Another page from Detective Baluja's book of bullshit...

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After a brief look at the Airways Auto Tag Agency debacle, nothing seems to make any sense.  Detective Jorge Baluja of the MDPD comes in and interviews the tellers from the auto tag agency regarding monies that were missing from the agency's tightly controlled accounting system and in less than one hour he concludes that it was the tellers that stole tens of thousands of dollars from the agency and the state and no one else, not the management or the tag agency's owners that were constantly watching the tellers every move or even the people within the tag agency who controlled the accounting aspects of the business.  After a brief harsh interrogation of the three young female tellers, through Detective Baluja's somewhat compromised detective reasoning skills, he decides that indeed the tellers were the culprits, regardless of the fact that no one with an once of common sense could come to the same conclusion, then goes ahead and arrests everyone.

So there you have it, the case of tens of thousands of dollars missing from the tag agency has been solved, most expeditiously I might add.  Convenient, isn't it?  I'm sure the state was after the folks over at the tag agency to make up for or explain away the missing money, out of nowhere a random detective appears who solves the caper within an hour and poof just like that it's over regardless of how improbable his findings were, regardless of the fact that the evidence clearly makes it impossible for the people he accused to have stole the money.  Nice.

Now let's ask ourselves, is Detective Baluja some kind of idiot savant that has a gift of being able to solve crimes that no one else has or is he just some sort of idiot that's been able to get away with charging innocent people then walking away leaving someone else to deal with the mess he's created?  Or maybe Detective Baluja is a just a crooked cop who's become adept at coercing witnesses and fabricating evidence to suit whatever his objectives may be?  Let's revisit the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case for a moment, a perfect example of how Detective Baluja works is the instance of the cashiers check he used to implicate the attorney involved in the case in some sort of wrong doing, for those of you who don't recall, Baluja showed the attorney's receptionist a copy of the cashiers check from that transaction as it was issued from the issuing bank and asks her if she'd ever seen it before since part of her job description was to receive and process these types of checks for the law office.  Here's a copy of the cashiers check he showed her...

When the receptionist is shown this check during her deposition, she goes on to say that she had never seen the check and that if she had seen it the check would have had her handwriting on it with the file number etc and that since it didn't have her handwriting on it she had never seen the check before.  Little did the receptionist know that Detective Baluja was holding another copy of the same check, a copy obtained from the bank it had been deposited in...

This copy of the check clearly has the receptionists handwriting on it, once she was shown the check at deposition nearly a year after the arrests, she went on to say...

Now, this change in testimony completely destroys the very foundation of the states case against the attorney they arrested.  The question we're left to ask though is despite the fact that Detective Baluja had both copies of this check in his possession, why did he chose to show the witness the clean copy as it appeared from the issuing bank rather than the one from the bank the check was deposited that clearly had the witnesses handwriting on it?  The answer is simple, he was told to put together a case on the anniversary of the mortgage fraud task force's first arrests and he simply chose to manipulate the evidence to create an outcome that was in line with what he wanted, once again, facts and evidence be damned.

So what's this history of fucking things up have to do with the Tag Agency story?  Simple, I don't think the fact that Detective Baluja ended up on this case was any kind of accident, no way no how.  If you believe that bullshit, you might as well believe that cavemen invented fire cause they were tired of eating raw marshmallows.

You guys decide, was the assignment of this case to our favorite detective a random assignment or was he intentionally assigned to the case in order to reach a predetermined conclusion thereby framing three innocent people in order to deflect attention from the real culprits?  The answer to that question lies with the people who own the tag agency, we'll unravel that mystery tomorrow...