Richie Incognito's Year of the Bully

Richie Incognito's Year of the Bully
Alvaro Diaz-Rubio


It didn't take Jorge long to find the missile amid the wreckage. Ten years of professional football had imbued the XXXL cup with its own pungent potpourri of blood, Bengay, and ball sweat. Locating it was easier than spotting a streetwalker on Biscayne Boulevard. The jockstrap was wrapped around a brick fastened with athletic tape and addressed simply: "To the Dildos at the New Times."

The next morning, this humble reporter unfurled the putrid package at his desk. The athletic supporter was the size of a baby's blanket, every square inch of fetid, faded cotton covered in childlike scribbles. It wasn't a warning, however — no threat for New Times to back off its investigations into steroid abuse in baseball, police shootings, or local corruption. Instead, it was a letter to the editor:

What's up, pussies? Richie Incognito here. The Miami Dolphins' most offensive offensive lineman. Pro Bowler. All-Star Wild Child. The NFL's dirtiest player and proud of it. I'm #68 on the field but #1 in secretly squeezing a dude's scrotum during a Monday Night Football man-pile. (It's called the "Rich-around." Get it?)

Listen up, you blog-typing twats. I read your articles about me, including the claim I drove that rookie biatch Jonathan Martin bonkers by harassing him. All I have to say is: Take a whiff of my cup and wake the hell up. That dude is softer than my supple Italian foreskin. This is professional football we play, not some tea-cozy crocheting competition.

I'd be angrier if I thought you were singling me out, but all your newspaper seems to do is print politically correct crap. You have a rapper as a columnist, a stripper who writes sex advice, and a newsroom full of MFAs. Let's start with your so-called People issue. You profiled a human statue, a community activist, and a kid in a chicken costume. Seriously, guys. What fucking city are you living in?

Take a good, hard look at 2013 and show me when a community activist accomplished anything. The only statue anyone cares about is the Heisman. And for god's sake, someone strip that kid of his chicken suit and suit him up in some pads so he finally gets laid.

What about Miami's real badasses? What about the ballers like me who get the dirty work done? The amoral assholes who pull no punches and spare no shady dollar in an all-out blitz to win?

Here's an idea. How's about you print my People issue? No charities. No children. No gourmet coffee roasters or French fashion bloggers. Just the bullies who truly boss this town.

Fins up!



P.S. Can you guys crochet me a new cup?

Dear Richie:

What a lovely surprise to receive your, uh, letter the other day, but do the Incognitos not believe in mailboxes? It's taken our unpaid interns three days to pick up the mess. One cut herself pretty badly and, without health insurance, had to use your jockstrap to stop the bleeding.

To address your complaints: We're sorry you don't agree with our coverage of your suspension from the Dolphins, but calling your teammate a "half-n****r," threatening to defecate in his mouth, and saying you'd kill his family was, let's just say, excessive. Compared to that, making Martin pay $15,000 for you to fly to Vegas and taunting him by saying you had sex with his sister almost seems quaint. Almost.

As for your argument that our recent People issue ignored Miami's "real badasses," we must point out that our issue focused on the coolest and most creative people in the city, not its most cutthroat and powerful.

But you're right. More than any year in recent memory, 2013 was dominated by bullies like you. From Gov. Rick Scott to rogue neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, corrupt politicians to bad cops and even worse criminals, steroidal sports stars to scamming team owners, 2013 was the year that Florida's Freudian id came roaring back in full force.

This was the Year of the Bully. So let's see your list, Richie. What psychos and sadists make up your People issue?


New Times

Richie's response arrived a few days later. This time, it was penned in ketchup on the greasy cardboard containers of a 16-piece family dinner from KFC:

Growing up in Jersey, my father would grab me by the collar in a horseshoe tackle and pull a Joe Pesci on me. "Son, don't take no shit from no one," he'd scream. "If you let anyone give you shit now, you're gonna take shit your entire life."


Of course, he also told me that Bill Clinton was Beelzebub and that "pretty boy Patrick Swayze wouldn't last a day in the real shit" while watching Red Dawn, but that might have just been the Vietnam flashbacks and Wild Turkey talking.















Well, that's what Maroño was like as mayor of Sweetwater. He launched a nationwide witch hunt on bath salts, blaming the drugs not only for the Miami Zombie but also for any two-bit break-in or any bum biting a cop. (Personally, I prefer booze before biting.) All the while, Maroño was really the one screwing over Sweetwater residents.

In Homestead, Mayor Steve Bateman didn't have the patience to stock the city government with supporters. Instead, he pulled an RGIII (pre-knee injury) and did it all on his lonesome. When a local developer had trouble building a health clinic, Bateman offered to grease the wheels — at the cost of $125 an hour in secret consulting fees. YOMO, Steve! YOMO!

Michael Pizzi made Miami Lakes politics his personal bitch. He went from the top of his University of Miami law school class to the top of local government. Then the mayor was caught taking $6,000 in kickbacks for federal contracts. But unlike Maroño and Bateman, who both pleaded guilty, Pizzi came out pissing into the wind. "I am innocent," he announced after a hearing in October. "And I will be exonerated and found not guilty at trial." Makin' me proud, Pizzi!

But the biggest baller in my book was Barry Layne Moore. The 51-year-old hillbilly mayor of Hampton, Florida, was caught dealing oxycodone to his entire town. Talk about a big fish in a little pond.

Then there was Raphael Herman, a dude who boasted about killing Osama bin Laden while running for mayor of Miami Beach. He missed his own election after getting jailed for swinging a six-foot flagpole at black people on a public bus. A flagpole! What a patriot.

Herman lost, of course, but the guy who won was an even bigger bully. Philip Levine spent a small fortune — roughly $2 million — to win a job that pays just ten grand a year. He's like a tropical, totally not handsome version of Leo DiCaprio in that Great Gatsby movie. Only there's not even a hot chick he's trying to bang. Levine dropped $354 for every vote he won by buying TV ads and treating old people to free punch, pie, and salsa music.

Attaboy, Phil! Making it rain on those wrinkles like senior night at the strip club.


Your father sounds like the type of guy who made you watch him kill small forest animals with his bare hands when you were a child. He probably didn't even wash up before dinner. I'd tell you to go see a psychiatrist, but you'd just flip my desk and try to dry-hump my sister.

As for your list, well, it's a tad full of criminals. Rick Scott may have escaped the clink, but his band of merry mayors won't. Levine bought himself an island, but that doesn't mean he's legit.

Besides, the politicians you mentioned are part of the problem, not some superhero solution. Across North America, politicians are abusing the bully pulpit, from serial dick-pic-sender Anthony Weiner to compulsive fur-coat-consumer Jesse Jackson Jr. to the crack-smoking, prostitute-loving mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. These liars belong in jail, not on a best-of list.

These scumbags set a terrible example. They show that bullying is not only OK but also the way to get ahead. No wonder kids are taking the message to heart. In Polk County, two teenage girls bullied 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick until she killed herself in a cement factory. One of them later posted on Facebook: "Yes, I bullied Rebecca and she killed herself but I don't give a fuck." Somehow, prosecutors still dropped the charges last month.

In Hollywood, two angelic-looking teens attacked their own friend because the girls were "beefing." They restrained, beat, and taunted the poor 15-year-old as she was raped by a male gang member on video. Then they let their bloodied victim stumble around the neighborhood looking for help.

Here in Miami, Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity brothers at Florida International University posted nude photos of women they had slept with for one another to see on Facebook. One member posted a pic of a woman wearing a Pike shirt next to the caption: "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GIVEN FATTYS OUR SHIRTS!!!!! THEY WEAR THEM!!!!!" The frat brothers also boasted about hazing pledges and pranking other houses by putting pig heads on their doors. Even after New Times broke the story, however, FIU cops declined to make arrests.


Like the FIU frat bros, Florida's most infamous bully escaped justice this year. George Zimmerman stalked unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin before fatally shooting him in the chest. Yet a jury acquitted the self-appointed neighborhood watchman of murder in July because of Florida's insane Stand Your Ground legislation.

Since then, Zimmerman has gone off the deep end. He's been pulled over three times for speeding, once with a gun in the glove compartment. And on November 18, his new girlfriend called 911 to say Zimmerman had smashed her coffee table and pointed a shotgun at her head. When police arrested him, he had five guns on him, including an AR-15.

Zimmerman is the worst kind of bully: one backed by bullets and barristers. After all, it was the National Rifle Association that crafted Stand Your Ground here in 2005. Not only does the NRA own the Florida Legislature, but it also has your boy Rick Scott in its pocket. No wonder Scott shot down the Dream Defenders by refusing to reconsider the law.

Federal agents pinch our personal info like schoolyard bullies shaking down kids for lunch money. Power-hungry politicians play constituents for fools. What other crooks do you have on your list, Richie?

Another letter arrived. This one, at least, was on paper — a weathered, water-stained (or what we hope was water) copy of the NFL Rule Book. The section "Unnecessary Roughness" was highlighted in blood red. "Personal foul" was adorned with a winking smiley face. And scribbled next to a paragraph about locker-room etiquette was the phrase "Mangina time!"

On the back cover, under a hand-drawn diagram of the Rich-around, Incognito had written his rebuttal:

George Zimmerman! How could I have forgotten him? My brothah from anothah mothah! Pudgy, violent, and without remorse, just like me. After his acquittal, that dude would come over to my place in Fort Lauderdale. We'd get shitfaced, play Call of Duty, I'd call him a "half-Mexican" (or Peruvian, whatever), and we'd end up punching each other until we passed out.

You can rag on Zimmerman all you want, but he wasn't the only bully with a gun and a badge to make it big this year. Far from it. Cops left more bruises on 2013 than a Dirty Harry interrogation. And they did it by borrowing from my playbook: harassing brothers and blindsiding opponents.

In New York, cops have been stopping and frisking people — well, black people — for years without a problem. But then, this August, a federal judge got all riled up over something called "racial profiling." What are cops supposed to do? Arrest anybody who flips a desk, starts a bar fight, uses a golf club to sexually assault a woman, or harasses his co-workers? C'mon.

Now this sappy political correctness has even spread to my own neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale. Thanks to New Times, cops are in trouble for pulling over black guys on bicycles. Ever since you wrote your exposé "Biking While Black" showing that Fort Lauderdale Police use bike registration laws to hassle minorities, the police have begun stopping — wait for it — nonminorities!

Don't worry. They won't bother me. It has nothing to do with me being white or a hulking NFL lineman. It's because I don't ride bikes. They're for poor people. You know what's not for poor people? Bentleys. And I've got plenty of those. Black ones too. See? I'm not a racist.

Another casualty of the PC brigade was Miami Gardens Chief Matthew Boyd. So what if his officers were caught on camera arresting innocent black gas station employees a couple (hundred) times. That Quickstop is in the ghetto! That's just what you do in the ghetto: arrest black people. Right? And so what if none of the cops is black? Or if they rifled through the store without a search warrant? You bleeding-heart liberals call that "shredding the Constitution." My boy Boyd calls it "proactive policing."

Speaking of being proactive, guess what happens nowadays when a cop chases down a fugitive and arrests him? He gets shit for doing his job. That's what happened to Miami Beach Officer Jorge Mercado in August. Granted, the fugitive was really just an 18-year-old graffiti artist named Israel Hernandez. And Mercado might not have needed to Taser the kid to arrest him. And, oh yeah, Hernandez died because of the stun gun. Minor detail.


The good news, however, is that Mercado is back on patrol! So don't let these little hiccups get you down, Blue! What would my bully list be like without you?


Bad cops. Bad criminals. Bad politicians. All bullies. But what about sports stars like you? You guys are celebrities and millionaires, yet you keep treating Florida like it's your personal pissing mat. Nobody is more responsible for what went wrong this year than you.

First, there is Florida State University football phenom Jameis Winston. In November, news broke that he'd been accused of raping a drunk FSU student in Tallahassee in 2012. Cops bungled the investigation for a year. Then, earlier this month, prosecutors suddenly dropped charges against the star quarterback for a "lack of evidence." Some media outlets stooped to suggesting the victim simply had loose morals. Incredibly, Winston emerged as the Seminoles' scandal-seasoned leader and won the Heisman. He may have outrun justice, but that statue is forever coated in sleaze.

This was also the year New Times exposed an even greater sports scandal: the massive steroid operation still staining America's pastime. This newspaper outed baseball superstars including Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colón, Nelson Cruz, and the $275 million man himself, Alex Rodriguez, as clients of a shady Coral Gables clinic called Biogenesis.

When we broke the news that A-Rod and others had been receiving illegal performance-enhancing drugs from Biogenesis chief Tony Bosch, the players all denied knowing the fake doctor. A-Rod, in particular, came out swinging (and missing). He hired a legion of lawyers, filed a handful of lawsuits, and took to the airwaves to angrily deny juicing. But his big-league bloviating and bullying didn't work. MLB still banned him for a record 211 games. The other players named in New Times' report received 50-game suspensions.


















"And that's my point. You can call me a bully. But I'm what you've made me — just like the cops and criminals and politicians you complain about. Want to toughen up a rookie? I'm your man. Block 300-pound defensive linebackers who want to run train on Ryan Tannehill? I'll do it. But don't expect me to be Mother Fucking Teresa as soon as the fourth quarter ends.

"Besides, unless we embarrass some sponsor or create a scandal on ESPN, y'all don't really give a crap what happens to us ballplayers anyway," Richie said, slugging back a tumbler of Wild Turkey and tossing the glass over his shoulder into the sand. "You don't care if we're concussed out of our minds or end up shooting ourselves in the chest so scientists can figure out what's wrong with our heads. You only want to know about our injuries when you might lose money in your fantasy football league."

Richie stood up in the hot tub completely naked, now wagging more than one shriveled, pale kielbasa.

"It's not just football, either. South Florida is built upon shit like this, like a swamp. You don't ask where the money for skyscrapers or art museums comes from; you just smile and throw a party. Then you act surprised when some corrupt politician goes to jail.

"You need bullies like me because we do the dirty work that lets you stay clean," he said, pointing a pickled finger at the camera. "So that Ryan Tannehill stays pretty and sells shampoo. And so that you get a good show on Sunday."

Richie slumped back into the hot tub, grabbed another glass, and flashed his $4 million-a-year grin.

"See you dildos next season."

Alvaro Diaz-Rubio

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