Carmel Cafiero, who exposed corruption in Miami for more than 40 years, dies at 76

When Carmel Cafiero became WSVN’s first female journalist on the air at Channel 7 and on her way to becoming a local legendary investigative reporter, two other famed investigative reporters were about to reveal events that would lead to the resignation of a U.S. president.

The time was 1973. Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were about to reveal the Nixon administration’s attempts to cover up its involvement in the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. Within a year, Richard Nixon would become the first, and only, president to resign from the office of the presidency.

Cafiero, like millions of other Americans was watching. And, as a young reporter in Miami, she was learning.

Also in 1973, the country, stalled by an oil embargo energy crisis, saw stewing drivers spilling out of gas station lines snaking down South Florida streets like the neighborhood of then-NBC affiliate WCKT Channel 7 on North Bay Village.

This was the challenging world and the streets Cafiero navigated to find her way through that TV station’s doors as a reporter in a male-dominated profession. WCKT would later become Fox affiliate WSVN.

“Our tenacious investigative reporter Carmel Cafiero passed away Friday morning. During her 43 years at 7 News, Carmel’s passion, persistence and pointed questions set the standard for journalism in South Florida,” said Alice Jacobs, vice president of news and local programming for WSVN, in a statement provided to the Miami Herald.

Cafiero was 76 and died at her home in Slidell, Louisiana, where she had moved after her retirement in 2016, her daughter Courtney Howell said.

Cafiero blazed trails

In a newsroom world of Woodwards and Bernsteins — men — Cafiero was the first on-air woman hired by Channel 7.

“There was agitation for women to be represented in the industry. The feeling was that [the station] needed a woman,” Cafiero told the Miami Herald in 2016, when, after more than 40 years at the station, Cafiero finally retired from her role as an investigative journalist.

“When I came to work there, the only other woman at the newsroom was the secretary,” Cafiero told the Herald.

In the less enlightened working culture of the early 1970s, Cafiero said she encountered occasional episodes of sexism at the Miami station. There were sniffed comments like “Can I expect that you won’t get pregnant?”

Cafiero was undaunted. Her talents soon silenced such whispered asides. She had a mission.

“The thing that I find rewarding about my work is informing people, and if by informing people we can avoid one person from being hurt or taken in, then it’s a success,” Cafiero said in one of her WSVN investigations.

“Carmel joined Channel 7, then called WCKT, in 1973 as a reporter — the first female journalist at our station. I know those of us who worked with Carmel feel so lucky to have learned from her and as a woman, I’m grateful for the road she paved,” Jacobs said.

On Friday, WSVN aired a tribute to Cafiero that recounted some of her many achievements as an investigative journalist.

Cafiero’s family role

“They did such an amazing piece on her and her amazing career. All of the milestones. Trailblazer. Being the first woman of this and the first woman of that. And her amazing career. But what South Florida never knew was the other side of her and just what an amazing wife, mother and grandmother she was,” Howell, Cafiero’s daughter, told the Herald on Saturday in a telephone interview.

“Just as fierce as she protected the people of South Florida, she loved us as fiercely. She was an amazing person inside and out. And I just don’t think South Florida, obviously, ever got to see that part,” Howell said.

They didn’t get to see the mother and the grandmother who loved fishing with her daughter and granddaughters in Miami Shores. The fishing trips with family to the Keys that will resonate in warm, private family conversations for years to come.

“Just a couple months ago, my daughter went on a fishing trip with my mom and her husband and caught some big, beautiful redfish and it’s a lasting memory that my daughter will always have,” Howell said.

“Fishing was a theme in our lives. From the time I can remember Mom’s always taken me fishing. It was something she absolutely loved,” her daughter said. “Whether it was fishing in the Keys for different tournaments to raise money for cystic fibrosis or to raise money every October to spay and neuter feral cats down in the Keys, every year we would fish that tournament.”

Cafiero’s schooling and career

That’s a lighter side of the New Orleans-born Cafiero that viewers over the decades may have missed, such as the time after the September 11th attacks when Cafiero was the first reporter allowed inside terrorist Mohamed Atta’s former Hollywood apartment. Or when she exposed the deception of self-proclaimed celebrity “psychic” Miss Cleo, whose customers were deceived nationwide. Or when she was among Florida’s prominent reporters prodding Miami-Dade County to change its building code after Hurricane Andrew.

There were hints of the lighter side scattered about her life, though.

Cafiero studied at Louisiana State University as an art major. She left school to get married in 1967 and had her first child in 1968.

Cafiero once joked with a Herald reporter, “I went to LSU and I studied football and fraternities.”

But then after building a family, she went to Loyola University and studied communications. There, Cafiero found her public voice, the one she’d wield to hold those in power accountable — a hallmark of her career.

“Not only was she breaking stories, she was breaking ceilings with who she was and the quality of her professionalism,” Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami-Dade state attorney, told 7News.

From radio to TV

Cafiero flexed her voice first at a small Louisiana radio station hosting a show called “Swap Shop” in which people called in to trade items, presumably not their mates. Show producers didn’t let Cafiero use her real name because “it’s too much of a name,” she was told. Instead, she did her first reports as “Diane Lacour.”

She later learned that WAFB-TV, a small station in Baton Rouge, offered two men an on-air job. When they passed, Cafiero rang the TV station’s management and inquired if they’d consider hiring a woman.

She got the job. In 1973, another investigative reporter in Baton Rouge recognized Cafiero’s skills and recommended Cafiero for a job at Miami’s Channel 7.

As WSVN’s script for her tribute reiterated, “Cafiero fearlessly pursued stories that exposed wrongdoing and served the public interest.”

A televised tribute

WSVN shared its televised script with the Herald for her obituary:

In one of Carmel’s first big stories, she wore a wig and went undercover to expose unlicensed doctors who performed abortions and clinic workers who told women they were pregnant when they weren’t. Carmel was told she was pregnant based on a urine sample from her male photographer.

Her investigative work exposed defective Chinese drywall in South Florida homes, dangerous pet jerky treats from China linked to dog deaths, and the sale of used mattresses as new.

In 2008, Cafiero’s reporting unveiled the opioid crisis, with Broward County at its epicenter, WSVN reported.

“It was a scourge on our community. Seven Floridians a day were dying from overdoses,” Al Lamberti, former Broward County Sheriff told the station.

“We have pictures of people snorting, shooting up in this parking lot after coming out of your clinic. I mean, what do you have to say about what’s going on here?” Cafiero once commanded a Broward clinic owner on camera.

“She was always on the case and usually on someone’s tail,” WSVN said of its star investigative reporter.

Cafiero’s favorite story

The story that she told the Herald struck her the most was her Pill Mills piece on the Broward clinic, run in 2010, which won Cafiero an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a prestigious broadcasting prize.

“These pill mills where handing out drugs like you wouldn’t believe. People were coming from Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, driving down here carloads at a time to get these prescription drugs, such as oxycodone. Nobody had done any stories on them,” Cafiero reflected upon her retirement.

“Her opioid series led to the prosecution of clinic operators and doctors,” WSVN said in its broadcast. Her work not only won awards but also contributed to saving lives and influencing changes in the law, according to the station.

After Hurricane Andrew

But Cafiero’s daughter says at least one of her mother’s televised subjects may well know of Cafiero’s loving side. The one that she’d shower on family off-camera.

After Hurricane Andrew devastated parts of South Miami-Dade in August 1992, Cafiero introduced her WSVN viewers to Selma Shapiro, who was widowed and whose damaged home was infested with rats and pigeons and covered in droppings.

Cafiero’s relentless reporting rallied the South Florida community to help Shapiro survive.

“I didn’t realize that people actually cared about me. I thought no one cared about me, but I found out differently,” Shapiro told Cafiero when the Hurricane Andrew segment was first broadcast 31 years ago, WSVN reported.

“Mom was able to get people from South Florida to pull together to really redo her house — new appliances, new furniture and everything — to change this woman’s life,” Howell said. “So Selma would be one of those people in South Florida who would know the loving side of mom and not not the one ‘chasing me down the street’ with the microphone because you’re running away from the truth.”

Survivors, services

Cafiero’s survivors include her husband, Robert Gordon, daughter Courtney Howell and two granddaughters, Mariah and Melanie. Her family will hold services Thursday in Louisiana. A public memorial has yet to be determined.