We are still recovering from the drama of the much anticipated firing of the grossly incompetent and astoundingly corrupt City Manager Arthur “Duke” Sorey at last Tuesday night’s Commission meeting.

As satisfying as it is that he’s finally been kicked to the curb, we are still disappointed that he’s going to strut out of City Hall with nearly $93,000 plus 20 weeks of taxpayer-funded health insurance, and his approximate $100,000 taxpayer-contribution to his 401A retirement account, on top of the undeserved $100,000 he’s earned for the past five months, while he was sucking the lifeblood out of your City coffers.

North Miami Beach residents are livid with good reason that this crook is leaving with even one penny more of their hard-earned tax dollars, especially when the Mayor and Commission were armed with an abundance of legitimate reasons to fire that piece of human garbage for cause.

The question on everyone’s mind is, “What the hell was Commissioner Jay Chernoff thinking?”

We get that he is new to the table, but clearly, Jay is unaware of how Duke has spent the last two years destroying every last vestige of ethical, transparent, and fiscally responsible governance in the City of North Miami Beach.

The trouble started at least two months before Duke was hired, when we first heard rumblings that he was coming to North Miami Beach.

Duke being Duke, he was already packing up his bag of dirty tricks from his stint as perpetual second in command at the North Miami City Manager’s Office.

In fact, on February 28, 2021 in Team Apocalypse ready to burn it all down, we reported:

Make no mistake, North Miami reject Arthur “Duke” Sorey is going to be your new City Manager, whether you like it or not.

Everyone in North Miami – residents and employees alike – already know it’s a done deal.  The only thing left to do is get his John Hancock on the dotted line of the contract that’s already been drafted.

Be prepared to match or beat his North Miami base salary of $209,934.40, plus at least another $50K in benefits, which will include an expense account, car and cell phone allowances, travel expenses, and a generous pension contribution, which will most likely be in the neighborhood of the 48.7% that the North Miami Mayor receives.

After we gave a brief synopsis of the trail of Duke’s destruction in North Miami, we added:

It’s absolutely no secret that North Miami Beach Commissioners Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, Paule Villard, and Daniela Jean have already conspired to hire Duke Sorey.  If they were counting on him to keep his mouth shut and lay low until the next NMB commission meeting, they were surely misguided.  Duke has apparently been shouting it from the rooftops of North Miami because the party has already started.  NoMi residents and employees have been brimming with excitement at the mere thought that Duke Sorey’s Thugocracy Reign of Terror is almost over.

As for the North Miami Beach Team Apocalypse, it doesn’t matter how how incompetent Duke is, how many actually qualified candidates apply for the job, or even how many of their own residents speak out against this insanity. They chose Duke Sorey, and they are not about to let anything get in the way of their evil plan.

By now you must be wondering why they so desperately want Duke Sorey.

Well, for one thing, as the Chief Executive Officer of North Miami Beach, he will give them carte blanche.

This blank check will entitle Team Apocalypse to spend any amount of your tax dollars on anything they want, no matter how reckless.

Because that’s how it’s done in North Miami.

Duke Sorey “retired” from North Miami after nearly bankrupting that City as its Deputy Manager, and two brief stints as Interim, from 2016 to 2021.

As we reported in North Miami’s CAFR: A True Story in Snapshots, Duke started out with a FY2015 year with a positive unassigned fund balance (reserves) of $9.1 million, and ended FY2019 with a negative unassigned fund balance of $1.4 million.

He didn’t fare much better in his final year as Interim City Manager when North Miami’s FY2020 ended with a negative unassigned fund balance of $12.2 million.

Yes, folks.  You read that right.

After leaving North Miami with a gaping budget deficit, Duke Sorey set his sights on doing the exact same thing to the City of North Miami Beach.

And just as we predicted, it all came to pass.

Thus, it was no surprise when, the very same day he signed his April 20, 2021 Employment Agreement, Duke Sorey kicked off Paule Villard’s re-election campaign with a $100,000 donation of your tax dollars in the form of $100 Publix gift cards to give away to the first 1,000 of her future voters.

A couple weeks later, Duke and Paule appeared on Island TV on May 14, 2021 to reassure all the residents of North Miami Beach that the “new leadership” is going to work hard to promote “diversity” … and that he will hire more Haitians.

What he didn’t say, but what later proved to be the case, Duke fully intended to fire as many whites, Hispanics, and non-Haitian islanders as possible to make room for Paule’s friends and family, all of whom just happen to be Haitian.

His first order of business was to fire, or force into resigning, the most highly qualified employees, such as those city employees with high ethical standards and who would most likely cause him problems by blowing the whistle on his corrupt actions, and replace them with his personal Friends & Family members, nearly all of them poached from North Miami, and the vast majority of them incompetent, especially those who can’t spell simple words like “separation.”

Seriously!

Then again, Criminal Commissioner Daniela Jean, who was a North Miami employee for a few years, can’t even pronounce ordinary words like “epitome,” and that basically represents the quality of the North Miami Beach city workforce today.

Hey, Daniela.  Here’s a tutorial for future reference:  Mispronounced Word 12 #epitome

Folks, we couldn’t make this up if we tried.

Within three months Duke Sorey increased the City’s payroll by $633,448.14.

By the end of FY2021 on September 30, 2021, he increased the City’s payroll by $1,253,528.12.

From October 1, 2021 through August 9, 2022 (the date of our most updated records), Duke had added another $1,524,634.20 to the payroll.

Cumulatively through that date Duke Sorey, had increased the payroll by a grand total of $2,778,162.32.

And your website still sucks by the way.

Duke then proceeded to reward his four bosses for hiring him by granting their every wish, with no regard to ethical or fiscal responsibility.

Just as we warned you.

Paule Villard’s first Publix gift card giveaway in June of 2021, for example, was totally illegal, but it had the blessing of the now-former City “Attorney” Hans Ottinot, who was hired for the sole purpose of protecting Paule and her three co-conspirators on the dais, Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, and Daniela Jean.

To that end, Hans earned his paycheck, even if it was at the expense of every single resident of North Miami Beach.

But, we digress.

Not even two months after Duke was hired, on June 15, 2021 the four Criminal Commissioners gave him a raise, which increased his benefits by $27,500 a year.

At the Commission meeting that same night, they also gave themselves another raise.  That night they passed a Resolution to gouge taxpayers for their “medical, dental, vision, and life insurance benefits,” even though they already received a generous expense allowance which was expressly designated to cover this cost.

Nevertheless, they pushed through Resolution R2021-60 to force North Miami Beach taxpayers to “provide direct payment for full premium of Mayor and Commission medical, dental, vision and life insurance benefits.”

And to make sure that this was in addition to their already astronomical “Executive Expense Allowance,” their Resolution specifically states that, “the payment of insurance benefits directly by the City shall not reduce any expense allowance previously granted to the elected officials.”

At the August 17, 2021 City Commission Meeting, McKenzie brashly pushed legislation to lease “surplus property” worth $257,180 to (surprise, surprise) the Haitian American Nurses Association (HANA) for five years at a paltry $10.00 a year.

Despite the fact that McKenzie never divulged his conflict of interest — his wife, Straussiana Fleurimond, is a registered nurse and a long time member of HANA, McMcKenzie knew it wouldn’t have mattered since he had the votes to get it done.

Then there are the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of tax dollars Duke spent on self-promotional vanity projects, a/k/a “special events,” for the only bosses that mattered to him — Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, Daniela Jean, and especially, Paule Villard.

In May of 2021, just his first month on the job, Duke blew an outrageous $57,808.38 on parties for his four new bosses, according to our updated spreadsheet.

By June of 2021, Duke stepped up his plan to bankrupt the City of North Miami Beach by spending an obscene $59,311.53 on top of the $100,000 gift card fiasco.

It didn’t stop there.

We predicted that Duke would destroy the award-winning North Miami Beach Police Department, and he did just that.  He began by forcing the hand of then-Chief of Police Richard Rand, who eventually resigned under threat of termination.  This led to a domino effect of many excellent officers choosing to jump ship rather than take orders from an uncouth, potty-mouthed thug.  It didn’t help matters when Duke illegally allowed the terminally stupid Paule Villard, who knows absolutely nothing about actual police work, to interfere in the hiring and firing of employees in the Police Department.  Needless to say, morale at the department is at an all-time low.

Then there’s the time that Duke purchased three lots in Washington Park for $800,000, or 65% over its market value, and then waived $1,812,450 in unpaid code violations liens on top of that.

Then there is all the Purchasing Card (P-Card) abuse that Duke has approved, including hundreds of thousands of dollars on illegal travel and food purchases.

Then there are all the taxpayer-funded vacations Duke approved for his four Criminal Commissioners, none of which had any public purpose or benefit for the residents of North Miami Beach.

And don’t get us started on the hundreds of thousands of dollars Duke spent on “special events,” also with absolutely no public purpose or benefit.

For example, in March of 2022 Paule threw a party for her personal friends and family, under the guise of an “Unsung Heroes/Quintessential Women” event.  This homage to herself cost at least $28,872.36.

Paule and her co-conspirator, Daniela Jean, held a non-stop party for Haitian Heritage Month last May which cost taxpayers at least $56,268.55, not including the public records we can’t obtain unless we pay a ransom of $135.36 for the rest of the invoices.

Michael Joseph’s Juneteenth celebrations cost $35,671.98 in 2021.  In 2022, the base price alone for the same event was $50,000.00, not including food, entertainment, or police and employee overtime, the invoices for which are being held hostage by Duke unless we pay his extortion fee of $169.20.

Then there’s the time that Duke and McKenzie secretly conspired to sell off the Arthur J. Snyder Tennis Center to build “affordable housing,” and then illegally spent $67,942.52 on an extravagant party for prospective purchasers — only to find out after the fact that no municipal parks are ever allowed to be sold or developed.

McKenzie’s annual birthday party, a/k/a Soup & Champagne, held on New Year’s Day at the Ancient Spanish Monastery, cost $13,500.00 in 2022, and increased to $44,700.00 this year.

And that’s not including the overtime for the Sergeant at Arms chauffeur that McKenzie used for the 4-minute drive from his rental apartment to the event.

Worse, Officer Jerry Hamilton sat in his vehicle waiting for McKenzie for NINE HOURS earning $63.91 per hour, or a total of $575.19, until he had to chauffeur the birthday boy back home less than a mile away.

By now you have to be wondering how someone so utterly unfit for any position in any organization, with the exception of strip club bouncer, became the City Manager for North Miami Beach, so we’ll let Duke tell you in his very own words.

Duke Sorey: “It’s still not all what you know but who you know and who you been good to.”

WATCH!

Words to live by, right Duke?

In Part 2, we’ll tell you all about “who Duke know and who he been good to” since four Criminal Commissioners handed him the City’s checkbook.

Stay tuned.

Stephanie