Miami Mayor Accused of Attack on Wife

Mayor Joe Carollo was jailed on a battery charge Wednesday after allegedly hitting his wife with a terra-cotta teapot. Police said that Maria Ledon Carollo was bruised and had a lump the size of a golf ball on her head.

The 45-year-old city official was being held overnight after a judge turned down his lawyer’s request for a special bond hearing. Carollo earlier had been questioned at police headquarters for four hours.

If convicted, the mayor could be sentenced to a year in jail. But that is considered unlikely.

Authorities said that Carollo was charged with simple battery--a misdemeanor--rather than felony battery after the teapot was determined to be less than a deadly weapon.

Ben Kuehne, an attorney for Carollo, lashed out at the judge’s refusal to hold a bond hearing. “Being in jail is certainly not a safe place for Mayor Carollo, who is a very public figure,” Kuehne said. He called the mayor’s jailing “unconscionable.”

But police said that Carollo was secure, held in isolation in a cell on the high-rise jail’s ninth floor.

Law enforcement officials said that police went to the mayor’s Coconut Grove home shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday after a 911 call from one of the couple’s two young daughters. Maria Carollo, 42, was standing outside in her bathrobe.

“I know you are his friend, but you have to act as a cop,” Miami Officer Jairo Lozano quoted Maria Carollo as saying. “Look what he did to me.”

Lozano said that after escorting Maria Carollo inside the house the mayor said to her: “This is what you wanted from the beginning.” Lozano said he noticed a scratch on the mayor’s neck, behind his left ear.

“Look what you did to me,” Maria Carollo said to her husband, according to Lozano’s report.

Asked if she wanted ice for her head, Maria Carollo told Lozano, “No, this is the way I want it for the picture.”

Later, however, Maria Carollo released a statement in which she urged police not to press charges. “Under no circumstances did my husband intend to harm or injure me. I am completely opposed to any further involvement of the legal system in this very personal situation. We want this matter to be resolved within our family.”

Miami police spokesman Lt. Bill Schwartz said there was “probable cause” to make the arrest.

The incident comes three months after Maria Carollo filed for divorce from her husband of 15 years--and weeks after he announced that he would not run for reelection in November.

Carollo, who came to the U.S. from Cuba at the age of 6, has been both a popular and unpredictable figure in Miami politics since 1979, when he first was elected to the city commission. Carollo, a onetime police officer, often has clashed with other city officials and has gained a reputation for being fiery and Machiavellian.

In 1985, after a business deal with Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa fell apart, the late founder of the Cuban American National Foundation was so enraged that he challenged Carollo to a duel--with either guns or swords.

Carollo refused.

After his first stint on the city council, which ended in 1987, Carollo ran a security business and opened an Asian restaurant called Shogun Joe’s, which failed. Elected again to the council in 1995, Carollo became mayor months later when he won a special election to replace incumbent Steve Clark, who had died in office.

He ran again in 1997 but was defeated by former Mayor Xavier Suarez. In March 1998, however, Carollo returned to the mayor’s office when a judge threw out 5,000 fraudulent absentee ballots and voided Suarez’s election.

During the Elian Gonzalez saga last year, the mayor was a frequent visitor to the Little Havana home of the boy’s Miami relatives. He was an outspoken critic of the federal government’s handling of the case.

Carollo was in the news last week when he proposed a scheme to make room for a downtown baseball stadium for the Florida Marlins by moving a stretch of famed Biscayne Boulevard one block to the west and filling in a section of Biscayne Bay. The plan was roundly ridiculed.

Carollo is expected to be released today after a bond hearing.

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.