MIAMI NOIR

Miami descended into a terminal noir fugue state in 2005, so it's only fitting that the whole mess would collapse toward a surreal New Year's Eve with Jim DeFede - the Miami Herald's star columnist, fired for secretly taping an off-the-record phone conversation with a disgraced local politician an hour before the man shot himself in the lobby of the Herald building - eager to serve as grand marshal of the satirical King Mango Strut in Coconut Grove. There are two Americas now, as Senator John Edwards put it during the last presidential election, and there are two Miamis: the new Miami, a perky engine of commerce fueled by condominiums and the celebrity machine of South Beach, and Teele's constituents in District Five, the people of Liberty City, Overtown, Model City, and Little Haiti, hard-scrabble neighborhoods in America's poorest city. Vice City with Teele as a cartoon character, a kind of Captain Corrupt - and consisted almost entirely of the surveillance reports in Teele's file at the state attorney's office.