South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
‘The house Lomelo built’ in Sunrise is gone
It was a City Hall like no other, built for a politician like no other.
There it stood, in the vast flat reaches of west Broward, a big gray concrete box, utterly devoid of charm, five stories high, the tallest building west of Pine Island Road: Sunrise City Hall, built in 1979.
The scene of one scandal after another and untold political brawls and conflicts of interest throughout the 1980s, it was the main base of operations for John Lomelo, who ran the city with an iron hand and dominated Broward politics for nearly two decades.
Lomelo also did business at Bobby Rubino’s rib joint on Oakland Park Boulevard and at his favorite watering hole, the Banana Boat Lounge, but that’s another story.
The wrecking ball finally arrived last week and leveled City Hall to the ground, demolishing the lone symbolic reminder of the rough-and-tumble Lomelo era. A modern new City Hall next to the old one will be dedicated on Jan. 20.
In the history of Broward County, Lomelo looms very large.
The first and only elected mayor of Sunrise, he was investigated by grand juries 14 times. He should have had his own parking place at the courthouse.
The feds finally nailed him in 1985 for shaking down a Maryland nursing home executive for $30,000 while the company was trying to do business in Sunrise.
They also got Lomelo’s shadowy “consultant” sidekick, whose name alone captured the feel of Broward in the ’80s: Spike Leibowitz.
“Big John,” as people called him, had an outsized ego, so he needed an outsized office in the new City Hall, paid for with a federal public works grant of $3.6 million.
It had special Lomelo touches: a sauna, kitchen, helicopter pad, and special electronically locking door to the mayor’s office, which occupied the entire fifth floor. That gave Lomelo a panoramic view of — well, the desolate western end of Oakland Park Boulevard.
“That fifth floor is ridiculous,” Walter Shaw, a member of the city council, told the Miami Herald in 1979. “The building is just another edifice to John Lomelo.”
It was ridiculous, and during one of Lomelo’s many suspensions, the acting mayor, Bob Butterworth, took one look around and said: “This is bigger than the governor’s office.” It was.
There hasn’t been a character quite like Lomelo, before or since. Colorful, profane and roguish, he was loved by his retired constituents, despite his glaring flaws.
Many of them, having come south from New York or New Jersey (as Lomelo did), shrugged their shoulders with indifference at the notion that their mayor might be on the take. They had seen it before.
What mattered was that he would take care of their needs: When a retiree suffered chest pains, the Sunrise paramedics quickly showed up, and when they wanted a stop light to slow down traffic at a busy intersection, Lomelo found a way to get it done.
“He was good to the people,” Sunrise retiree Abe Solomon once said.
The mayor sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” at condo men’s club meetings and danced with their wives, sweating through his polyester suit — a full-service mayor.
But Lomelo’s abuses finally caught up to him and ended his career. A jury quickly convicted him of mail fraud and extortion, and he went to federal prison in 1985; he died in a nursing home in Sarasota in 2000 at age 72.
While he was serving his fifth suspension from office, awaiting trial, the voters finally woke up and stripped the mayor of many of his powers. The city later changed to a city manager form of government. The road to the hockey arena, Pat Salerno Drive, is named for a city manager, not the flamboyant mayor who was once profiled on “60 Minutes.”
It took Sunrise a long time to overcome the stigma of the Lomelo years. He didn’t live long enough to see Sawgrass Mills, or to see Sunrise become the unlikely home of a National Hockey League franchise. But the vision of Sunrise as a bustling city on the edge of the Everglades began with him, in that fifth-floor penthouse office now reduced to rubble.