Missing receipts in the Plantation cops mortgage fraud trial and our friend and fellow blogger Al Crespo gets banned from a public building on his quest for public information!

Throughout the ongoing saga that is the Plantation cops mortgage fraud trial, one of the governments contentions is that the alleged mastermind of the mortgage fraud scheme, Joe Guaracino, pocketed nearly $1.2 million dollars from escrow withholds and other credits at the closings for the properties that are the subject of the federal indictment.  As we mentioned last Friday, this week was going to be Mr. Guaracino's chance to explain everything while on the stand, from the hearing yesterday...

Q: Did Joseph Guaracino of Home Buyers Group get money back on these occasions?


A: Yes, on most occasions we did.


Q: What was the purpose of getting money back?


A: To do whatever was state, remodeling, upgrading, in some cases, buying furniture.


Q: What did you do with that money?


A: Exactly that.

Pretty simple, right?  There were credits given to the buyers from the sellers for various improvements to the homes and the money was disbursed to the buyers at the closing, these would be the same funds that the government alleged was misspent or misappropriated by Guaracino and/or his group.  Before the indictment, Guaracino was asked to produce evidence of the money from these transactions being used for their intended purpose, there's a small problem though, take a look for yourselves as defense attorney Michael Walsh and Guaracino go through and compare the receipts the government produced to the court versus the receipts that Guaracino produced to the government...

Q: Let's do this, let's take our time and go through the Government's evidence.  Do you see a receipt on the Government's for 8443?


A: I do not.


Q: Is there a real receipt in there for 8443?


A: Yes, sir, on the second page.


Q: Do you know why those two receipts are missing from the government's chart?


A: It goes to the quality of the investigator.

WHOOPS!  You get the idea, this search for receipts that are somehow missing from the governments evidence goes on and on and on.  Somehow the receipts for the home repairs were given to the investigators pursuant to a subpoena yet somehow they never made it into the case files.  As we discussed before, the difference between what the government came up with and what was really spent came up to roughly around $600,000.  That's a rather large discrepancy isn't it?  Why would the governments investigator play so fast and loose with these receipts?  I mean, this is a paperwork intensive case where one of the main allegations against the lead defendant is that he misused funds that were credited back at closing, receipts are provided pre-indictment that shows were nearly every penny went yet the investigator and the prosecutors conveniently leave out nearly $600,000 worth of receipts?  What gives here?  Is it just me or is this starting to sound like some sort of set up?

There's something else though regarding the recent court proceedings regarding the second phase of the Plantation cops trial that's rather interesting.  Out of the three men on trial, only Joseph Guaracino is putting up a defense, neither one of the other defendants, Dennis Guaracino or Steven Stoll, are putting up a defense.  Could the governments case be so weak that a proper defense isn't necessary?  Obviously the defense thinks so, it remains to be seen if the jury agrees.

Now, onto something even more disturbing, we caught this on the news last night...

That's City of Miami Assistant Manager Luis Cabrera banning or friend and fellow blogger Al Crespo from entering the Miami River Center, a City of Miami building that's open to the public!  What a crock of shit.  Here we have a blogger that's gotten a little too close to the real story and is finding the skeletons in peoples closets, unearthing the back room deals between incompetent boobs that make up our city government and what happens?  They do whatever they can to shut you down.  We're no stranger to this bullshit, as some of you already know, our work here has caused some of the people that we've written about to go to the MDPD, FBI, FDLE, etc to initiate investigations against us.  No worries though, despite their best efforts, we're still here.  Now that everyone's back from summer vacation, we'll have time to discuss some of the lengths that Assistant State Attorney Bill Kostrzewski and his boy Detective Baluja have gone through to get us shut down.


Stay tuned.