First if you google him you’ll find a name change years ago. Then you’ll find a distinguished career. What is disturbing is you’ll find he made big money at MDPD working crazy OT. Why did he chop us down and create an unsafe work environment? We’ll get back to that soon.
Noriega got into a pissing contest with Krapps. She and her cohorts talked Doug into taking an appointment to a vacant seat on the commission with the understanding that he was to fire Rollonson. He took the seat and went back on his word. He didn’t realize that they had his criminal background ready to be presented to the public and first used it as a sort of extortion. He announced his failure to disclose in public after lying on his commissioner application. He was convicted for cocaine trafficking and served time. After that he had some other issues. Noriega took it upon himself to use our people to do an investigation that the state should have handled and named krapps as a person of interest. She then got Powell in as the city attorney and he started to work on covering the city from liability regarding a possible FEMA fraud. He did an evidence preservation of the city and police servers using a high level IT company. He was accused of wrongdoing as we ha so called sensitive information on the police side. (Imagine Mickey Mouse PD with top secret information?), which triggered the immediate resignation of the manager, HR Director and a secretary. Noriega authored memos to file claiming Powell was under investigation because the former attorney was his friend. Some who knew Martell, who was so not qualified to be manager was hired. Looks like Krapps and strip Club Mitch found her. She was brought in and fired Noriega who was an at will employee. She had a great chief candidate who pulled out last minute and good thing he did. He would have been gone already due to political volatility. She scrambled and reached out to Bill Hernandez who retired from MDPD and became #2 at NMBPD (he may have pulled the FRS scam as well). He recommended Velken as Chief and he was hired in 2 days. Velken assumed duties and never met with the shifts, didn’t get to know anyone, and had to figure a way to get around FRS Law. It is done occasionally in a legal way, but it needs to transparent. This case might be legal, but not transparent. We’re not sure who actually advised them how to get Velken around the FRS law, but it was only a matter of a couple months that he needed to either work without pay, or sit out. He let two part time detectives go during this time and neither of them are missed. He made no arrests or took any serious personnel action. In fact all he did was chop stuff down. When he became interim manager, he hired Jorge Gonzales CM of Bal Harbor as a paid consultant (6k per month) who was formally the city manager of Miami Beach. JG advised Velken against bringing Noriega back and went on to bash Noriega to no end. He apparently doesn’t like Carlos. Carlos is suing on a whistleblower claim and the league of cities defends NBV as its insurance carrier. They say carlos has no case. Carlos is using an FOP attorney who has advised home to take a settlement because the case is weak. Only Strout wants Carlos back. Latham plays to the crowd and the FOP is all over Marvin and he’s scared. So let’s follow money. Velken chopped the budget up to pay Gonzalez. Velken who is connected to Chief Hernandez may have used a scheme Hernandez used to get by FRS, and the mayor is gonna use any money left in the pot to pay a consultant a half a million dollars for five weeks of evaluation? Let’s find out what Latham’s connection to this firm is and get to the bottom of all this skullduggery. Velken will probably resign and maybe get decertified. The mayor may be innocent but who knows and the employees won’t get anything in bargaining, and will probably lose benefits because everybody is stealing all the money.