Doug Clifton: Miami-Dade has lots of crooked mayors, but Broward had Lomelo

There’s no official score keeper for these kinds of things so I’ll take a wild guess this is correct: Miami-Dade has produced more indicted mayors than any county in Florida. Surely no county turns them out two or three at a time.

Last month the Feds snared the mayors of Homestead, Sweetwater and Miami Lakes on bribery and extortion charges within a couple of weeks. Impressive. And all too familiar a litany of allegations.

So the numbers for Miami-Dade continue to grow but the numerical count ignores quality and for that we must recall the antics of the late, and some still say, great, John Lomelo, mayor of Broward County’s Sunrise.

Lomelo came to the office with a prison record, which in itself is quite a feat. During his 16-year tenure he transformed the quaintly named town of Sunrise Golf Village into the sprawling densely populated city it is today. Along the way he generated grand jury investigations and prosecutor investigations by the handful, 14 of the latter. He beat nearly all of them but in the end got nabbed on a bribery and extortion charge that was too tight to escape.

He went to Eglin for two years, where he apparently failed the prison humility classes. Soon after his release he ran for mayor, but this time even his loyal supporters couldn’t back him.

Perhaps it was those supporters who emboldened him, sending him back to office time after time, grand jury inquiries be damned. Lomelo was bigger than life. By dint of personality and pugnaciousness, he took the Tinker Toy Sunrise Golf Village into the modern era. He annexed land like the Nazis took Eastern Europe, making new friends and enemies with every added acre.

No one outscored him on the hutzpah index. He belted back whiskey as he presided over city council meetings, crooned songs at every public opportunity, introduced Frank Sinatra at the singer’s appearances at Lomelo’s Sunrise Musical Theater, slapped backs, shook hands, held court –and extorted.

When he got charged with abuse of authority for overruling a Sunrise cop by un-arresting the son of a crony, he challenged the charge in court, won, then charged the city for his legal bills.

Lomelo’s charmed and storied life ended in 2000 in his retirement home in mid-state.

They shipped his body back to Sunrise where it lay in state. Frank Sinatra’s ”My Way” – and Lomelo’s – played in the background.