The story behind a Miami Beach cop’s liquor-fogged, wrong-way ride

JULIE K. BROWN, jbrown@MiamiHerald.com

The Miami Herald

October 1, 2011

Claudia Costa was driv­ing her Ford Explorer north on Inter­state 95, af­ter picking up two girlfriends in Fort Laud­erdale. It was 4 a.m. on a Thursday in December 2007. Traff­ic was light. Costa’s friends had been clubbing. The swimsuit model and Playboy play­mate was the des­ignated driv­er.
Suddenly, she saw two head­lights barrel­ing straight to­ward her. Costa cursed, then braced for a colli­sion. Upon impact, the Explorer spun around and smacked an­oth­er car, which kept go­ing north. The SUV came to rest up against the me­dian.
If getting hit by a wrong-way driv­er wasn’t shocking enough, what hap­pened next was             

even more jarring. An occupant of the wrong-way car, a 2006 Lexus 250 IS, didn’t check if they were OK, didn’t offer as­sistance, didn’t call 911. He climbed out of the crunched car, scampered down an embank­ment, hopped a fence and van­ished into the night, leav­ing the three women to wait for paramedics and po­lice.

“As far as he knew, we were dead,” Costa said.
Costa had no way of knowing this, but the man in the car that had slammed into her was him­self a po­lice sergeant — af­ter a boozy night on the town with his fel­low Miami Beach offi­cers. Or that when law offi­cers search­ing for the run­away rid­er spotted him wandering along Andrews Av­enue in Oak­land Park — caked in mud, reeking of alcohol, keys to the Lexus in his pocket — they would chauffeur him home         

rather than test his blood alcohol or toss him in jail.

Lat­er, when a state troop­er would try to inves­tigate the Miami Beach sergeant’s behav­ior, he was dismissed by some of the offi­cer’s col­leagues. Finally, when that troop­er detailed these diffi­cul­ties in a prob­a­ble cause affidavit — saying Miami Beach offi­cers had lied, ignored subpoenas and failed to return his calls — he would encounter the wrath of the Beach’s top cop, Car­los Nor­ie­ga.
In re­cent months, the Miami Beach Po­lice De­part­ment has gained unwanted scruti­ny for the exploits of sev­eral offi­cers, including one who ran over two people dur­ing a drunk­en ATV joyride; two who were fired for rough­ing up gays, and sev­eral oth­ers who gunned down a motorist on Memo­rial Day week­end, firing