Detective Baluja and ASA Kostrzewski deliver more fail....

What could be worse than what we discovered regarding the twenty one instances of Bernardo Barrera's signatures over the last two days?  The only thing worse than Mr. Barrera's attempt at changing his signature when he convinced the police that his identity was stolen was how we obtained the other signature samples.  See, we didn't simply go to the criminal case file and pull out the documents containing the signatures, we actually did a little investigating.  Interesting concept isn't it Detective Baluja?

If we were simply to go through the voluminous criminal case file, we would have only found two sets of documents containing Mr. Barrera's signatures, the loan documents for the fraudulent Oak Avenue home purchase and the samples Mr. Barrera submitted to the police, let's take a look:

A sample from the fraudulent loan docs that Mr. Barrera claimed he didn't sign.

And one from the signatures that Mr. Barrera submitted to the police as a sample.

Perfect right?  Now armed with these two samples, Detective Baluja and ASA Kostrzewski are off to the races.  Would this be enough for you to buy Mr. Barrera's cock and bull story of identity theft?  Would simply listening to his story and comparing these two sets of signatures be enough due diligence on the states part to go ahead and build a case?  Even if it was enough for the Detective to move forward, how could it have been enough for the prosecutor?  Wouldn't the prosecutor want to use an abundance of caution before moving forward especially since one of the targets of the investigation was a fellow attorney?

So if we didn't collect the other signature samples from the documents in the criminal case file, where the hell did we get them?  Did we spend hundreds of hours going through documents at the courthouse?  Did we hire a private investigator?  Nope.  Here's where we got the documents and how much time we spent collecting them:

• Signatures collected from divorce file, picked up from the civil courthouse, less than 30 minutes total.
• Signatures collected from letter sent to the court for the foreclosure case, picked up at the civil courthouse, less than 30 minutes total.
• Signatures collected from documents on file with the state for the fraudulent corporation Mr. Barrera opened, less than 1 minute obtained from www.sunbiz.org.
• Signatures collected from the mortgage for Mr. Barrera's primary residence, less than 5 minutes obtained from www.miamidade.gov.

So there you have it, a trip to the civil courthouse and a few minutes online gave us several signature samples that created serious doubt regarding Mr. Barrera's claims of identity theft.  Our hour or so at the civil courthouse could have been even shorter if we were say a MDPD Detective that could have parked wherever they wanted.  Now, if you were armed with the signature samples that we presented over the last two days, could you have possibly believed Mr. Barrera's assertions that he had nothing to do with the fraud?  Impossible right?  So how the hell could this have happened?  Why weren't more of Mr. Barrera's signature samples collected by the police?  We know Detective Baluja is mentally challenged, but how the hell could have Prosecutor Kostrzewski allowed this case to move forward with literally no investigating?


Is this all it takes for your life to be ruined?  A mentally deficient cop with a history of lying and a washed up prosecutor throw together a half ass case based on an extremely poorly run investigation and BAM, your life is ruined.  Can this be right?  Why didn't Detective Baluja spend a few minutes and at least look at Mr. Barrera's signature and compare them with other documents that he's signed in the past?  Why didn't ASA Kostrzewski vet the pile of garbage that Baluja called a case before moving forward?  WTF?!  This can't be right, someone has to be held accountable for this bullshit.