Rubio in Reverse: Marco in Retrograde
What Dorothy Thompson once said of Hitler is true of Trump's Secretary of State: he is "the apotheosis of the Little Man."
Of all the insult-comic nicknames Donald Trump has bequeathed his rivals in the last ten years, none has been as singularly appropriate as “Little Marco.” The correspondent Dorothy Thompson once described Adolf Hitler as “the apotheosis of the Little Man.” We might make the same claim about Marco Antonio Rubio.
That Rubio agreed to serve as Secretary of State for a President he once called a “con artist” and warned was “dangerous”—and not only to serve him, but to implement policies lifted from the Nazi playbook—all but confirms his teeny-weeniness.
There was Little Marco, cozying up to the World’s Coolest Dictator©, negotiating a Nazi-style deal to remand U.S. prisoners to El Salvador. There was Little Marco, okaying the destruction of USAID, long the means of expression of American soft power overseas. There was Little Marco, who not long ago called the invasion of Ukraine “Russia’s reprehensible aggression” and led Senate initiatives to punish Putin, sitting silently in the Oval Office as Trump and JD Vance insulted Volodymyr Zelenskyy and parroted Kremlin talking points. There was Little Marco, cancelling visas and condoning ICE’s illegal roundup of legal U.S. residents—even though his parents, his older brother, his wife’s parents, and his ex-drug-dealer and felon brother-in-law were all born in other countries.
He cannot plead ignorance. He knows more state secrets than almost anyone alive. Remember, Marco Rubio was on the Senate Intelligence Committee during Trump’s entire first term. He signed off on Volume 5. He knew then, and damned well knows now, what Donald Trump really is—and who he’s really working for.
But he’s serving him anyway. He’s carrying out Trump’s orders like a good little Nazi underling. Never mind that Donald Trump has more in common with Fulgencio Batista, the mobbed-up Cuban strongman, than any past U.S. president, of either political party. Never mind that the policies he’s enforcing at the State Department, if implemented in the 1950s, would have hurt his parents and his brother.
Is his ambition that great? Rubio has always prioritized his political career above anything else—including, it seems, his family; his wife, the introverted Jeanette, remarked years ago in a (rare) interview that she sometimes felt like he was “cheating on” her with politics—and that, at home in Miami raising their four children while Rubio was off in Washington, she sometimes felt like “a single mom.” All that sacrifice, to go down in history as the willing accomplice of a corrupt American Nazi: the dictator’s diplomat, a Ribbentrop for our time.
To fully appreciate the abject pusillanimity of “Tony” Rubio—the spinelessness, the lack of conviction, the mendacity, the unscrupulousness, the disgusting hypocrisy—it helps to work backwards, Benjamin Button style. . .
It is April 12, 2025. Rubio doubles down on the State Department’s capricious policy of revoking visas, especially for students. In an op-ed at FoxNews, he explains:
Visiting America is not an entitlement. It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values. And, as Secretary of State, I will never forget that.
U.S. law lays out clear rules about who can and cannot come to the United States. The State Department’s consular officers are required to apply these rules to each of the millions of visa applicants around the world each year. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), aliens who endorse or espouse terrorist activity or persuade others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization – such as Hamas – are ineligible for U.S. visas.
What’s more, the INA gives us broad authority to revoke a visa. This authority is fundamental to safeguarding our national security, as well as protecting Americans and lawful visitors within our borders. The Trump administration’s commitment to security and the enforcement of our immigration laws is unprecedented and unwavering. We expect – and the law requires – all visa holders to demonstrate their eligibility every day their visa is valid. This includes respecting our laws, behaving appropriately according to their visa type, and continuing to meet these standards throughout their stay in our country.
This is an implicit threat: Anyone can have a visa revoked for any reason, without explanation. And it comes a week after Rubio ordered diplomats to comb through social media posts for visa applicants for content critical of Israel for conducting its daily war crimes in Gaza.
President Zelenskyy—who is not, as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend rudely points out when the media asks questions, wearing a suit—visits the Oval Office, where he is upbraided by a blustery JD Vance and bullied by a somnambulant Donald Trump. It is February 28, 2025. Rubio sits on a couch next to the VP, a sullen look on his face, but does nothing to correct the President’s erroneous statements, shush the Vice President, or otherwise come to the defense of the embattled Ukrainian leader.
Internet body-language doctors come out in force, calling out his disgusting cowardice.
Marco Rubio is in San Salvador, at the lakeside dacha of El Salvador’s tyrannical president, Nayib Bukele. It is February 3, 2025. Rubio announces that Bukele has “offered to do the same”—that is, to incarcerate—“dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
The CECOT prison in El Salvador is one of the most notorious in the world. Remanding legal U.S. residents to a penal facility in another country echoes Nazi Germany establishing its most brutal concentration camps in Poland—where German law did not apply.
On the same day, Rubio is named Acting USAID Administrator, where he will formally oversee the dismantling of the agency most responsible for flexing U.S. soft power, promoting democracy, and providing humanitarian assistance to other countries. A month later, Rubio will reveal that 83 percent of USAID programs have been cancelled—with devastating effects on needy people the world over, as well as the reputation of the United States, painstakingly cultivated for decades, as an honest broker and a force of good in the world.
It is January 21, 2025—Marco Rubio’s first day as Secretary of State. In his remarks to State Department employees, he says:
Beyond that, this is the face of the United States. In fact, if you think about it, for many people on this planet, their only interaction with America—most will never travel here—their only interaction with America in many cases—whether they be leaders or everyday people—will be the men and women who serve us abroad and do so with tremendous integrity and dedication. They are literally the face of our country —whether it’s through the aid we’ve provided or through the services.
I want the Department of State to be at the center of how America engages the world —not just how we execute on it, but on how we formulate it. Some of the brightest minds in foreign policy reside within this building and within this government, and we need to ensure that we have an environment here that’s conducive to creativity, to boldness, to new ideas, to recognizing the dynamic world in which we live—one that is changing faster than it has ever changed before. And we need to be ahead of it.
. . . I want the Department of State to have the best ideas and the best options available for the President, and then I want us to be able to execute them better than any agency in our government.
This garners much applause from a relieved diplomatic corps.
A few months later, he will move to lay off a number of those brightest minds in foreign policy, in a massive State Department overhaul. The “environment here that’s conducive to creativity, to boldness, to new ideas, to recognizing the dynamic world in which we live,” Rubio will claim, has suddenly become “beholden to radical political ideology.” By radical, he really means anti-dictatorial, and thus implicitly anti-Trump.
Rubio calls the bill to codify gay marriage “a stupid waste of time.” It is July 21, 2022.
Russia has marshaled its forces for a potential invasion of Ukraine—which would be an inexcusable act of aggression and a violation of numerous treaties and the Westphalian order. It is February 2022.
In response, GOP senators introduce the Never Yielding Europe’s Territory (NYET) Act to provide critical support to Ukraine.
“We cannot return to a world in which countries can simply choose to invade their neighbors—it is dangerous and destructive,” Rubio says, in support of the bill. “The United States must be ready to impose real and harsh consequences if Putin decides to invade Ukraine. Our legislation would do exactly that.”
Marco Rubio is a keynote speaker at a Conference on National Conservatism, promoted by the Edmund Burke Foundation and the Claremont Institute, in Orlando. It is November 2, 2021.
Joining him as keynote speakers are insurrectionist fist-pumper Josh Hawley, Dark Enlightenment weirdo JD Vance, and Vance’s whoremaster, the neoreactionary billionaire Peter Thiel.
It is August, 2020. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releases Volume 5 of its report on Russian active measures campaigns and interference in the 2016 election, presenting its findings on counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities. The Committee, in its wisdom, helpfully place its key finding right up front:
The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Read it again: Russian government. Aggressive. Multifaceted.
This is not just a bunch of Democrats making this claim. The Committee is bipartisan. Even dyed-in-the-wool Trump allies like Tom Cotton and John Cornyn are compelled to sign off on this.
The Report stops short of explicitly accusing the Trump campaign of reciprocity—of taking an active role in embracing the aid that Russia bestowed. Even so, most of the Republicans on the Committee—Senators Risch, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, Sasse, and, of course, Marco Rubio—feel the need to add this addendum to the report (italics and boldface in original text):
Volume 5 exhaustively reviews the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities to the 2016 election, but never explicitly states the critical fact: the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election.
Note that this addendum is not signed by Richard Burr, the then-chair of the Committee. Note also that Burr has been removed from that post by his fellow Republicans—and put under investigation by the FBI for alleged insider trading—almost immediately after completing the Report. This suggests a major disagreement between Senator Burr and Senators Risch, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, Sasse, and Rubio.
Here is Rubio, who has ascended to chair of the Committee after Burr’s departure, looking much like a wan prisoner in a hostage video, desperately trying to throw the national media off the treasonous scent:
But the fact is, the Committee did find that Paul Manafort—the chair of the Trump campaign from May through August of 2016, and a key adviser before and after that period—coordinated his efforts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian intelligence officer who specializes in election meddling, as well as with his estranged client, the mega-oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Indeed, the very first section of Volume 5 concerns Manafort’s deep, long-standing, and unequivocal ties to Kremlin operatives—relationships that continued throughout 2016.
Let me say this again: in 2016, the chair of the Trump campaign worked closely with a Kremlin election saboteur—covertly sending him polling data.
Not a coffee boy: the chair of the campaign. The guy in charge. Working with a Russian spy. And not just any spy: One who specializes in election fuckery.
While Senators Risch, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, Sasse, and Marco Rubio may have found “no evidence” that the Trump campaign “colluded,” they found ample evidence that the chair of that campaign coordinated, conspired with, worked with, sought advice from, and otherwise got help from Russians with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
But Rubio chooses to roll out this document detailing Trump’s seditious relationship with the Kremlin by…defending the traitor, Donald Trump.
It is Valentine’s Day, 2018. A radicalized 19-year-old has entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, opened fire, killed 17 people, and wounded 18 more.
In one of the most cynical and shameful moments of his political career, Marco Rubio, one of the biggest benefactors of NRA largesse, makes the preposterous claim that meaningful gun control legislation would not have prevented the Parkland slaughter:
“I understand. I really do,” he says, falsely. “You read in the newspaper that they used a certain kind of gun and therefore let’s make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don’t have some sort of de facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to that, per se.
“If we do something, it should be something that works. And the struggle up to this point has been that most of the proposals that have been offered would not have prevented, not just yesterday’s tragedy, but any of those in recent history,” Rubio continues, in what is an egregious lie. “Just because these proposals would not have prevented these does not mean that we therefore raise our hands and say, ‘Therefore, there’s nothing we can do.’”
These insensitive and asinine comments are similar to ones Rubio made after the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub.
A few days later, at a CNN Town Hall, Rubio shares the stage with survivors of the Parkland mass shooting, who hammer him about gun reform. He does not budge.
Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, in the mass shooting, tells him right to his face: “Your comments this week and those of our president have been pathetically weak.”
Marco Rubio and his wife, Jeanette, dine with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in the Blue Room of the White House. It is February 15, 2017. This is the first private two-couple dinner the Trumps have hosted.
“He’s always calling me Little Marco,” Rubio says to Trump, during a GOP debate in Virginia. “And I’ll admit he’s taller than me. He’s like six-two, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is five-two. And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them.”
It is February 29, 2016. This barb, and Trump’s response, compels CNN to generate an all-timer of a headline: “Donald Trump defends size of his penis.”
In Houston, Texas, a half dozen Republican presidential hopefuls take the stage for a debate. It is Thursday, February 25, 2016. Marco Rubio positively eviscerates Trump:
“You say the same thing every night,” Rubio says.
And: “We saw a report in one of the newspapers that Donald, you’ve hired a significant number of people from other countries to take jobs that Americans could have filled. My mom and dad—my mom was a maid at a hotel, and instead of hiring an American like her, you have brought in over a thousand people from all over the world to fill those jobs instead.”
And: “You’re the only person on this stage that has ever been fined for hiring people to work on your projects illegally. You hired some workers from Poland.”
And: “If he builds the wall the way he built Trump Tower, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it.”
He mocks Donald running “a fake university,” and offers his own version of Trump’s stump speech: “Everyone’s dumb, I’m going to make America great again, I’m winning in the polls, lines around the states, every night.”
And he delivers what should have been the coup de grâce: “You know where Donald Trump would be if he hadn’t inherited 200 million dollars? Selling watches in Manhattan.”
For one shining moment, it looks like Marco has slain the dragon, and that he will be the GOP nominee. He has never looked happier. He doesn’t know it, but that night is the apogee of his political career.
It is March 2015. Marco puts on the market a money pit of a house he bought, in arguably the most ill-advised business deal of his career. For one thing, he bought the place in 2005, at the height of the real estate market, only to watch its value crater within months. For another, he bought the house with a buddy of his named David Rivera.
The two Floridians briefly shared an apartment in the early months of 2011, when they first came to Washington to serve in Congress. But they’d known each other for years. It was Rivera, the chair of the Florida House Rules Committee, who nominated his pal to be Speaker back in 2007. And it was Rivera who campaigned with Rubio in 2000, helping him get elected in the first place.
In July of 2010, as both men were running for U.S. Congress, Deutsche Bank—Deutsche Bank!—began the process of foreclosing on the house, and stopped only when Rivera paid almost ten grand owned in back payments and fines.
After their first days in Washington, Rivera began to “break bad.” As Marc Caputo will recount in Politico, Rivera “weathered state and federal investigations into his finances, a related state ethics case that recently resulted in a proposed $58,000 fine, and the more serious campaign-finance scandal that erupted in 2012.”
The two politicians share a habit of laxness in their bookkeeping:
Like Rivera, Rubio also double-billed taxpayers for flights paid for by a political group, in his case the Republican Party of Florida. When the matter was brought to Rubio’s attention during his 2010 Senate race, Rubio told The Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times that it was an error, and he agreed to pay back the party $2,400.
But Rivera would take it much further; in 2024, he will be indicted for serving as an unregistered agent of Venezuela. Even so, Rubio, who would make a political career of shifting loyalties and abandoning all principles, stood by his man, as Caputo will report in 2015:
If the two still talk, it doesn’t surprise former state Rep. J.C. Planas, a Miami Republican who served with the two in the state House. Planas said Rubio was loyal to a fault and that it could prove costly in 2016.
“David Rivera reminds me of the villain Iago in Othello—and Marco’s political career is Desdemona,” Planas said. “Marco has stood by David, and it’s just baffling to me. I’ve never understood their relationship.”
Othello, a tale of love and jealousy and thwarted ambition, is an odd comp.
It is late October, 2013. Marco Rubio is a Senator now, a rising star in Republican politics. His name is bandied about in discussions about GOP presidential nominees. To that end, he has co-sponsored an immigration reform bill and spent most of the past year promoting it.
Back in January 2013, in a back and forth with Red State editor Erick Erickson, Rubio initially shared his thoughts on immigration reform. He sought to
modernize our legal immigration system. In essence, we create one that meets the needs this country has in this new century. For example, while I support our family-based system of immigration, we can no longer afford to have less than ten percent of our immigration based on skill and talent. We need a functional guest worker program so that, in times of low unemployment and rapid economic growth, our industries have the labor they need to continue growing. And we need an agricultural worker program that allows our growers to contract the seasonal and year round labor they need legally.
But now, in October 2013, with his own bill sent to the House, Rubio has made an abrupt about-face. He’s asked Speaker Boehner not to pass the legislation. He’s campaigning against his own bill. Even for a serial flip-flopper, this is unusual political behavior.
As NBC News reports:
Senator Marco Rubio is bailing on his own immigration bill.
Not only is the senator from Florida now telling House Republicans not to pass the Senate legislation he co-sponsored and championed for months—he’s urging them not to negotiate with the Senate at all.
In a brutal twist for reform, Rubio’s office told conservative news outlet Breitbart on Sunday that Speaker Boehner should not go to conference with the Senate to pass a final bill. That’s the position anti-immigration House Republicans have taken for months, but the whole reason they oppose Senate talks is that they’re scared Boehner will cut a deal that’s—well, that’s just like Rubio’s bill. . . .
That story quotes Frank Sharry, president of America’s Voice, who says that Rubio “gets some heat from the right and, before you know it, the Boy Wonder retreats and dissembles.”
That sentence neatly sums up Rubio’s entire political career.
Rubio’s first book, his memoir An American Son, comes out in hardback. It is June 19, 2012. The book sells well—almost 50,000 copies, according to Circana Bookscan via Forbes—but not nearly enough to recoup its generous $800,000 advance.
At least, that’s not how publishing usually works. As explained previously on these pages, an advance is literally that—an advance on royalties from projected sales. Authors receive something like $3 for each hardcover sold. Even if Rubio made ten dollars a pop, that’s not anywhere close to $800,000.
But the book, evidently, sells like hotcakes. The following year he will report $345,000 more in income from the publishers; the year after that, $30,000. In order to be paid $345,000, he would have first had to recoup his $800,000 advance—and then sold a number of copies in the mid five figures. The math on that is fuzzy.
When American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone drops in 2015, Rubio will report $102,500 in earnings—on a book that sells fewer than 15,000 copies.
Jeanette Rubio, who had a brief stint as a cheerleader for Marco’s favorite football team, the Miami Dolphins, is hired by someone else with NFL ties: the billionaire Norman Braman, owner of an auto dealership empire and former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. It is late in 2010. She is paid $54,000 per annum for a part-time job working with Braman’s charitable foundation.
Previously, Braman has engaged the legal services of Marco Rubio—who considers him a sort of father figure—and will, in 2015, pledge millions of dollars to fund Marco’s presidential run.
Rubio finally closes on the sale of a house in West Miami he’d purchased for $175k in 2003, hoping to flip it for a profit. No such luck. It is 2007, and the property has languished on the market for two years.
But the Hand of God reaches down to save him, in the person of a crooked chiropractor named Mark Cereceda, whose mother buys the place for a whopping $380k. And what do you know? Right after the closing, Rubio abruptly changes his position on a political position—to Cereceda’s benefit.
As Ken Silverstein will later explain in the Observer:
Shortly after Mr. Rubio sold the house, he did a 180-degree rotation on a key insurance bill for which Dr. Cereceda had been lobbying. Whereas he had previously been an outspoken opponent of the measure—indeed, he was described in one local press item at the time as “the main holdout”—he ended up voting for the legislation, which required Florida drivers to purchase $10,000 worth of personal injury Insurance.
Many of Dr. Cereceda’s clients were injured drivers who paid him with insurance money. And by the way, reported cases of personal injury fraud immediately soared in Florida after the measure passed.
Dr. Cereceda has a lengthy arrest record both prior to and after his mama bought Mr. Rubio’s house. In 2003, he was arrested on charges of Aggravated Assault With A Deadly Weapon. Two years later, he was arrested for Felony Battery and also for Disorderly Conduct, and then in 2013 he was busted for running an illegal political contribution scheme by which he ordered his employees to contribute to political campaigns in their names and then he and his relatives reimbursed them. The doctor got off light. He was sentenced to house arrest and given probation.
How Rubio met Cereceda I cannot say, but he does have lingering neck issues from his football days. Perhaps Cereceda was a bad dude but a great chiropractor? Or maybe he was brought in to fix Rubio’s chronic spinelessness.
A news crew descends upon a house on NE 27th Street in Miami. It is May 9, 2007. TV reporters will soon reveal that a producer has installed a series of Big Brother-esque webcams in the house, which film the, ahem, goings and comings of “[s]cores of ripped, young Hispanic and Black male models [who have] been hired at a $1,200 monthly fee, plus free room and board, to live inside, where the cameras [catch] their every move—including regularly scheduled orgies.”
The house is owned by the father of Angel Barrios, an old friend of Marco’s, with whom he had been arrested years prior. Barrios, a property manager, rented the house to Flava Works, which he thought was a “digital media” company but was actually running a popular gay porn site called CocoDorm.
The Miami New Times will later report that “the City of Miami Code Enforcement Board hit CocoDorm and Barrios with multiple citations for illegally running an adult business in a residential area. In August 2007, the city will sue Barrios and his investment group in Miami-Dade civil court.”
The story continues:
“I have nothing against gay people, but this is just so far from the truth,” says Barrios, who laughs out loud at the idea of having had a sexual relationship with Rubio. “I have kids, and now they’re reading all this garbage online. It’s insane.”
Yet the story does add to a trend for Rubio, who has dealt with multiple news cycles about shady connections and sketchy choices back in his hometown, from a pile of traffic citations to mountains of questionable credit card debt to a brother-in-law convicted of dealing cocaine. Now Rubio can add to the mix a childhood buddy wrapped up in a years-long legal war over gay porn.
Marco Rubio takes out a home equity loan in the amount of $135,000 on his primary residence in Miami. It is January of 2006.
This is unusual, because he had just bought the house five weeks earlier, from a shell company with a nautical name (appropriate, I suppose, for a shell company), putting down $55,000 on a purchase price of $550,000. In the interim, his bank reappraised the house and has determined it is now, suddenly, worth $735,000.
Yes, 2005 is the height of a go-go real estate market, especially in Florida. Even so, quintupling a home’s equity in 37 days is, as the kids say, sus; it would make Brett Kavanaugh blush.
The head of the bank that gave Rubio the loan is Jim Greer, once the chairman of the Florida GOP. In 2013, Greer will plead guilty to charges of grand theft and money laundering—criminal activity that, to be clear, had nothing to do with Rubio’s loan.
Two payments are made by a PAC run by Jeanette Rubio, Floridians for Conservative Leadership Committee, to a super PAC called Floridians for Conservative Leadership in Government, which lists Marco Rubio as president and Jeanette Rubio as vice president. It is 2005.
The latter super PAC subsequently pays a company called Servicarga $3,500 for “courier services.” This is fishy for two reasons, as Silverstein will report in the Observer in January 2016: “Mr. Rubio’s wife owned Servicarga and…according to IRS returns and other documents, the company stopped operating in 1997.”
Jeanette Rubio files the paperwork to incorporate a PAC called Floridians for Conservative Leadership Committee, listing herself as the registered agent and sole director. It is October 24, 2002. In the next nine days, the new PAC will raise almost a quarter of a million dollars—$35k of which “vanished into thin air,” as Silverstein will write.
It is July of 2002. In his capacity as Statehouse Representative, Marco posts a letter to the Florida Division of Real Estate, recommending a man named Orlando Cicilia “for licensure without reservation.” The recommendation is heeded; Cicilia is granted a real estate license.
Years later, the Washington Post will write that this document, obtained
under the Florida Public Records Act, offers a glimpse of Rubio using his growing political power to assist his troubled brother-in-law and provides new insight into how the young lawmaker intertwined his personal and political lives.
Rubio did not disclose in the letter that Cicilia was married to his sister, Barbara, or that the former cocaine dealer was living at the time in the same West Miami home as Rubio’s parents. He wrote that he had known Cicilia “for over 25 years,” without elaborating.
Mario and Oriales Rubio add two names to the deed to their house: Barbara and Orlando Cicilia. It is 2002.
It is January 25, 2000. Marco Rubio, who sits on the West Miami city commission, wins a special election, trouncing the Democratic candidate, Anastasia Garcia. He is now headed to Tallahassee, to serve in the Florida House of Representatives. In November, he will be re-elected for a full term.
In between the special election and the November election, Marco’s brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, a Cuban immigrant, is released from prison. He has spent a dozen years inside.
Marco Rubio graduates cum laude from the University of Miami Law School, with massive student loan debt. It is May, 1996.
Marco is in college in Miami. He is seriously dating Jeanette Dousdebes, four years behind him at South Miami Senior High School. It is some indeterminate time in the mid-90s—as best as I can tell, 1995.
One night, he tells her, presumably on the phone, of his plans to attend a “foam party” at a local nightclub (probably the Warsaw Ballroom or Amnesia). She tells him that if he goes to the foam party, she will break up with him. He goes anyway. (Note: this story is in Rubio’s memoir.)
Why does Jeanette strongly object to the foam parties? Steven Almond, writing in the Miami New Times in June of 1995, explains:
As the name implies, a foam party features gallons and gallons of soapy foam, which is pumped onto an enclosed dance floor, creating what amounts to a giant bathtub in which revelers are encouraged to slip and slide and bump and grind to their hearts' delight. To facilitate the process, the participants are likewise encouraged to strip down to bathing suits or underwear. . .
The events are not orgies—not, at least, to judge from visits to four recent foam parties, three of those on gay-oriented nights [Tuesday and Saturday].
On the other hand, these aren’t Boy Scout campouts, either.
The scene generally features several hundred scantily clad bodies packed onto a dance floor and writhing to bone-rattling music under strobes and colored lights. Nothing new, right? Until suds come gushing out of a machine suspended over the dance floor.
As if on cue, various forms of passionate embrace begin. Kissing. Petting. Rubbing. Because the foam froths up waist high, it acts both as a lubricant and camouflage. Mutual masturbation is an occasional component, generally beneath the cover of foam. As the evening wears on, a few men pair off and sit together in the foam that builds up outside the partitioned-off area. Nearly all the male participants are topless by the end, as are a few of the randier women.
So Marco is there, at one of these nightclubs, “watch[ing] the foam descend from the ceiling...a sight to behold,” as he would later recall, when he feels his beeper vibrate. It’s Jeanette! Maybe she just finished reading Almond’s piece in the Miami New Times and is freaking out?
He looks down at his shoes, which were black when he came in, and is shocked to see that they have somehow gone white, like Doc Brown’s hair in Back to the Future. And he realizes he has to get out of there. So he exits the club and goes to call Jeanette.
Years later, during a live interview, Rubio will imply that this is maybe not the only foam party he attended. “You can’t say you go to them all the time if you went once,” says the late-night host Jimmy Fallon to Rubio.
Alice C. Wainwright Park sits at the convergence of Coconut Grove and Brickell, affording a gorgeous view of tony Biscayne Bay. The homes that surround the lush, tree-lined park are pricy. But this is not the sort of place where rich people bring their children. Wainwright is notorious as a hub of drug dealing, prostitution, and gay men “cruising.”
It is after dark on the night of May 23, 1990—a Wednesday. Marco is a few days shy of his nineteenth birthday. He is back in town after a disastrous year at a small college in Missouri, where he played football. He is sitting in a parked car at the park, drinking beer with his friends Angel Barrios and Derek Wilson, when the cops show up. Marco is arrested.
Later, the charges will be dismissed and the court documents destroyed.
Seven men are convicted of dealing drugs. It is February 6, 1989. The kingpin, Mario Tabraue, is sentenced to 100 years in prison. His Number Two—Marco’s brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia—gets 35 years. The lengthy sentence is informed by $15 million in proceeds from drug sales that Cicilia is found responsible for, and which have gone missing.
It is still dark on the morning of December 16, 1987. Law enforcement, both federal and local, are making final preparations for a pre-dawn raid on the Miami-based operations of Mario Tabraue, a major cocaine smuggler and drug dealer.
The bust is made at Tabraue’s manse, which law enforcement has dubbed “the Playboy Mansion.” They find firearms, a shit-ton of cash, and Tabraue’s exotic pets: a pair of spotted leopards. In a scene reminiscent of Goodfellas, Tabraue’s wife stuffs 50 grand into a bag and tosses it out a window—and it hits a cop standing outside right in the noggin.
Also arrested in the sting is the “front man” of the outfit: Marco’s flashy Cuban-born brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia. The lead DEA agent will later recall that Cicilia looked like “he’d walked off a Miami Vice TV set.”
The Cicilia family lose their house; Barbara and her kids move in with Marco’s parents. Marco is a senior in high school.
It is December 16, 1983. Marco is visiting his sister and brother-in-law in Miami for the Christmas holiday. Knowing her brother loves football, Barbara springs for tickets to Miami Dolphins game—the last game of the regular season, at the Orange Bowl.
What 12-year-old Marco doesn’t realize is that the tickets—and the rest of the trip—is financed by his brother-in-law’s new and lucrative job, as the front man for a major Miami drug dealer named Mario Tabraue. As the Washington Post would report, years later:
At that point, Tabraue had a booming drug business, according to law enforcement officials who tracked him. Tabraue’s drug ring had been populated by thugs known for their ruthlessness; some carried pistols in briefcases. Prosecutors believed that a member of Tabraue’s crew had killed Larry Nash, an undercover informant for what was then the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in 1980 and disposed of his body by dismembering it with a circular saw and burning it in a horse trough filled with charcoal.
Nash’s body was never found; a jury later decided that Tabraue had committed an act of racketeering by helping to dispose of the informant’s corpse.
What began as a marijuana-import operation in the late 1970s had blossomed into the far more lucrative business of distributing kilos of cocaine smuggled into South Florida from Colombia. During operation from 1976 to 1986, the ring moved half-a-million pounds of marijuana and 200 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $75 million.
It’s a great game for a Fins fan. The Dolphins beat the New York Jets, 34-14. Jets quarterback Richard Todd throws not one but two fourth-quarter pick-sixes. Marco has a blast.
It is 1979. Little Marco is eight years old. The Rubio family relocates to Las Vegas, where they have family, in search of more lucrative work. He and his mother begin attending the Mormon Church. His older sister, Barbara, who is 20, refuses to go with them and stays behind in Miami with her boyfriend, Orlando Cicilia.
Mario Tabraue, the owner of a Miami-based exotic-animals business, begins his lucrative career as a cocaine smuggler and drug dealer. It is 1976.
Orlando Cicilia arrives in the United States from Cuba. He is 15 years old. It is 1972—the year of the Miami Dolphins’ perfect season. He will meet his future wife, Barbara, not long after, in high school in Miami.
Marco, the third of the four Rubio children, is born in Miami. It is May 28, 1971. His mother is driven to the hospital by his 21-year-old brother Mario. His sister Barbara is 12.
Nuclear war is averted—barely—after it is discovered that the Soviets have placed nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to U.S. deployment of similar weaponry in Italy and Turkey. It is October 28, 1962. Dean Rusk, who holds the same job Rubio will later have at State, remarks, “We were eyeball-to-eyeball and the other fellow just blinked.”
A covert military operation initially devised by Eisenhower but overseen by JFK fails spectacularly. It is April 17, 1961. The Cuban exiles of the Democratic Liberation Front, despite U.S. financial and military support, botch the invasion and are routed by Castro’s forces. The landing takes place at the Playa Girón—the Bay of Pigs.
It is 1959. Marco’s older sister, Barbara, is born.
It is almost midnight on the first of January, 1959. The mobbed-up strongman Fulgencio Batista, realizing he has lost the country to Fidel Castro, resigns from office. After both the United States and Mexico deny him entry, he flees to Portugal.
Castro seizes and nationalizes U.S. businesses in Cuba: oil refineries, sugar plantations, banks. An embargo with Cuba will begin two years later. The collapse of the Batista regime also causes the collapse of the Mafia’s shipping network in Cuba, which had been operating with impunity since 1946.
Tired of life in Cuba under the Batista regime, Mario and Oriales Rubio, Marco’s parents, emigrate to Miami with their young son Mario Jr., seeking better opportunities. It is 1956.
Following a military coup, Fulgencio Batista reclaims control of Cuba. It is March 10, 1952.
The so-called Havana Conference is held during Christmas week, 1946, at the Hotel Nacional in the Cuban capital. Convened by Meyer Lansky—co-owner, with Fulgencio Batista, of the Nacional—at the behest of Lucky Luciano, the Conference is a summit meeting of the most powerful gangsters and mafioso in the United States, including Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Gaetano Lucchese, Joseph Bonnano, Giuseppe Profaci, and Carlos Marcello. Over the course of the week, territory is divvied up, chain of command formally established, beefs between the various families smoothed over, and Havana established as a port of entry for narcotics coming from North Africa.
Marco’s mother, Oriales, is born in Cuba. The Hotel Nacional has just opened. It is November 2, 1930.
Mario Rubio, Marco’s father, is born in Cuba, where Gerardo Machado, a former general of the Cuban War of Independence friendly to U.S. commercial real estate interests, is president. A tourist boom establishes Havana as a hub of gambling and prostitution. It is October 29, 1926.
Thanks to Gal Suburban for her help. Pieces by the Washington Post as well as in-depth articles by Marc Caputo at Politico and Ken Silverstein at the Observer—all linked in the piece—are must-reads for more information.
Gage Skidmore. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
Amazing research. The descriptions of disgusting flip-flopping and lies reminded me of today's local news. In Ma$$achu$$ett$, our blue-collar town's average income is about $57k, barely survival-level here. Yet we pay 400 of our 2000+ town employees more than $100k/yr-- many, in excess of $200k plus countless perks -- town manager, about $300k. That's almost $100k more than Boston pays its mayor, and they have many more higher-income taxpayers. But we were here first, since 1620, longer to cultivate corruption. We peons are so worn down by corruption and self-dealing that few even bother (or dare) to comment. All of the maybe 6 responses to today's news story "explain" to us why no capable person could ever be found do these 400 crucial jobs for less money and how glad we should be to pay. In fact, an ethical high schooler with good grades could run this town more successfully. It's a mess of favoritism, waste, and incompetence. But people believe the bs. So here I am again, back at: we're doomed by human gullibility and brainwashing -- and apathy. Such a spectacularly researched story about Rubio. Why aren't legions seeing? Why is corruption so "successful"? I still suspect Robert Hare's book about white-collar psychopathy's charisma describes the answer. I think unless the world does extensive "psychopathy awareness and avoidance" education, especially facing AI, humanity is doomed. But with education being dismantled, I hope I'm nuts. My other suggestion: headline all Greg Olear articles, bold print, max volume, all media, forced attention.
Fantastic deep dive 👏🏼