Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The details behind the Guaracino plea change...

So what happened?  What exactly caused former Plantation cop Joe Guaracino, the man the government alleges was the mastermind of a sixteen million dollar mortgage fraud scheme to suddenly change his plea after a long arduous legal battle that he was winning up till now?  As we discussed on Monday, the prosecutors managed to convince the court to not only discontinue picking up Joe's legal bills but to also make him responsible for all the money the government had shelled out for his defense since he declared that he could no longer afford to pay his own way earlier this year.  The prosecutors did such an effective job of convincing the court that Guaracino had duped the court into paying his legal bills that the judge even went so far as to say that the...
“...defendant mocked this Court and offended the benevolent purposes of the Criminal Justice Act"
Fine, I wasn't there and can't comment accurately on what the defendant did or didn't do to the court. 

So now Guaracino has this first hurdle to overcome, how can he proceed to the second trial when he's got no money to pay his attorney or the other costs associated with going to trial, expert witnesses, exhibits, etc.  Big problem.  Now, let's move on to the second hurdle he's got to overcome.  As if losing his ability to defend himself wasn't a big enough problem, now comes the AUSA with this...


Joe Guaracino Superseding Information

That's right, MORE CHARGES!  If my information is correct, the prosecutors were ready to file even more charges if Guaracino didn't plead out!  That brings us to the change and plea which ultimately ended up with this factual proffer which some of our readers claim is Mr. Guaracino coming clean and admitting to what the government alleges he had done...

Joe Guaracino Factual Proffer

So there you have it.  Does any of this seem fair to you?  I'm no attorney but somehow the way this went down doesn't seem exactly fair.  Perhaps Mr. Guaracino really did everything the government said he did, maybe he really was the mastermind of this massive fraud scheme, if that is the case, why not prove it in court rather than go about it the way they did?  On another note, consider how much money was spent in order to bring about the convictions of three out of the ten people that were originally charged in this case (as well as those who cut deals and cooperated before the trial), add to that the millions of dollars that must have been spent during the investigation that lasted nearly five years to build this case.  Does that seem like the best use of the taxpayers money?  A few years ago we put together a list of random frauds that we found while driving around Coconut Grove, we wrote about them in detail and retrieved all the documents to prove what had gone on ( you can find those stories here, here and here).  These weren't convoluted tales of homes being purchased, renovated then rented or resold, these were cases where homes were purchased from elderly people and resold the same day using bogus appraisals and crooked title companies for two, three or even four times what they had originally been purchased for, all in the same day without the bad guys ever laying out a penny.  Even better, no one ever made a single payment on these homes yet here we are nearly three years later, three years after I had originally written about the homes, three years after I had forwarded the cases to law enforcement and even taken the cases and handed them to a member of the Miami Dade County mortgage fraud task force personally.  The result?  Zip, NADA, NOTHING.  All I ever heard was that there was no time or resources to look into these cases even though I had literally done everything for them.  

I have to wonder, what would have happened if a fraction of the time and money spent on the Plantation cops mortgage fraud case could have been allocated to investigating what I wrote about?  I guarantee you that these homes were just the tip of the iceberg, I have information that suggests the people that were behind those frauds were part of a much larger group that made the Plantation cops case look like chump change, but again, no money and no resources to adequately investigate.  Or maybe no interest because there were no cops involved in the frauds?

3 comments:

  1. Why would they bother mortgage brokers were doing this every day. you hit it right on the nail they didn’t have headlines for the newspapers so why go after a real case where people really tried to screw the banks instead of people who paid their mortgages off. No cops, No firefighters, No personal anger towards those people. Answer the government does nothing. Wouldn’t even make their press release page not worth their time or money.

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  2. Any amount of taxpayers' money is fair when you consider how Joe screwed most of his business "partners"... I'm a vivid case of someone who's rebuilding his life because of this scumbag... Give me a break!

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  3. Sorry where were you during the case. Cause I didnt see one partner show up in court to say he screwed them. But Mr. anonymous now says hes rebuilding his life. From what? The Only people that got hurt from this case involing Joe were the familey and friends who were on trail. Who had to defend themselves against the bullshit charges. Rebuilding your life. Anyone who was involved in this case that has to rebuild there life don't blame joe for this.So tell your sad story to someone who cares. Cause you weren't a part of this case.

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