The slam dunk case against the Airways Auto Tag Agency tellers...

It's been a while since we've discussed the Airways Auto Tag case, so let's do a brief rundown of the case...

• We start off by learning that our old friend, MDPD Detective Jorge Baluja, is still busy screwing things up.
• Off to the friendly neighborhood tag agency to renew our tag only to find out that three of the tellers in the tag agency had recently been arrested by none other than Detective Jorge Baluja who has the dubious distinction of not being able to investigate his own way out of a wet paper bag.
• A little digging nets us a police report where Detective Baluja alleges that three tellers from the tag agency were stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the agency by collecting money from the clients then voiding out the transactions afterwords and pocketing the money.
• Now we realize how improbable it is for tens of thousands of dollars to be missing in one day from such a small tag agency.
• We go through some of the accounting procedures at this tag agency and once again come to the conclusion that stealing anything let alone tens of thousands of dollars would be near impossible from such a small, tightly controlled operation.
• A quick glance at some of Detective Baluja's previous less than stellar investigative work.
• Now we realize that the owner of the tag agency is married to none other than the Police Chief of the City of South Miami, therefore calling into question the impartiality of any detective investigating the tag agency case.
• We ask whether or not there was probable cause to arrest the tellers that were charged.
• Strangely enough now we find out that there were several other people that had access to the accounting software other than the tellers that were arrested and that the owner of the tag agency also owns the company that wrote the accounting software and therefore had access to the tellers confidential access codes.
• The tag agency owners own testimony reveals that the company's finances were in such bad shape that she was looking to "turn it in" and walk away from the business.
• Things get even more bizarre, we learn that the tag agency owner's daughter in law abruptly left the her job at the agency right after the money went missing and that her son is also one of the owners of the company that writes the accounting software that the agency uses therefore adding one more person to the list of people other than the tellers that knew their confidential access codes.
• Even worse, despite the tag agency having security cameras all over the place, somehow they didn't catch any of the alleged thefts.
• The height of stupidity, the prosecutor in the criminal case against the three tellers tries to convince the court that this blog is in some way shape or form working in concert with the three tellers to harass the owner of the tag agency and therefore wanted the court to revoke the three tellers bonds.

Ok, that pretty much sums up where we left off a few months back.  To be perfectly honest though, we stopped writing about the case hoping that once a new prosecutor was assigned to the case after the previous prosecutor tried to get the tellers bonds revoked, the charges against the tellers were going to be dismissed.  Unfortunately, it didn't happen, so it seems like it's time to start shedding some light on this case again.


The crux of the states case against the three girls that were charged with stealing tens of thousands of dollars from this tag agency was that once the individual transactions were processed, the tellers would later go back and cancel said transactions using their access codes in both the state system and the tag agencies internal computer systems and then pocket the money.  Fairly simple right?  In essence, by virtue of the tellers logging into the state and tag agency computers, they would leave an electronic fingerprint on all the transactions that would make it easy to identify who initiated the transactions and cancelled the transactions.  Simple enough, that is until we proved that there were several people that knew these so called "confidential passwords" the tellers used in the tag agency's computer system.


Now, in order to be perfectly clear, let's go through how the state proposes one of these transactions occurred:

1. First, the teller in question logs into the State of Florida computer system (that only the individual teller knows the password to) then processes the transaction.
2. Second, the teller in question logs into the tag agency's internal computer system (the one that the tag agency owner led the state to believe that only the tellers knew the passwords to that we later proved that several other people knew the passwords to) then processes the transaction generating a receipt for the customer.
3. At some point either later that day or early the next day, said teller logs back into the tag agency's computer system and cancels the transaction then subsequently pockets the money.

Fairly simple scheme right?  Now one thing we know for certain, the individual tellers are the only ones that know their passwords for the state of Florida computer system, no one else.  While we know that several other people that had access to the tag agency's computers other than the tellers that were arrested and that the owner of the tag agency also owns the company that wrote the accounting software and therefore had access to the tellers confidential access codes, the tellers are the only ones that could log into the state's system and generate receipts with their user ID's on them.  That's a really important point as we're about to discover, take a look at some excerpts from the receipts generated by the states computer system that were given to the state as part of the discovery in this case, specifically, pay attention to the initials outlined in red...

Now, for the sake of our discussion, I've omitted the rest of the receipt that contains an innocent customers personal information.  What's important here are the three letters that I've outlined in red as they identify the person who logged into the state's computer system and created these transactions.  In the instance of these two transactions, the identifying initials, IJM, don't belong to any of the tellers that were arrested, they belong to none other than Ileana Josefina Martinez de Castro, the owner of the tag agency and the City of South Miami's police chief's wife who claimed that tens of thousands of dollars were missing through the tellers nefarious schemes.  Remember that when it comes to the states computer system, only the person who is assigned the password knows their password, so if you're to believe the state's theory of this case, how did the owner of the tag agency processing these transactions fit in to there version of events?  Even worse, how did the dipshit detective who investigated this case not realize this horrendous error in his investigation?


While this revelation of the owner of the tag agency having her "electronic fingerprint" on some of the transactions in question doesn't absolve the three tellers that were charged of any guilt, it certainly does call into question the investigative work that ultimately culminated with the arrests of the three tag agency employees.  The same "electronic fingerprint" the detective used to build his case against the three tellers he arrested could have been used to implicate the owner of the tag agency!  WTF?

I'm getting sick and tired of writing about this stupid case.  Three innocent women are stuck dealing with this bullshit while the state takes its time fucking around.  More tomorrow.