The rightful location for the Barry Kutun Boat Ramp would be in the bowels of the Julia Tuttle Causeway with the sex offenders.
But Miami Beach has kept its tribute to Kutun not far from the kiddie playground at Maurice Gibb Park -- despite his 2007 conviction for cavorting with a 16-year-old.
The ramp not only memorializes Kutun, who had sex with the underaged girl at least eight times, but says something about the enduring reverence enjoyed hereabouts by disgraced politicians.
Boaters who regularly pull their trailers past a large sign honoring a sex offender can hardly be shocked that just across the bay the Miami City Commission intends to name a community center in Little Haiti after Art Teele.
INGLORIOUS PAST
Teele's 2005 suicide preempted a tidal wave of state and federal corruption charges, laden with fraud and kickbacks. No matter. The Miami Herald's Michael Vasquez reported last week that the City Commission seems hellbent on saddling Little Haiti with that tainted name.
Teele-style political corruption usually fails to roil the public revulsion engendered by public officials who have sex with minors. And Kutun's problems were compounded when police found photos on his computer at North Miami City Hall -- where he worked as city attorney -- of his illicit trysts with the child and also with an adult prostitute.
Kutun told police he thought the girl, whom he paid $50 to $200 to visit his condo, was 18. The cops didn't buy it, but apparently it helps, in trying times, to be a former state legislator with nifty political connections.
POWER OF CONNECTIONS
Kutun pleaded guilty to child abuse after his lawyer negotiated a stunning deal -- house arrest and probation.
He dodged adjudication as a sex offender -- a status that would have banished him to the causeway netherworld.
No one in Miami Beach thought to erase the disgraced name from the boat ramp.
But neither did the Broward County School Board bother to rechristen William Dandy Middle School in 1994 after Dandy, a longtime school official, drove into a pedestrian, knocked her 150 feet and fled the scene.
He waited four days -- after police had already connected his car to the dead woman -- before turning himself in. The well-connected Dandy escaped with probation. The school kept his name.
In 1990, Miami changed Leomar Parkway back to SW 132nd Avenue after Leonel Martinez went down on drug smuggling charges. But Miami kept Abel Holtz Boulevard after the banker did his stint in prison.
CALLING A FOUL
Jose Canseco Street still runs through Southwest Miami-Dade County despite the fallen baseball hero's various scandals.
But Robert Castillo of Miami Springs was stunned and disgusted Monday afternoon when told he was backing his fishing boat down the namesake of the inglorious Kutun.
''They ought to name it instead after that crack-smoking county commissioner who ran off to Australia,'' Castillo growled, referring to the still-infamous Joe Gersten who absconded about 15 years ago to avoid a court subpoena.
And why not name it after Gersten? By South Florida standards, his crack-whore exploits hardly preclude glorifying his name on a community center or a street sign or a boat dock.
Besides, if Kutun's ramp gets a do-over as Gersten's ramp, maybe we can lure Joe back home for the rechristening.
