Thomas Barr Jr.'s Blog, page 10
July 10, 2015
Counter to Breast Cancer
Arrests of 3 Mayors Reinforce Florida���s Notoriety as a Hothouse for Corruption
Story by Nick Madigan
HOMESTEAD,
Fla. — Even by Florida standards, the arrests of three suburban Miami mayors on corruption charges within a month were a source of dismay, if not exactly a surprise.
On
Wednesday, Steven C. Bateman, 58, the mayor of Homestead, was arrested. He is accused of accepting under-the-table payments from a health care company that sought to build a clinic in town, the state attorney’s office for Miami-Dade County said. Mr.
Bateman was turned in by City Council members and staff, said employees interviewed Friday at City Hall.
On Aug. 6, Manuel L. Maroño, 41, the mayor of Sweetwater
and president of the Florida League of Cities, and Michael A. Pizzi, 51, the Miami Lakes mayor, were picked up along with two lobbyists. The United States attorney’s office has
accused them of involvement in kickback and bribery schemes concerning federal grants.
Prosecutors said Mr. Maroño had received more than
$40,000 in bribes and Mr. Pizzi $6,750. The defendants, who were targets of an F.B.I. sting operation, are charged with “conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right” and could face 20 years in prison if convicted.
Gov. Rick Scott suspended all three mayors while the criminal cases proceed.
“We bought the trifecta,”
said Carla Miller, the ethics officer for Jacksonville and a former federal prosecutor. “It’s bad when three mayors get led out in handcuffs. What’s left of the public trust gets ground into little pieces.”
Not that such situations are unusual in Florida, which led the country in convictions of public officials — 781 — between 2000 and 2010, according to Department of Justice figures.
“Florida has become the corruption capital of America,” said Dan Krassner, the executive director of a watchdog group, Integrity
Florida, citing statistics going back to 1976 and the “significant number of public officials arrested this year and last.”
Florida, and especially Miami
and its environs, has long had a reputation as a place where the odd and the eccentric mix with the furtive and the felonious. Last century, organized crime figures from Chicago and New York set up lucrative gambling, extortion and loan-sharking endeavors
in Miami Beach and elsewhere, and beginning in the 1980s, South Florida’s economy, culture and reputation were transformed by drug trafficking.
With so much money
sloshing about, it was perhaps inevitable that a parade of officials would enrich themselves illicitly at the public trough.
One was Alex Daoud, who in 1985 became the
mayor of Miami Beach and six years later was indicted on 41 counts of bribery. He served 18 months in prison, and has since written a memoir.
Last year in Miami Beach,
City Manager Jorge Gonzalez, who was making $273,000 a year and had been mired in a web of investigations, was forced to step down after seven of his employees were arrested in a federal corruption investigation. His six-figure pension remained intact.
The arrests of the three Miami-Dade mayors followed news in July that the Securities and Exchange Commission had charged the City of Miami and one of its former budget directors with securities fraud, only a few years after the commission reprimanded the city for similar
behavior. In May, a former mayor of Hialeah, Julio Robaina, and his wife, Raiza, were charged with failing to report income from high-interest loans totaling more than $1 million that they had made under an informal system involving friends and associates.
The Robainas said they were innocent.
Photo
In 2011, in the largest municipal recall election in the country, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos Alvarez,
was removed from office after he gave large pay raises to close aides and then pushed for a significant increase in property taxes.
This year, the State Legislature approved two ethics bills and six that focus on government transparency and accountability — the first time in 36 years that state lawmakers had passed ethics
legislation. Mr. Krassner and others think legislators could do more. But many people seem resigned to the prevalence of officials who appear oblivious to ethical boundaries.
“They
get drunk on power,” said Katy Sorenson, who served on the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners for 16 years and runs the Good Government Initiative at the University of Miami, which educates elected officials about ethics and related issues.
“There’s a certain psychology to some of the people who run for office here — they don’t think they’re going down the
wrong track, but there’s a slippery slope,” she added. “There’s a lack of self-awareness, an immaturity, a brazenness, of feeling like a big shot. So when they’re arrested, they’re very surprised.”
The persistence of political malfeasance — often involving the stereotypical envelopes stuffed with cash, delivered with knowing nods — perplexes those for whom public service is a noble
calling.
“Maybe it’s the heat,” said Ruth Campbell, 93, a former City Council member here and the curator of the Historic Homestead Town Hall Museum.
Mrs. Campbell, who has lived in town since 1942, was sadly aware of Florida’s reputation as a haven for corruption. “We like to be distinguished,” she
said, “but not like that.”
Prosecutors said Mr. Bateman, among other things, had failed to disclose that the health care company, Community Health of South
Florida Inc., secretly agreed to pay him $120,000 over a year to lobby on its behalf. By the time he was arrested, he had accepted $3,625, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said.
After
the mayor’s arrest, a City Council member, Judy Waldman, told reporters, “I have zero tolerance for people using their public office to make money.” Ms. Waldman, who referred to Mr. Bateman only as “that individual,” said his
activities on behalf of Community Health Care of South Florida were “just the tip of the iceberg,” and encouraged prosecutors to dig deeper.
Mr. Bateman’s
lawyer, Ben Kuehne, told The Associated Press that his client was “shocked” by his arrest and had “served the community for many years in an honest, dependable manner.”
At City Hall on Friday, in a frame that contained photos of city officials, Mr. Bateman’s likeness had been concealed behind a paper copy of the city’s crest. But a day earlier, a group of his supporters rallied a couple
blocks away, and Mr. Bateman, out on bond, showed up, shook hands and vowed to fight the charges.
June 26, 2015
Hispanic Vote
Entrepreneurs Pay Day!
Jesse Jackson, Jr. to be released from prison Thursday 3/26/15, Kennedy says
Story by Jeremy Diamond and AnneClaire Stapleton
Former congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. is set to be released Thursday
3/26/15 from prison, and transferred to a Washington, D.C., halfway house, friend and former Rep. Patrick Kennedy told CNN.
Jackson has been serving his 30-month sentence at a federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama
for the past year, said Kennedy, who visited Jackson in prison Monday.
"His wife and two children and parents are picking him up," Kennedy told CNN on Tuesday.
Jackson pleaded guilty to federal
charges in February 2013, admitting he diverted about $750,000 in campaign funds for his personal use. His wife also pleaded guilty to federal charges and will begin serving her one-year sentence after Jackson is released from federal custody.
The
two were authorized to serve their sentence separately because they have young children.
Jackson, a former Democratic congressman from Chicago, was national co-chairman of then-Sen. Barack Obama's 2008 campaign committee.
He resigned from Congress after the allegations erupted, citing physical and mental health issues, including bipolar disorder.
Kennedy said he thought Jackson still had several more "weeks or months" left in his sentence and
was visiting Jackson in prison "to let him know he still had friends who were here for him when he got out."
But Jackson told Kennedy during the visit that he was being released earlier than anticipated.
"He
said Patrick 'I'm gonna be getting out sooner than I thought, getting out this Thursday at 5 a.m.,'" Kennedy recalled.
Jackson's lawyer and family have not yet returned requests for comment.
Jackson's
father is civil rights activist and one-time presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson.
June 12, 2015
Corey Booker
New York Senate Leader and Son Are Arrested on Corruption Charges
State Senator Dean G. Skelos of Long Island and his son, Adam B. Skelos, arrived at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Manhattan on Monday morning. Credit Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Story by Susanne Craig
ALBANY — Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son were arrested on Monday by federal authorities on extortion, fraud and bribe solicitation charges, expanding the
corruption investigation that has cast a renewed spotlight on Albany’s intractable corruption problem.
The charges against Senator Skelos, 67, and his son, Adam
B. Skelos, 32, were detailed in a six-count criminal complaint that quickly became mandatory reading material in the Capitol building. Politicians and their staff members pored over the 43-page complaint — an often titillating document that included
references to burner phones, secretly taped conversations and strong-arm tactics that were on display even during the wake of a slain police officer.
Senator Skelos,
a Republican from Long Island, was accused of taking official actions to benefit a small Arizona environmental company, AbTech Industries, and a large New York developer, Glenwood Management, that had financial ties to AbTech. Senator Skelos agreed to do so, according to the complaint, as long as the companies paid his son.
The arrests came just months after federal bribery and kickback charges led Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, to
step down from his position as speaker.
Mr. Skelos said on Monday that he was innocent of the charges against him, and Senate Republicans on Monday night backed
his decision to remain in his leadership position. Still, the Senate corridors here were aflutter Monday with whispers about possible successors.
Senator Skelos’s
arrest also raised the inevitable question of who federal prosecutors might target next.
For more than a year now, Preet
Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, which oversaw the cases against both Mr. Silver and Mr. Skelos, has been waging a public campaign against corruption in Albany. Mr. Bharara has criticized the capital’s closed-door
culture and its tradition of how deals are often made by Albany’s “three men in a room,” referring to the governor, the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader.
In 2014, when Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo abruptly shut down a commission that
he had established to root out wrongdoing and bring reform to Albany, Mr. Bharara started an investigation into the decision to disband the panel and publicly asked whether the governor had “bargained away” corruption investigations as part of
a deal with lawmakers.
On Monday, Mr. Bharara, who has been criticized
for grandstanding, restricted his comments to Senator Skelos and his son.
“Dean Skelos’s support for certain infrastructure projects and legislation
was often based not on what was good for his constituents or good for New York, but rather on what was good for his son’s bank account,” Mr. Bharara said, announcing the charges with Diego Rodriguez, the head of the New York office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.
In a brief court proceeding in Manhattan, a federal magistrate judge, Henry B. Pitman, ordered both men released with certain conditions. Senator
Skelos’s lawyer, G. Robert Gage Jr., told the judge, “I can’t imagine anyone having deeper roots in the community” than his client.
Outside
court, Senator Skelos said that he would be exonerated.
“I know that I will be found not only not guilty but innocent,” he said. “I have absolute confidence
and respect for our judicial system here in the United States of America, and utmost respect for our judges and our juries. And that’s why I will be found innocent and my son will,” too, he said.
Adam Skelos’s lawyer, Christopher P. Conniff, said, “Adam Skelos is not guilty of these charges and looks forward to fighting them in the courtroom.”
The case against Senator Skelos and his son grew out of a broad federal investigation focused
on the younger man’s business dealings, some of which were reported last month by The New York Times, including payments that AbTech made to Adam Skelos over the course of several years.
AbTech sells spongelike filters to remove pollutants from storm water. The complaint says that from late 2010 through 2012, Senator Skelos pressured Glenwood to direct commissions to his son. The developer complied and arranged for
Adam Skelos to receive almost $200,000 from AbTech.
In 2013, when Nassau County was considering awarding AbTech a contract that the senator was
supporting behind the scenes, Adam Skelos told a cooperating witness that his father believed his compensation should be increased, and that if it was not, they would seek to block the contract. The county awarded the contract, worth as much as $12 million,
to AbTech. Adam Skelos’s monthly installments jumped to $10,000 from $4,000.
The complaint portrays Senator Skelos as eager to use his political influence to generate
income for his son, who has worked in recent years as a title insurance salesman. For example, the senator repeatedly urged a senior Glenwood executive to direct title insurance business to his son, according to the complaint. The executive ended up arranging
for a title insurance company to make a $20,000 payment to Adam Skelos, disguised as a commission, even though he did no work for the money, the complaint says.
Adam
Skelos made little secret of his father’s efforts to help his business interests. Frustrated that Nassau County was not acting promptly enough to pay AbTech, Adam Skelos suggested his father would retaliate. “I tell you this, the state is not going
to do a [expletive] thing for the county,” he said on a recorded phone call in December.
As for Senator Skelos, the complaint says that he promoted and voted for
legislation beneficial to Glenwood, and tried to secure changes to the state’s most recent budget that would have benefited AbTech.
It seems clear from another
secretly recorded conversation cited in the complaint that Adam Skelos’s work with AbTech had little to do with his environmental expertise. In the conversation, recorded in February by a senior AbTech official after he began cooperating with investigators,
Mr. Skelos acknowledged that he became a consultant for the company even though he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff.”
The
senior executive at Glenwood, who was deeply involved in the company’s political activities and campaign contributions, was also cooperating with federal authorities, according to the complaint. Alan Levine, a lawyer for Glenwood Management, declined
to comment on the complaint.
A spokeswoman for AbTech, Lisa Linden, said the company “is cooperating and will continue to cooperate with federal authorities.”
Dean and Adam Skelos were each charged with two counts of extortion under the color of official
right and two counts of solicitation of bribes and gratuities, with one count of each crime alleged in relation to Glenwood and one each in relation to AbTech. Both men are also charged with conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to commit honest
services wire fraud.
