Although New York's Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project gave the Miami Beach houseboat caretaker, Fernando Carreira, a promised $10,000 reward after he discovered Cunanan in hiding, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani refused to give a similar promised reward reportedly causing even Howard Stern to blast City Hall's bad faith on this account.

Mayor Giuliani is widely known to be cop-friendly, too friendly currently to meet the extreme challenges created by an overactive police brutality battalion working "overtime" under his administration.

The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, commenting on Thursday's (August 14) front page story, explained how two police officers (Justin Volpe--with yet possibly others on his watch, including fellow officer Thomas Bruder, 31) were charged with criminally torturing a captive by "yanking down his trousers and driving the wooden handle of a toilet plunger so far into his rectum it punctured his small intestine and damaged his bladder. The filthy handle was then driven into (the captive male's) mouth with enough force to break his teeth."

Throughout Wednesday, says the Times front page news article, the Mayor's comments "seemed to support at least some of the allegations leveled" at the victim by police.

Later, however, after both the Mayor and the Police Commissioner visited on Wednesday night at the bedside of the critically injured man (33-year old Abner Louima) Mayor Giuliani quickly changed his tune. All charges were dropped against Louima. Reminded by reporters that he boasts often about how he gives police the benefit of the doubt, he replied, "When I have information that suggests to me that I shouldn't say that, I don't."

The victim Louima, married, has two children. Though he was initially charged with disorderly conduct, obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest, the Mayor, upon eliminating these charges described Louima as "a very dignified and nice man."

Louima had attempted to break up a fight, according to witnesses, and when police intervened he was arrested in the attendant scuffle. On the way to the station in the police car, reportedly, the car was stopped and he was repeatedly beaten before being taken to a bathroom stall in the stationhouse where the phallic-substitute toilet plunger was brutally and repeatedly jabbed into his anus.

Bob Herbert's August 14 Times column was titled "One More Police Victim." and an enhanced quote from his piece asked, "Will Giuliani ever rein in the cops?" Herbert lists a lengthy history of New York's police brutality preceding this most recent example.

"Mayor Giuliani," he says, ""professed to be shocked by the attack. Perhaps he was. But the only thing shocking to most close observers was the grotesque psychosexual nature of the assault."

If Giuliani is finally having to face up to extreme abuses of authority under his reign, he has yet to face up to soon-to-be-declared Miami Beach Mayoral Candidate Bob Kunst, the famed Anita to AIDS activist who is planning a Labor Day trek to Manhattan.

There Kunst plans to hound the New York Mayor as he did Miami Beach's City Hall and to extract from him with bad publicity the promised reward for Fernando Carreira. It was Kunst who collected over 6,200 signatures on a petition that helped persuade Miami Beach police and the FBI that they should fork over the rewards they'd promised the citizenry.

Kunst has already begun, issuing a barrage of his typically startling one-liners aimed directly at the New York City Mayor: "Cheatin' on His Wife...Cheatin' on His Reward! Giuliani's Goons Rape a Refugee...Would You Re-Elect This Bum?"

Kunst told GayToday that he has nearly finalized plans, after consultation with a host of Miami Beach's prominent citizens from all walks of life, to run for the post of Miami Beach Mayor. If he proceeds, it will not be his first campaign.

In 1982, Kunst ran for Governor against now-Senator Bob Graham, and for U.S. Senator against Graham in 1986. In the Senatorial primary he won a remarkable 150,000 votes on a CURE AIDS NOW platform, running with a shoe-string budget of $5,000, a single donation, and using a borrowed pink Mary Kay Caddy that was brandishing a "CURE AIDS NOW" bumper sticker. A vigorous campaigner, Kunst spoke personally to men and women in remote regions like the Florida Panhandle, and succeeded in making a sizable statement about the Florida citizenry's concern over AIDS.

Kunst explained to GayToday that he plans to run directly against Miami Beach's present-day political incompetence, a glaring problem that worries his fellow Beach residents. Having once been given a "Key" to this native city of his, Kunst says he still loves and is proud of his birthplace.

"Some gay business people," he explains, "did not want to support (candidates) Kasdin and Pearlson, identified with overdevelopers, and were considering backing Bob Skidell, who was one of Anita Bryant's key people."

Kunst, during the rise of the orange juice lady's 1977 hate crusade, had debated Skidell on PBS' McNeil/Leher Show. Now he laments, "I can't believe gays would reward Skidell like this and betray everything, forgetting his service to Anita" he said.

Kunst, unlike the other two candidates, says he's had more than enough of catering to the developers, and that he does not want to see a Miami Beach skyline akin to "the mess in Honolulu".

"Lets bring back the wonder and romance of Miami Beach," he says with sincerity, "while still being the sun and fun party capital of the world... and without so much unnecessary chaos by an indifferent and incompetent city government."

During Candidate Kunst's Labor Day visit to The Big Apple, he will, in his indefatigable way, work to call attention to Mayor Giuliani's similar incompetence for opportunistically promising and then cheaply reneging on the 71-year old Cunanan-finder's $10,000 reward."

"The bad publicity surrounding this whole reward issue," will end up costing the Mayor even more," prophecies Bob Kunst.