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03-16-2015, 09:33 PM
If the gang of criminals now holding office in this city think they have pulled the wool over the FBI's eyes they better think again. The huge scandal over Southland Towing is not going away. Both Commissioners Guerra and Orlando Lopez had holdings in Southland Towing corporation; Catalino Rodriguez made the property room his own drug dispensary and bank account and Isolina Marono has rigged every city election in the past ten years. Don't be surprised if those listed will be sitting at a federal penitentiary prior to the election or did you think the sweet deal Mayor Marono got was just coincidence? Keep your toothbrush close by at night criminals.
Sweetwater mayor’s corruption conviction pops lid on a sewer of scandal
BY JAY WEAVER, BRENDA MEDINA AND MELISSA SANCHEZ
Until federal agents began swarming over the city the past several months, Sweetwater seemed as nondescript as its City Hall — a three-story concrete box surrounded by working-class homes and an auto repair shop, tamale stand and passport office down the street.
Now, the tiny West Miami-Dade city is quickly becoming famous for something other than its perennial flooding problems and the quirky fact that it was founded by Russian circus midgets.
The city’s disgraced mayor and a lobbyist crony — both convicted last month in federal court — admitted pocketing $60,000 in kickbacks after getting nailed in an FBI sting operation. But the bust only scratched the surface of a culture of corruption that has infested City Hall, which is shared by Sweetwater officials and the police department.
Federal agents are trying to unravel the tangled tentacles of ex-Mayor Manny Maroño’s association with a towing company, in which he has been a suspected silent partner. The city’s no-bid, verbal agreement with Southland The Towing Company, which state records show the mayor once owned, filled police coffers with wads of cash from fines — funds controlled by the recently resigned police chief, a Maroño ally. Some of that cash, deposited into a postal-type box inside the police department, was found to be missing.
The arrangement also gave Sweetwater and the towing company the opportunity to sell dozens of seized cars at auction. And it gave some police officers the chance to take joy rides in luxury vehicles, including an ultra-sleek Porsche Panamera.
El Nuevo Herald/The Miami Herald, along with CBS4, also found:
• Thousands of dollars in cash are missing from the official police evidence room. The resulting probe has uncovered a second evidence room, this one a secret, in an off-site warehouse filled with confiscated knock-off designer bags and clothes, along with machines for detecting fake currency.
“It was a like a criminal enterprise,” Centeno said. “But now Sweetwater is getting a very aggressive treatment to get rid of that cancer of corruption. And that’s very positive for my city.”
In the near future, the U.S. attorney’s office is expected to charge the three police officers. But the towing investigation, which focuses on possible kickbacks to city officials and police officers in an alleged extortion racket, could lead to other arrests down the road.
The former mayor and his defense lawyers, Armando Rosquete and Kendall Coffey, declined to comment about the feds’ probe of Maroño’s interest in a handful of companies, including Southland The Towing Company and Southeast Towing, Inc. His recent guilty plea to the kickback charge in an agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office does not protect him from potential criminal liability in the towing probe.
Maroño claims he got out of the towing business in 2009, but legal records and sources familiar with the former mayor’s companies say he is a silent investor with “front men” representing his interests.
In the towing probe, Maroño chose not to cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors. The possible reason: He did not want to implicate family members and friends who have been involved in his business and political dealings while he served as mayor from 2003 until his removal from office in August.
Among those close to Maroño: Southland’s current owner, Robert Muriedas; Southland’s former owner, Peter Hernandez; former Southland employee Jose Guerra, a Sweetwater commissioner; and the city’s attorney, Ralph Ventura, who has also represented Southland. And then, of course, there are the ex-mayor’s relatives: his mother, Isolina Maroño, also a city commissioner; his uncle, Antero Espinosa, who recently resigned as the city’s director of maintenance; and Maroño’s wife, Jenny Munoz-Maroño, who works as the city’s coordinator of special projects. The couple, who had been divorced, remarried after his arrest in August.
The scope of the towing probe is significant if a recently filed class-action case against the city is any indication. The suit, filed in Miami federal court, claims that Sweetwater police and officials violated the constitutional rights of more than 100 people whose vehicles were seized, towed and auctioned after the motorists were unlawfully detained on trumped-up charges, such as shoplifting, and required to pay a $500 fine to the city.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Rick Diaz, said the Sweetwater cops mostly targeted drivers whose cars were fully paid off so there would be no hassle clearing titles before Southland and the city sold off the confiscated vehicles.
The city is seeking to dismiss the case. Since the mayor’s kickback scandal rocked City Hall, Sweetwater has lowered the towing fine to $250.
Troubled police department
City Hall wasn’t Sweetwater’s only problem. The police department, with 39 full-time officers, was reeling from mismanagement, bad hires and shenanigans.
Just weeks after the August takedown of the mayor and his colleague, the FBI arrested a Sweetwater police detective on charges of credit-card fraud and identity theft. Officer William Garcia, suspended without pay, was accused of using phony credit cards at Miami Beach, Key Largo and other South Florida establishments, and stealing other people’s card numbers.
Then, out of the blue, the Sweetwater Police Department relieved two other officers of duty: Detective Octavio Oliu and acting Sgt. Reny Garcia, both now under federal investigation.
Oliu, who had been forced to resign from his previous job as a Miami-Dade County officer in 2007, was hired by the Sweetwater Police Department in 2010. Garcia joined the force in 2006.
Also relieved of duty: Richard Brenner, a civilian employee who worked as a red-light camera monitor and was a member of the department’s police auxiliary since 2011. According to sources, Brenner was suspended because he was working as a Sweetwater police officer, including making arrests, without being a sworn member of the department.
FBI anti-corruption agents have been building a broader case around the three officers, including gathering computer and other records from the police department and questioning local officials, according to sources.
The crackdown has people saying that “Dirtywater” might be a more apt name for the city, though longtime Sweetwater officials take umbrage with that characterization.
“What I’m concerned about is the residents of Sweetwater,” said former Sweetwater mayor and current Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz, who declined to talk about his problematic protégé, the convicted ex-mayor, or the city’s embattled police department.
That may take a while.
Longtime Chief Roberto Fulgueira, who was pals with Maroño, retired in late October amid the controversy engulfing his department, including his giving the no-bid towing contract to one of the ex-mayor’s former business partners. Money was also missing from the police evidence room.
In early October, Fulgueira asked a deputy chief to open a probe.
By the end of the month, city officials announced that thousands of dollars in cash were indeed missing from the police evidence room.
They also said money was missing from a separate collection of cash fines — at $500 a pop — paid by people who wanted to recover their towed vehicles after police arrests.
“As far as I know, it amounts to thousands of dollars,” Diaz, the mayor, said at a news conference in late October.
Diaz said the missing money from the evidence room had been seized during arrests.
The man in charge of supervising the evidence room at the time was Catalino Rodriguez, a longtime Sweetwater officer who resigned on Oct. 7, the same night he was named a city commissioner in the shake-up after the mayor’s removal from office.
He denied taking any money. “I don’t know anything about that,” Rodriguez said. “My conscience is clean.”
For years, the former police chief, Fulgueira, was responsible for reviewing the receipts and counting the money from the towing fees. Individual cash payments were wrapped in a copy of each invoice and deposited in the faux postal box located inside the police department.
Two people had keys to the box: Fulgueira and Rodriguez. According to Rodriguez, Fulgueira was the main person who would process the three to four payments of fines made on a weekly basis. After counting the money, he said, Fulgueira would hand the cash and invoices to the deputy chief, Roberto Ochoa, who would then deposit the money with the city’s finance department.
Fulgueira, who served on the Sweetwater police force for 32 years before resigning last month, did not returns calls for comment.
Publicly, the former chief said he wanted to leave for personal reasons, citing his ailing mother. But his exit could not have come at a more troubling time for Sweetwater.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1958062.html#storylink=cpy
Sweetwater mayor’s corruption conviction pops lid on a sewer of scandal
BY JAY WEAVER, BRENDA MEDINA AND MELISSA SANCHEZ
Until federal agents began swarming over the city the past several months, Sweetwater seemed as nondescript as its City Hall — a three-story concrete box surrounded by working-class homes and an auto repair shop, tamale stand and passport office down the street.
Now, the tiny West Miami-Dade city is quickly becoming famous for something other than its perennial flooding problems and the quirky fact that it was founded by Russian circus midgets.
The city’s disgraced mayor and a lobbyist crony — both convicted last month in federal court — admitted pocketing $60,000 in kickbacks after getting nailed in an FBI sting operation. But the bust only scratched the surface of a culture of corruption that has infested City Hall, which is shared by Sweetwater officials and the police department.
Federal agents are trying to unravel the tangled tentacles of ex-Mayor Manny Maroño’s association with a towing company, in which he has been a suspected silent partner. The city’s no-bid, verbal agreement with Southland The Towing Company, which state records show the mayor once owned, filled police coffers with wads of cash from fines — funds controlled by the recently resigned police chief, a Maroño ally. Some of that cash, deposited into a postal-type box inside the police department, was found to be missing.
The arrangement also gave Sweetwater and the towing company the opportunity to sell dozens of seized cars at auction. And it gave some police officers the chance to take joy rides in luxury vehicles, including an ultra-sleek Porsche Panamera.
El Nuevo Herald/The Miami Herald, along with CBS4, also found:
• Thousands of dollars in cash are missing from the official police evidence room. The resulting probe has uncovered a second evidence room, this one a secret, in an off-site warehouse filled with confiscated knock-off designer bags and clothes, along with machines for detecting fake currency.
“It was a like a criminal enterprise,” Centeno said. “But now Sweetwater is getting a very aggressive treatment to get rid of that cancer of corruption. And that’s very positive for my city.”
In the near future, the U.S. attorney’s office is expected to charge the three police officers. But the towing investigation, which focuses on possible kickbacks to city officials and police officers in an alleged extortion racket, could lead to other arrests down the road.
The former mayor and his defense lawyers, Armando Rosquete and Kendall Coffey, declined to comment about the feds’ probe of Maroño’s interest in a handful of companies, including Southland The Towing Company and Southeast Towing, Inc. His recent guilty plea to the kickback charge in an agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office does not protect him from potential criminal liability in the towing probe.
Maroño claims he got out of the towing business in 2009, but legal records and sources familiar with the former mayor’s companies say he is a silent investor with “front men” representing his interests.
In the towing probe, Maroño chose not to cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors. The possible reason: He did not want to implicate family members and friends who have been involved in his business and political dealings while he served as mayor from 2003 until his removal from office in August.
Among those close to Maroño: Southland’s current owner, Robert Muriedas; Southland’s former owner, Peter Hernandez; former Southland employee Jose Guerra, a Sweetwater commissioner; and the city’s attorney, Ralph Ventura, who has also represented Southland. And then, of course, there are the ex-mayor’s relatives: his mother, Isolina Maroño, also a city commissioner; his uncle, Antero Espinosa, who recently resigned as the city’s director of maintenance; and Maroño’s wife, Jenny Munoz-Maroño, who works as the city’s coordinator of special projects. The couple, who had been divorced, remarried after his arrest in August.
The scope of the towing probe is significant if a recently filed class-action case against the city is any indication. The suit, filed in Miami federal court, claims that Sweetwater police and officials violated the constitutional rights of more than 100 people whose vehicles were seized, towed and auctioned after the motorists were unlawfully detained on trumped-up charges, such as shoplifting, and required to pay a $500 fine to the city.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Rick Diaz, said the Sweetwater cops mostly targeted drivers whose cars were fully paid off so there would be no hassle clearing titles before Southland and the city sold off the confiscated vehicles.
The city is seeking to dismiss the case. Since the mayor’s kickback scandal rocked City Hall, Sweetwater has lowered the towing fine to $250.
Troubled police department
City Hall wasn’t Sweetwater’s only problem. The police department, with 39 full-time officers, was reeling from mismanagement, bad hires and shenanigans.
Just weeks after the August takedown of the mayor and his colleague, the FBI arrested a Sweetwater police detective on charges of credit-card fraud and identity theft. Officer William Garcia, suspended without pay, was accused of using phony credit cards at Miami Beach, Key Largo and other South Florida establishments, and stealing other people’s card numbers.
Then, out of the blue, the Sweetwater Police Department relieved two other officers of duty: Detective Octavio Oliu and acting Sgt. Reny Garcia, both now under federal investigation.
Oliu, who had been forced to resign from his previous job as a Miami-Dade County officer in 2007, was hired by the Sweetwater Police Department in 2010. Garcia joined the force in 2006.
Also relieved of duty: Richard Brenner, a civilian employee who worked as a red-light camera monitor and was a member of the department’s police auxiliary since 2011. According to sources, Brenner was suspended because he was working as a Sweetwater police officer, including making arrests, without being a sworn member of the department.
FBI anti-corruption agents have been building a broader case around the three officers, including gathering computer and other records from the police department and questioning local officials, according to sources.
The crackdown has people saying that “Dirtywater” might be a more apt name for the city, though longtime Sweetwater officials take umbrage with that characterization.
“What I’m concerned about is the residents of Sweetwater,” said former Sweetwater mayor and current Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz, who declined to talk about his problematic protégé, the convicted ex-mayor, or the city’s embattled police department.
That may take a while.
Longtime Chief Roberto Fulgueira, who was pals with Maroño, retired in late October amid the controversy engulfing his department, including his giving the no-bid towing contract to one of the ex-mayor’s former business partners. Money was also missing from the police evidence room.
In early October, Fulgueira asked a deputy chief to open a probe.
By the end of the month, city officials announced that thousands of dollars in cash were indeed missing from the police evidence room.
They also said money was missing from a separate collection of cash fines — at $500 a pop — paid by people who wanted to recover their towed vehicles after police arrests.
“As far as I know, it amounts to thousands of dollars,” Diaz, the mayor, said at a news conference in late October.
Diaz said the missing money from the evidence room had been seized during arrests.
The man in charge of supervising the evidence room at the time was Catalino Rodriguez, a longtime Sweetwater officer who resigned on Oct. 7, the same night he was named a city commissioner in the shake-up after the mayor’s removal from office.
He denied taking any money. “I don’t know anything about that,” Rodriguez said. “My conscience is clean.”
For years, the former police chief, Fulgueira, was responsible for reviewing the receipts and counting the money from the towing fees. Individual cash payments were wrapped in a copy of each invoice and deposited in the faux postal box located inside the police department.
Two people had keys to the box: Fulgueira and Rodriguez. According to Rodriguez, Fulgueira was the main person who would process the three to four payments of fines made on a weekly basis. After counting the money, he said, Fulgueira would hand the cash and invoices to the deputy chief, Roberto Ochoa, who would then deposit the money with the city’s finance department.
Fulgueira, who served on the Sweetwater police force for 32 years before resigning last month, did not returns calls for comment.
Publicly, the former chief said he wanted to leave for personal reasons, citing his ailing mother. But his exit could not have come at a more troubling time for Sweetwater.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1958062.html#storylink=cpy