Lawyer represented South Florida’s most notorious criminals
Over the decades, defense attorney Louis Casuso represented the most Miami of clients: international cocaine kingpins, an infamous cartel hit man, a Cuban spy, a man accused in a notorious terrorism case, a robber who preyed on visitors during the heyday of the city’s tourist robberies.
But for all his adventures — and the colorful yarns he told friends over coffee — Casuso wasn’t a flashy guy.
“He was a simple man. He wasn’t a social one. He didn’t like crowds,” said his wife, Daisy Casuso. “The most favorite thing he could do was sit by the water and read a book.”
Casuso died Tuesday at age 75 of heart and kidney failure. His death stunned the South Florida legal community, which gathered Wednesday night at his wake in Miami to honor the veteran defense lawyer, known for his clever stories, wry sense of humor and dogged representation of clients charged with the most serious of crimes.
“Louie was aggressive but kind. Outspoken but yet reserved. To me, Louis was the total package,” said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Reemberto Diaz, a longtime friend who once worked with Casuso when in private practice. “Louie had an amazing sense of the world. He was humble and honest — and never thought too highly of himself.”
Casuso was born on Aug. 19, 1946, in Havana, Cuba. He came to the United States as a child, under Operation Pedro Pan, a program that brought thousands of children from Cuba.
His mother and siblings eventually arrived too. Casuso eventually attended the University of Miami, and then the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, where he helped pay the bills by selling women’s shoes and working at a liquor store and as a security guard.
Casuso became a Florida lawyer in 1974, and was hired as prosecutor by then-Dade State Attorney Janet Reno. He soon went into private practice, where he cut his teeth during the days of the Cocaine Cowboys, when drugs were flooding Miami and the government began aggressively targeting traffickers.
Diaz worked his first federal case in 1983 with Casuso. Their clients: two Colombian drug traffickers. Jurors came back at 9:30 p.m., convicting the pair, devastating Diaz. Walking out of the old federal courthouse, Casuso shrugged. “I’m hungry, let’s go to dinner,” he said.
Casuso treated him to dinner at the old Everglades Hotel in downtown Miami. “Never celebrate an acquittal, never cry over guilty verdicts,” Casuso told him. “Do the best job you can and be done with it.”
His cases back then frequently made the news. Among them:
Raul Puig, a Miami police detective who became a cocaine dealer and sold law-enforcement secrets to traffickers. Puig got four years in prison after his conviction at trial in 1983.
Huber Matos, the former Cuban revolutionary
AAwho turned into a fierce crusader against Fidel Castro, who was charged with possessing an unregistered machine gun aboard a yacht in 1986. The charge was later dismissed.
David Harrell, one of 12 men who went to trial for robbing tourists in the late 1990s, one of a spate of crimes against visitors that plagued Miami’s tourism industry. He was convicted.
Marisol Gari, an Orlando woman convicted of spying for the Cuban government in 2005 as part of the spy ring known as the Wasp Network.
More recently, Casuso garnered the spotlight after he appeared in the seminal documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” — he’d represented Jorge “Rivi” Ayala, the Miami hit man featured in the film. He also represented one of the defendants at trial in the case of the Liberty City Seven, the terrorism case that has recently been featured in a pair of documentaries examining federal tactics after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
His bread and butter were cases involving the extradition of drug kingpins — work that took him from Miami to Puerto
Rico, Colombia or Honduras.
“Casuso would trek through the jungles to meet with these people,” said his friend, lawyer Rick Hermida.
Casuso never took himself too seriously. Attorney Bill Clay remembered seeing Casuso, as a prosecutor, get into a fistfight with a lawyer outside a courtroom in the 1970s. Clay dubbed him “Louie the K” — for knockout punch.
“Ever since then, literally every single time I saw him I would raise my fist and say, ‘Louie the K show me your knockout punch,’ and he would,” Clay said. “I would even text him when we were in Fed court together on Zoom and ask him to show me his knockout punch and he would cleverly raise it for me to see on the video and smile.”
At Miami’s Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building, his early morning tales in the first-floor cafeteria were stuff of legal lore.
“In a world of charming story tellers, Louie was royalty,” said defense lawyer Juan Gonzalez. “One of the things I most missed during the pandemic was Louie’s enthralling war stories over coffee or drinks.”
Casuso is survived by wife Daisy, sons Antonio and Joey Casuso, stepson Luis Martin, daughter Lisa Casuso, and siblings Maria Teresa Casuso and Tony Casuso.
AADavid Ovalle: 305-376-3379, @davidovalle305
Helen N. Fagin, who died March 13 in Sarasota at age 104, survived the Holocaust, taught about it as an internationally renowned professor at the University of Miami and was at the heart of efforts to build nationwide memorials to its millions of victims — starting with the iconic and poignant sculpture park in Miami Beach.
The Holocaust Memorial, at 1933-1945 Meridian Avenue, began when three passionate locals met in Miami in the mid-1980s.
Norman Braman chaired the committee behind the Holocaust Memorial. Coconut Grove architect Ken Treister designed the bronze sculpture of an arm and hand reaching toward the sky. Fagin, tapping her memories and culling through thousands of photographs from UM and archives at Yad-Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem to tell the history, gave the Holocaust Memorial its soul.
She gave the memorial its light, and its purpose — because she knew.
“I always say when people ask me about the memorial I say Treister wrote the music and Helen took care of the words,” Braman told the Miami Herald.
“Helen told the story of the Holocaust. That was her role in the creation of the memorial. And she did so as an educator because she was a survivor. And as a survivor, to be certain that the story and the history of the Holocaust never be forgotten, she was remarkable. Her focus was always there and she understood it better than anybody else. She held on to the highest principles among our very small group and kept us on the right path from the very beginning when we all met in 1985, to when the memorial came about in 1990,” Braman said.
Her children, Judith and Gary Fagin, culled stories of their mother’s life to share in the family obituary.
Born Helen Neimark in Radomsko, Poland, on Feb. 1, 1918, Fagin grew up in a home steeped in Jewish tradition and culture, Gary wrote.
Fagin was in her second year at
the Jagiellonian
Kristallnacht
In 1971, Fagin joined the University of Miami’s
English department faculty, having earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UM by 1968. She was a fast favorite among students. Fagin won the Freshman Teacher of the Year and the Panhellenic Council Best Professor awards.
Norma Orovitz, a retired journalist and author who spent decades serving Miami Jewish Home and Hospital (now Miami Jewish Health), was one of her students. Orovitz says Fagin was a strong influence.
The two met in 1973 when Orovitz went back to UM as a second-timearound student after she had three children. This was about 10 years after her first period of study at UM had ended in 1964. An English major, Orovitz was about to register for an upperlevel English course but a former teacher encouraged her, instead, to take advantage of a new class Fagin had just developed, Literature of the Holocaust. Fagin’s curriculum was one of the earliest of its kind in the U.S., according to UM.
But, as her family said, for more than 20 years Fagin “had rarely, if ever, spoken of her own experiences, the memories too painful to share.”
All of that changed, however, when “Night” author and future Nobel Laureate Wiesel was invited to speak at the University of Miami Hillel House. Fagin was asked to hold a reception in his honor at her home. Wiesel encouraged Fagin to talk about her experiences so that others would not “describe it from their imaginations,” according to the UM Alumni Association.
Fagin’s resulting Literature of the Holocaust course would become part of a newly created Judaic Studies program at the University of Miami. Fagin became program director in