up in enforcement actions that treated documentation as disposable and due process as optional. Employers reported sudden staffing gaps. Clinics scrambled. Restaurants cut hours. Hotels quietly reduced service.

The majority of the City Commission did not intervene.

They did not object.

They did not ask who would replace the labor holding the city together.

Silence became complicity.

For a city whose economy is overwhelmingly dependent on tourism — and whose service sector is sustained by immigrant labor — the posture was not just punitive.

It was economically illiterate.

The message was clear: enforcement optics mattered more than workforce reality.

What it portends is simple. A tourism economy cannot function without workers willing — and allowed — to show up. When fear becomes policy, the labor pool shrinks, service falters, and the cost is passed quietly to residents and visitors alike.

This, too, was described as stability.

Enterprise Behavior

When coincidence stopped explaining the pattern

In isolation, the episode might have been dismissed as hardball politics. In context — alongside FBI interview summaries, intermediary communications, and parallel conduct across departments — it reads as a test case for whether power could be exercised collectively without consequence.

Three or more individuals.

A shared objective.

A pattern of action.

A result achieved through coordination rather than coincidence.

That is not dysfunction.

That is enterprise-level behavior.

rack·e·teer·ing (noun)

Definition: A pattern of illegal or unethical activity carried out by three or more individuals, acting in coordination, for a shared objective, through repeated acts rather than isolated incidents, often using legitimate institutions or processes to conceal or advance the enterprise.

By that definition, what unfolded was not a lapse in judgment or a breakdown in governance.

It was coordinated conduct.

Repeated behavior.

Shared objectives.

Outcomes achieved through process rather than chance.

What Forced the Record Open

Why this did not surface on its own

The misconduct that surfaced at City Hall did not reveal itself spontaneously.

It did not unravel because of internal safeguards.

It emerged because Monroe County State Attorney Dennis Ward stayed engaged when retreat would have been easier — and because his lead prosecutor, Colleen Dunne, pursued the work with discipline, patience, and no interest in theater.

It also surfaced because the untimely death of the ringmaster removed the pressure valve that had long kept things contained.

Ward’s office followed the evidence where it led, resisted political fatigue, and declined the local tradition of convenient amnesia.

Then sixteen members of the Monroe County community signed their names to a grand jury report that spoke plainly to power.

Discipline by Attrition

The quiet purge at the Tourist Development Council

Vendor and contractor relationships were reviewed, officials said, to ensure alignment with priorities. Necessary transitions were corrective, not punitive.

What happened was railroading.

Audits cleared criminal wrongdoing. Careers ended anyway.

Performance was not the issue.

Proximity to scrutiny was.

Water on Paper, Water in Practice

When compliance met biology in Cow Key Channel

As officials debated water-quality testing protocols, vendor contracts, and compliance metrics, the biological record told a more immediate story.

In Cow Key Channel, manatees were observed congregating and actively drinking freshwater effluent seeping from shallow injection wells associated with a regional resort utility system — behavior consistent with manatees seeking altered salinity gradients created by artificial freshwater sources.

Compliance existed on paper. Consequences existed in the water.

Values, Funded and Defunded

What received money — and what did not

Funding was declined for the city’s UNESCO Creative City of Literature bid, while money remained available for legal workarounds, consultants, and procedural gymnastics.

It never even came to a vote.

Hunger, Heard and Denied

When testimony failed to move votes

Families described skipping meals.

Nonprofits warned demand was rising.

Votes were taken. Outcomes were reached.

When the conversation drifted to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, it revealed not humor — but distance.

Changing the Language

Why the word mattered more than the defense

The word corruption proved too small.

What emerged instead were patterns. Coordination. Selective enforcement. Systems producing outcomes regardless of individual innocence.

That is not corruption.

That is racketeering.

The Collapse of the Local Press

How access journalism replaced scrutiny

Subscription rates were quietly slashed.

Coverage softened.

Silence passed for restraint.

The collapse was not loud. It was normalized.

Memory Management

Who decided what residents would remember

Any perception of systemic failure, officials said, reflected misunderstanding or faulty memory.

Memory was not faulty.

It was managed.

Looking Ahead

Why 2026 will not erase the record

The calendar will flip.

The city assures residents nothing fundamental changed.

The record shows otherwise.

This is about to be 2026 — not 1984.

The systems want you tired.

They want you compliant.

They want you convinced that remembering is pointless.

It isn’t.

History only survives when someone insists on writing it down.

In a world full of Big Brothers, be a Winston.

And if you are not pissed off by now, you are not paying attention.

Happy New Year.

— Ted