Hector Barletta lives within the fences of his own affluence. He is wealthy, a Honduran business executive who stays only in the best hotels in the best neighborhoods. In August, he traveled to Miami on vacation.
Criminals saw him, identified him for what he was. They poked a hole in a tire on his rental car, robbed him as he was fixing the flat. They left with $15,000, money he carried to Miami to deposit. And they took his peace of mind."I love Miami. I love Miami, believe me," said Barletta, in a telephone interview from Honduras. "I've been traveling there 23 years. But I won't bring my family back for vacation.
"The police and Chamber of Commerce have to do something ... to warn people," he now says. "It's become an unsafe city."
Miami, a vacation paradise and the most violent city in America, is bowing to its undeniable history.
This month, the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce will release a brochure that warns tourists of Miami's dangers and tells them how to protect themselves. It follows Miami's latest public relations disaster: the shooting of two British tourists who got lost in a bad neighborhood and refused to be peacefully mugged.
It is part of a larger plan by image-makers to save tourists and the tourist industry. And it is a giant step toward reality.
For years, they blamed the ugly image on media hysteria. They blamed the TV show "Miami Vice" for glamorizing crime.
Now image-makers have conceded - in writing - that there is violent crime on the streets of Miami. The 1990 statistics for violent crime in Miami - 15,607 murdered, mugged, or pistol-whipped and tied to a tree and set on fire - make a convincing argument for caution.
It is contrary to good public relations to welcome a visitor with a warning, but too many tourists have left blaming Miami for sugarcoating its image.
"We have to tell people," said Mike Nuzzo, a lawyer who grew up in Miami. "We have to warn them. The tourists don't know where not to go and what not to do. We give them car keys, a map, a smile and then they are on their own."
Kent Jurney, a former police officer and now professor of criminology at Miami-Dade Community College, heads the chamber's crime prevention committee. Jurney said the packet tells people how to recognize and avoid robbers, how they can make themselves less of a target. It will be handed out at Miami International Airport and rental car companies.
Jurney thinks that for every tourist who is robbed, Miami loses 100 to 200 tourists who stay away. For crimes like the shooting of British couple John and Rose Hayward, now recovering from their wounds, the ripple effect might be even greater.
But even as police and tourism leaders plan to unveil the brochure, they downplay the crime rate, the highest in the nation last year for crimes of violence. The statistics are misleading, Jurney says. The Miami crime rate went up 11 percent in 1990, while population increased some 13 percent, he said.
Last year it was Atlanta the FBI called the most violent city. "There are parts of Peachtree Street I wouldn't walk down without a machine gun," Jurney said, tongue in cheek. "Sarasota had a bigger crime increase (last year) than Miami."
But crime in Miami, the city where a man once was arrested walking down the street carrying a human head, seems more spectacular, more threatening.
Miami has 9 million tourists a year, a $6 billion industry. Almost all go home without a scratch.
Then there are people like the Haywards, on holiday from Oxfordshire. They were driving up Interstate 95, bound for Kissimmee, when a car pulled beside their rental car to tell them it was on fire - an old trick robbers use. The Haywards pulled off the freeway. The two men in the other car followed. It was lambs going to slaughter.
John Hayward, a middle-age firefighter who had won the Queen's Medal for bravery, balked at giving away his money and his wife Rose's purse. The robbers shot them.
The tourist industry put up a $10,000 reward and two suspects have been arrested. But the public relations damage was vast, nationally and internationally. It isn't anything that hasn't happened before, with harsher consequences. The Haywards lived.
A 56-year-old woman from Quebec was shot and killed during a robbery in March; a 30-year-old tourist from Costa Rica was murdered when she asked for directions in January 1990; a retired Canadian millionaire in town for a boat show was murdered the year before for a Rolex and a wad of cash.
During the same 24-hour period that the Haywards were shot, Miami criminals also victimized tourists from Mexico, Venezuela and Japan, as well as the Soviet Union's 1980 Olympic rowing team.
Tourism leaders have responded with more than the brochure, which will have an initial printing of 500,000 copies.
The Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau has established a fund to pay for victims and witnesses to return to Miami to testify.
It also has asked rental car companies to remove identifying stickers and marks, and is pressing for legislation that will remove the "Y" license plate designation - an identifying mark that amounts to painting a bull's-eye on a tourist's back. The rental agencies already are complying.
But even though most tourists don't stroll around any more in Bermuda shorts, black socks and nose caps, the experienced criminals will find them.
They waltz through the Bayside Mall on Biscayne Boulevard taking pictures of park benches. It is fairly obvious they are not local. Miami Detective Myriam Royle calls it The Profile.
They drive rental cars, often hesitantly, and pull over to the side of the road a lot. They carry money and valuables. If they are victimized, they probably won't come back to testify.
The crimes seem so simple. A driver will intentionally bump a car from behind on the interstate or in traffic. When a tourist pulls off the road, robbers corner them. At intersections, a robber will run in front of a car, force it to stop, then reach inside to snatch a purse. If the tourist won't roll down the window, the robber might smash it.
Police and tourist officials say a lot of the misery could have been avoided if tourists didn't leave their common sense at home with the dog.
The brochure will warn of the tricks criminals use to gain confidence, to get people to roll down their windows. It will urge them to get more specific directions from rental agencies so that they won't circle aimlessly in rough neighborhoods.
It will warn tourists about being boxed in at stoplights, where smash-and-grab robbers strike. Police already are telling people to drive through stoplights, if the road is safe, if they feel threatened.
Some tourists already are taking evasive action, not always correctly. In August, an elderly tourist approached by a panhandler at an exit ramp slammed her car in reverse and backed all the way up the ramp, tires smoking, barely missing several cars.
"Use common sense. Don't go into dark areas. Miami is like any big city. We're not crime-free," she said. But Royle said blaming tourists for their own victimization isn't always fair. There are things inherent to Miami that make the city dangerous.
Many of the crimes against Miami tourists happen within a few miles of the airport, in their first hour in Miami. That is because many of Miami's rental-car agencies are on a confusing maze of back streets close to the airport and near the notorious Miami River.
One wrong turn, and tourists are creeping lost down dark streets lined with warehouses and hangars. They often wind up on the river itself. Miami residents avoid the area at night because of knifings, shootings and the drug traffic that are part of everyday existence.
Criminals know tourists get lost here, and wait. Royle said tourists don't know which neighborhoods to avoid, don't know it might not be safe for them to exit expressways in high-crime areas, especially after dark.
Then there is the matter of guns.
Tourists from cities where guns are less common than driver's licenses might not always respond appropriately when threatened, might think that if robbers can't actually grab them, they can get away. John Hayward never expected his attackers to shoot him.
"It's a big city, with big-city tensions," Royle said. "There is no need to feel threatened by Dade County. There are a lot of nice people... . But be very cautious."
The city has little of the physical menace of other cities, not the brooding character of New York or raw edge of Chicago. It is hard to imagine people being shot outside pastel houses.
And that is the great danger of Miami, that visitors can't always tell a mean area from a good place not to get shot.
The tourism industry's brochure will not warn people to stay away from specific neighborhoods. But police, tourism officials and longtime residents say there are specific areas that have proved either dangerous or surprisingly safe, places tourists should know about. Here are a few:
THE SOUTH GROVE. Douglas Road and Grand Avenue, in Coconut Grove, is known for bloodshed. Just a few minutes from the fancy hotels, boutiques and open-air cafes in the heart of the Grove, this is the place where a Costa Rican tourist was shot to death after she asked for directions, the place where a man's tongue was cut out in 1982.
LITTLE HAITI. It can be a deadly place if you are politically connected to one faction or another on the island nation - two radio announcers have been killed in the past year - but it is one of Miami's safest inner-city neighborhoods after dark. There is a sense of community. People gather for tent revivals in Creole.
NORTHWEST 15TH AND 66TH. This is not the place for your car to break down at 3 a.m. In the last year, authorities have recorded five murders, 128 assaults, four rapes and 62 robberies in the vicinity of NW 15th Avenue and 66th Street. It also happens to be a frequent place tourists exit the interstate for gas, or to ask for directions if they miss the exit to Miami Beach.
LITTLE HAVANA. Except for Spanish-language lettering on the signs, main drag Calle Ocho during the day has all the vibrancy and color of a North Florida strip development. At night it livens up, and police warn of purse snatchers. That may be the worst a tourist ever sees while waiting for a table.
BISCAYNE BOULEVARD On. July 4, shoppers at the Omni Mall stared as two men beat each other with rocks and bottles at 15th Street and Biscayne Boulevard. To the south, at Bayside Mall, tourists see little violent crime. North of the corner of 15th it gets mean, the place where the owner of a convertible had his skull split by a hatchet. Thieves love it because tourists cruise Biscayne admiring the view and forget to turn around.
SOUTH BEACH. In years past, before renovations made it shine again, it was a good place for strong-arm robbers. Now ponytailed waiters push the shrimp-and-leek appetizers as beautiful people parade by.
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