Judges, Lawyers, And Chickens -- At Dade County Courthouse, Santeria Offerings Are Part Of Daily Docket

MIAMI - It was a day like any other at the Dade County Courthouse - the judge on the bench, the jury in the box, the lawyer in the hall, the dead chicken on the steps.

This is Miami, and if a defendant wants a little help as the wheels of justice spin, it is not unusual to make an offering to Chango, Ochosi and Elegua, which is not a local law firm but a trio of powerful gods worshiped in the Afro-Caribbean religion known as Santeria.

So no one here thought it strange that someone had left a gift on the courthouse steps. Indeed, it happens so often that a special detail of maintenance men, known informally as the "voodoo squad," is dispatched each morning to corners and corridors around the courthouse to search for goat heads or lizards with their mouths wrapped tight or colored eggs with judges' or prosecutors' names written on them.

On this particular morning in May, a security guard was summoned. This is his report:

"I arrived on the scene and observed the item to be a white paper bag with red chickens painted on it." There were two holes in the bag, "with what seemed to be a flower or rose sticking out of one of the holes." Near the bag were three $1 bills and 95 cents in change. "Inside was a white plastic plate, some type of plants and some type of dead feathered bird."

The report concludes, "The bag was tossed in the nearest trash can."

"Dead feathered bird," says Elizabeth Timpson, the courthouse building manager. "I love that description. It was probably a chicken. But maybe not. Sometimes it's a little bird or a dove or a rooster.

"Once I remember, and I didn't even open up the bag, but I think it was a turkey. The feet were enormous. Either it was a turkey or a chicken on some kind of powerful hormones."

For years, defendants or their relatives or associates have been leaving sacrificial offerings at the Dade courthouse, a hulking, seven-story concrete building aswirl in major and minor intrigues.

The practice apparently boomed during the 1980s, when a parade of drug traffickers moved through the criminal-justice system. It is widely believed that those involved in smuggling and selling drugs prefer not to simply abandon their fates to "white-powder attorneys" in double-breasted Armani suits, but to plead for help as well from the forces of Santeria or its religious cousins, such as Haitian voodoo, Brazilian umbanda or West Indian obeah.

Not too long ago, says Judge Harvey Baxter, who works at another courthouse in North Dade County, "we found a baby goat's head wrapped in a bloody towel inside a brown paper bag." Inside the goat's head was a white herring. No one contacted for this story is sure what the herring meant.

Baxter has also found candles and coins in his courtroom. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm really in the United States," he says.

Timpson estimates that offerings are left almost weekly on the Dade County courthouse steps or in "Chicken Lane," a road that separates the courthouse from the county jail, and at least two or three times a year someone actually leaves an offering in a courtroom.

"The judges hate the voodoo powder," Timpson says, "so we vacuum it up as soon as we find it." The powder is said to be created by writing down the names of judges or prosecutors or snitches and burning the paper with plants or twigs.

It is not known how many people here believe in Santeria and its related religions. But Rigoberto Zamora, a high priest or babalawo, who is also president of the International Union of the Yoruba Religion Rights in Little Havana, guesses that tens of thousands of citizens in Miami practice Santeria, including, as he likes to say, "many doctors, lawyers, business people and politicians, many whose names you would know."