Dead air - closing down 'pirate' radio stations in Florida

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Michael W. Lynch

When the FCC shuts down pirate broadcasters, it sometimes unplugs whole communities too.

It's a routine afternoon at the Pure Funk Playhouse in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood: A couple of DJs are hanging out in the shade of a Ryder truck after a morning's work - a pro bono "Stop the Violence" assembly at a nearby middle school. Classes are done for the day, and a few local teenagers and other hangers-on are sitting in the doorway, waiting for a local dance team's daily drills to start. A few feet away, a disheveled man crunches by on a bicycle, apparently unconcerned that his rear wheel lacks a rubber tire.

Until a year ago, there would have been one more activity going on - a live broadcast from Hot 97, (97.7 FM) - and about 50 more kids hanging out. Sometime between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. each day, Brindley Marshall, aka "Bo the Lover," would have slipped behind the microphone for his afternoon show, mixing the latest jams for his younger listeners with oldies for their parents. When circumstances warranted, he would use the station for live call-in talk about the issues of the day. A police officer might stop by to "shout out" to a wife or girlfriend or to deliver a message for Bo to pass on to his young, sometimes volatile listeners.

But early on July 28, 1998, just as the sun peaked over the abandoned bank facing the playhouse, one of the station's DJs looked up and saw a mass of cops approaching. They were from the federal government, and they were there to help - help themselves to Hot 97's equipment, that is.

Hot 97 was caught in a Federal Communications Commission crackdown that closed 13 South Florida "pirate" radio stations between July 27 and July 31. FCC Chairman William Kennard hailed it as the "most successful, large-scale, enforcement action against unlicensed operators to date." Before the year was over, Kennard's cops would shutter another 21 stations in the area. The closed outlets ranged from the youth-oriented jams pumped out by Bo and his DJs in Miami to the all-gospel sound that Willie Brown Sr. had been airing in rural Homestead for 13 years.

Kennard, concerned with broadcast diversity, is making noise about licensing low-power radio stations and has proposed licensing them even as he has been shutting them down. Established broadcasters oppose his proposal through their Washington lobbying arm, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the idea is meeting resistance on the Hill. (See "Radio Waves," June.) In a May address to the NAB, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman and presidential hopeful John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked, "What possible diversity interest is advanced and what kind of opportunity is created by manufacturing thousands of new radio stations in an already overpopulated, transitional market?"

Both of these Florida stations, neither particularly unique among "pirate" broadcasters, answer McCain's question and vindicate Kennard's belief that micro radio is diverse radio, both in ethnicity and in programming. These Florida operations were in fact community tools, black-owned and operated businesses that served listeners otherwise being neglected.

There's not a lot to look forward to in Liberty City - a riot-prone neighborhood just north of downtown Miami that is distinguished by its vacant, trash-strewn lots and boarded-up buildings, some decorated with spray-painted "R.I.P." remembrances. The area's main commerce appears to be barber shops, small churches, laundromats, mom-and-pop groceries, and drugs. "It's the drug den of Miami," confirms one local activist who operates a teen pregnancy center across the street from the project where she grew up.

Even the feds are scared of the neighborhood. One of the officials who sleuthed out Bo's signal claimed in an affidavit that he didn't take any signal measurements at the time of a phoned-in complaint "due to the dangerous environment of the neighborhood where the station is located."

If the agent hadn't been so scared, he could have found the station without spending much of the taxpayers' money: The call numbers and telephone number are painted in large orange, white, silver, and black letters on the building's bright red, white, and yellow exterior. "Why try to hide?" asks Bo. "We didn't think we was doing anything wrong."

Not that Bo has never done wrong. He first made the papers at age a 21, when he held a gun to a bailiffs head in a Miami courtroom where his brother was standing trial. The courthouse soon got metal detectors; Bo got 12 years in state prison. But he emerged five years later, in 1989, determined to turn his life around. And by all measures he did. Starting with a new set of clothes, $100 release money, and a bus ticket back to Liberty City, Bo built a DJ business one piece of equipment at a time, playing at weddings and parties and producing his own dances at the local National Guard Armory.

"We started with a cheap system," says Bo. "You give me two speakers and come back a month from now and I'll have 10. Because I can make things happen. That's just the way it is." Today Bo owns nearly 200 speakers, enough equipment to keep 15 parties in music simultaneously.