Charles Albert Crespo

Al Crespo, a long-time investigator and public critic of the Florida film industry and its
machinations in Tallahassee, as well as public corruption in the City of Miami, and who
through his blog The Crespogram for 10 years exposed official ineptitude and
malfeasance, died August 16 at his home in Miami Shores at the age of 80.
Born in Havana, Cuba on December 24, 1941 to Albert and Alice Crespo, he was the last
of the two direct descendants of the earliest families to settle of Key West in 1816-17. He
was also the grandson of Pablo Crespo-Perez, an honored Cuban Revolutionary hero
from the Spanish-American War. He will be buried in Key West's historic cemetery
among his family.
Prior to returning to Miami in 1984, he spent 20+ years in state and federal prisons for
armed robbery and armed bank robbery. Upon his return, he was fortunate to find a
new life working in the South Florida film industry, in no small part because the film
industry functions on merit and not on resumes. For nearly 30 years he worked his way
up from a production assistant to line producing and production managing for almost
100 TV commercials, as well as scores of music videos. This work gave him the
opportunity to work with some of the most creative and talented actors and musicians of
the last 30 years including Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and World Music Award winners.
In 1998, seeking a new creative challenge, Crespo undertook a multi-year project
reporting and documenting social unrest across America. In this effort, he also worked
as a contract photographer for the Associated Press. His project resulted in the
publication of a coffee-table photo book, Protest In The Land of Plenty.
While covering the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, Crespo was shot with
rubber bullets several times in the head by Los Angeles police. He became the lead
plaintiff in the federal lawsuit Crespo et al. vs. Los Angeles Police Department, the
American Civil Liberties Union case that set new guidelines for how police deal with the
news media during protests and demonstrations.
In 2010, in response to newly-elected Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado's firing the City's
film commissioner and replacing him with an incompetent political appointee, he
launched The Crespogram Newsletter. It did not take Crespo long to discover, like
others before him, that Miami City Hall was a festering hotbed of malfeasance and
public corruption.
Crespo soon earned a reputation for breaking news stories that mainstream media
ignored, including an alleged $400,000 bribe offered to then-Mayor Regalado by then-
Miami Police Chief Miguel Esposito in 2011, the theft of 11 revolvers from the Police
Department's "secure" facility in 2016, and the Department's use of a rotting storage
container under Interstate 95 in downtown Miami to store police evidence
Perhaps Crespo's most significant accomplishment was informing the community not
only about the almost daily corruption at Miami City Hall, but making the exposure
possible by mastering the process of accessing public records. He was relentless in the
pursuit of public records: In 2017, the Downtown Development Authority, an agency of
the City of Miami, agreed to settle a lawsuit for public records by paying Crespo's
attorneys $10,000.
In November 2020, as a result of the pandemic and the discovery that he had inoperable
liver cancer, Crespo announced his retirement. In the last months of his life he crafted
several episodes of what he hoped would become a dramatic television series based on
the stories he had written in the Crespogram Newsletter. With suggestions from several
close friends, he agreed to give the series the working title It's Miami, Bitches!, the tag
line that ended so many of his posted stories.
Crespo never ceased to understand and appreciate the trust that so many Miami city
employees – especially police officers – demonstrated in support of his efforts to
uncover corruption via the silent and essential contributions they made by providing
him papers, audio tapes and first-hand information on how the City's bureaucracy
functioned.
While he might have been a bank robber earlier in life, Crespo never flinched from that
reality through to his final days. When politicians whom he exposed attempted to
discredit him, he would remind them: "Yes, that's true, but unlike you, I wore a mask."
There will be no memorial service. In lieu of flowers, Crespo requested everyone vote at
every opportunity. "Remember, we still live in a democracy." he said. "Evil and
corruption exist not only in Miami but throughout the nation, and the votes of caring
citizens is democracy's best protection."