Retired Miami-Dade cop, whose colorful career included roles on ‘Miami Vice,’ dies at 84
There wasn’t much Robert Hoelscher didn’t do during his half-century with the Miami-Dade Police Department. He began as a patrol officer and worked homicide, SWAT, criminal intelligence and robbery. He spent time in the Bahamas fighting corruption and there are even rumors that he was in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He also was a celebrity of sorts. Hoelscher played a role — sometimes literally — in “Miami Vice,” the hit 1980s TV show that put Miami’s dazzling scenery in the national spotlight and made the city’s detectives, at least two of them, seem cool and cutting-edge fashionable.
When he wasn’t on the clock, the firearms expert worked as consultant on TV and movie sets. So Hoelscher not only taught Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs the right way to hold a gun, he made cameos in several episodes as a SWAT commander or patrol officer.
Last Friday, with his wife, a son and three grandchildren bedside at the family home in the tiny Central Florida town of Pierson, Hoelschler lost a battle to cancer. He was 84.
“I wanted him home,” said Elsbeth Hoelscher, his wife of 60 years. “This happened very fast. He’s at peace now.”
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Hoelscher’s family moved to Miami from New York around the time of World War II, after his father was transferred while working for National Cash Register. He graduated from private St. Theresa Catholic School in Coral Gables, before spending a few years at a local university.
Though Elsbeth met her husband in Miami, religious sensitivities forced the couple to elope to Georgia to get married.
“Bob was Catholic and I was Baptist and that didn’t mix well back then,” said Elsbeth, adding they were welcomed by both families with open arms when they returned.
Hoelscher began working for Miami-Dade police in 1959. By the 1970s, he was working major crimes. In the next decade he’d become a fixture on the set of “Miami Vice,” the 1980s television series starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as Crockett and Tubbs that had an influential six-year run.
Hoelscher appeared in seven episodes, usually playing himself. He was a Special Response Team and SWAT commander in a trio of 1986 episodes called “El Viejo,” “Sons and Lovers” and “Definitely Miami.” And in 1988 he was street patrol officer in an episode titled “Redemption in Blood.”
Hoelscher also had a bit role in “Let It Ride,” a hokey-fun movie filmed in and around Hialeah Race Track about degenerate gamblers that starred Richard Dreyfuss and David Johansen. And later, he played a minor role in the Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster “True Lies.”
As he neared retirement, Elsbeth Hoelscher said the couple bought property in Pierson, a town with “one red light, one bank and one Dollar Store” and built a home. Elsbeth said her husband cleared the land while she prayed he didn’t hurt himself.
In 2009, after 13 years as a reserve officer, Hoelscher finally hung up his badge. He also spent some of his remaining years working alongside attorney and cold case investigator Paul Novack. Novack said Hoelscher was instrumental in the recently-solved case of Danny Goldman, a 17-year-old who disappeared after allegedly being kidnapped by mob associates.
“His brain functioned better than any computer. I’d pick a name and Bob remembered the day he arrested the guy, the clothes he was wearing,” said Novack. “He was the epitome of courage and determination.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2022 at 5:06 PM.
