Writer Pulls No Punches Fighting for State He Loves

Skip Wiley once fed an elderly tourist to a crocodile and murdered the Miami Chamber of Commerce president by stuffing a toy alligator down his throat--all in the name of preserving Florida’s beauty.

Wiley is a newspaper columnist in Miami. He’s a fictional character in the novel “Tourist Season,” the creation of Carl Hiaasen, the Miami Herald columnist (and novelist) who--like Wiley--fumes that Florida is becoming overrun with tacky tourism and development.

So, did Hiaasen model Wiley after himself?

“It’s more likely that I modeled myself after Skip,” Hiaasen says.

Not that he’s willing to murder or maim to get his point across. He doesn’t need to. His books and columns do it for him.

“He had my character killed by having him choke on a rubber alligator,” says Bill Cullom, the real Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce president. “He got my attention. Since that time, I’ve been reading him a little more closely.”

Gov. Jeb Bush also has felt Hiaasen’s heat. “The front end of one of those classic Hiaasen attacks--it’s not a happy time,” he says. He turns to an aide: “When was the last Carl Hiaasen column when I was drilled a new belly button?

“You just remember the intensity of it. The air temperature changes after you read one of them. It has a global warming impact,” Bush says.

Former Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez sued unsuccessfully after Hiaasen called him “Mayor Loco,” “loony,” “deranged,” “crazy” and “paranoid.”

“I will say one thing and only one thing about Carl Hiaasen: He’s a good novelist and he should stick to writing novels,” Suarez said. “I have read them all.”

He then corrected himself.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t read the last one because it came out after he said I was crazy.”

Hiaasen is funny, brutally honest and plays no favorites. His mission is to save the state he loves from bad politicians and greedy developers--both plentiful in Florida.

“He’s a Florida resource,” says Tim Dorsey, a former Tampa Tribune editor whose first novel, “Florida Roadkill,” has been compared to Hiaasen’s work. “He’s an incredible fundamental journalist as far as research and investigative skills--he brings that to books more than other people who don’t have that experience.”

Hiaasen was raised in Plantation, then a small town on the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale. To the west was nothing but forests and the Everglades. Now the woods where he used to explore, fish and camp are gone, replaced by miles of strip malls, condos and subdivisions.

“That’s a nightmare, the development,” he says. “All of that is really part of the original Everglades basin. There really shouldn’t be a living human soul anywhere out there and it’s pure concrete. It’s so . . . ugly.”

Ugly, too, are the bizarre stories the state pumps out almost daily. Ugly, but fascinating--and grist for Hiaasen’s columns and novels.

“I don’t think it’s possible to say strongly enough how insane Miami politics are and how truly pathologically wacko some of the characters are,” Hiaasen says.

Miami is where politicians manage to get reelected despite criminal indictments. It’s also where a jury foreman took a $500,000 bribe to fix a drug kingpin’s trial, a convicted hit man had phone sex with secretaries in the state attorney’s office and a mayor was thrown out of office because a dead man helped elect him.

Hiaasen’s characters are caught up in similar madness: a drug dealer-turned-developer who is obsessed with Barbie dolls and uses plastic surgery to turn his two Russian concubines into real-life Barbies; a former governor who disappears into the Everglades and lives off roadkill while punishing those who disrespect the environment.

In Hiassen’s latest book, “Sick Puppy,” the hero, Twilly Spree, dumps the entire contents of a garbage truck into a litterbug’s BMW convertible. After seeing two Jet Skiers throwing full beer cans at pelicans, Spree tracks them down, knocks them unconscious with their own beer and torches their Jet Skis.

“Florida is really a character in the novels, it’s not just a setting,” he says. “And in my life it’s not just a place I live. It’s something I care about--it’s a very real thing.

“So when I’m driving down the highway and I see a bunch of pigs with rental tags throwing [expletive] out the window, yeah, I definitely want to follow them and take a crow bar to the car. I don’t do it, but I have friends that have been known to.”

Hiaasen is 47. He started his Herald column in 1985, nine years after coming to the paper as a reporter. In 1992, he fled to the Florida Keys and a 3,000-square-foot home in Islamorada. His nearly two-acre property sits on Florida Bay with a view stretching out toward islands on the southern tip of Everglades National Park.

He calls it his church.

His critics say he is a cynic. But sitting near the mangroves lining his property, he speaks gently even as he talks about the people, places and events that upset him most. He is polite, has a bright smile and eyes, and a quick wit.

He hears a splash and pauses. “A barracuda,” he says.

A few days earlier, nine manatee came up to the dock. He fed them lettuce and gave them fresh water from a hose. “The boating traffic is so heavy here on the weekends that they take their little manatee lives in their hands. I was worried to have that many together; I was afraid they were going to get clobbered. Several of them had scars, prop scars.”

As if to emphasize the danger, a boat pulls up nearby with water-skiers. “Look at those ninnies,” he says, staring as the ski line drops. “Here we go--another day in paradise.”

“Every day you pick up the paper and turn on the TV and you see some story that is so infuriating that to turn and walk away from it would just seem wrong and immoral. To walk away from the fight, to let somebody off the hook that easily.”

He really couldn’t leave Florida, or stop writing about its evils.

“There’s no earthly reason for me to continue doing the column, except that it’s important ... for me to be able to live with myself,” he says. “It’s very necessary to my sanity.”