Think about the chilling effect that kind of punishment would have on the scheming SOB's in office down here as well as their cronies. Make an example out of a couple of these guys and put their heads on stakes in front of city hall to send a message to the next fucker that thinks he can run amok on the tax payers dime...
Back in late May we discovered disturbing inaccuracies in the grand jury testimony that eventually led to the Plantation Cops mortgage fraud indictment. From what we were able to find, the government misrepresented several important facts to the grand jury which made an already bad situation for the defendants even worse by including incorrect inflammatory statements like these...
With respect to this particular Indictment, we’re talking about the first count, which is a conspiracy count. It’s a conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and filing of false statement with a Government agency, the Department of Housing & Urban Development.
Counts 2 through 12 are the mail fraud counts. Counts 13 through 25 are the wire fraud counts. Counts 26 through 33 are the 1001 counts, which is the filing of a false statement with a federal agency.
Q. And the department or agency to which the HUD-1 is submitted is the Department of Housing & Urban Development?
A. Yes.
We now know that these statements were false and misleading, the paperwork in question is in fact not submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development or any other federal agency. The government responded to the defenses motion to dismiss these charges by basically saying fuck it, let the jury decide...
II. ANY PURPORTED ERROR IS RENDERED HARMLESS BY THE PETIT JURY Any purported errors claimed by the Defendant are rendered harmless if the petit jury convicts the defendant. See United States v. Mechanik, 475 U.S. 66, 72-73 (1986). Based on the aforementioned argument and facts, the counts in the Indictment should stand and the defendant can be tried on the merits. "An indictment returned by a legally constituted and unbiased grand jury, . . . if valid on its face, is enough to call for trial of the charge on the merits." Costello, 350 U.S. at 363.
I was really hoping that Judge Cohn would recognize how serious these "errors" were and would then dismiss the charges in question. Wishful thinking I guess...
According to the judge the defendants "suffered no prejudice from the United States’ alleged misconduct and his constitutional protections were not jeopardized." Wonderful, I'm sure the defendants feel the same way.
Now, back to the City of Miami mess for a moment, our friend Al Crepso broke another story yesterday regarding an alleged bribe that Mayor Regalado offered to embattled police chief Miguel Exposito to resign. According to Mr. Crespo, Regalado offered the Chief $400k to leave, an offer the chief turned down because according to the chief "they couldn’t buy me or my reputation". That's all well and good, but for those who've been paying attention to the rumors surrounding the feud between the mayor and police chief, this $400k buyout thing isn't exactly anything new. Rumors of this alleged buyout have been circulating since early January 2011, from what we've heard the chief turned down the buyout because it would have created too much of a tax liability for him. Regardless of the tax liability or when this "buyout" actually became public knowledge, the question that we're left with is how the hell did the mayor unilaterally decide to give the Chief this offer? Doesn't something like this (especially of this magnitude) require the a vote by the commissioners? Worse still, with the city tetering on the verge of bankruptcy, how can they afford to keep giving away massive severance packages like this? How many murals and led billboards does the city have to put up in order to generate $400K?
The city is on fire folks, the mayor and the police chief publicly feuding, city buildings becoming public billboards, employees showing up part time and taking home over $300k per year, etc. It's going to be interesting to see what's left when this is all over.
Don't even get me started, I can't begin to describe how pissed off I am right now over this nonsense. Look where where we're at right now...
Record unemployment
Record foreclosures
Record Bankruptcies
Honest hardworking government employees getting their pay and benefit packages cut
Cities and municipalities teetering on the verge of bankruptcy
I don't need to restate the obvious about the economic state our country is in right now, to add insult to injury we're living in a city that's being described as one of the most corrupt cities on the country. Fantastic.
In the middle of all this mayhem we have none other than Veldora Arthur, the City of Miami's first black female assistant fire chief who between her base salary and benefits gets paid close to three hundred thousand dollars a year by the City of Miami tax payers. Now, let's put that into perspective, let's assume that her position as the Assistant Fire Chief requires her to be at work say from nine to five and let's just say for the sake of argument that she puts in a forty hour work week, that works out to about $144 per hour assuming that she works 52 weeks a year and takes no vacations. Let's disregard her benefits and figure out her hourly rate based on her base salary, $184,336.44, again assuming she takes no vacations and works a full 52 weeks per year, that comes out to roughly $88 per hour. I'm sure City of Miami firefighters who actually put out fires don't make that kind of money! Now, how many of you guys make that much money?! Not many of us I guess, at the very least, I DON'T!
I ran those numbers over the last couple of days and started to get all worked up, things got even worse when we got this comment on our blog on Tuesday...
Veldora Arthur comes in at 10:00 and leaves at 4:00p.m. She doesn't come in to work, but does not take any time off the books. Works, better yet, shows up to work for 20 hours a week.
WHAT THE FUCK! Let's forget about the federal mortgage fraud indictment she was named in for a moment and simply consider the audacity of this statement, this woman makes nearly $300,000 per year and comes in to work for a few hours a day? What gives! I started looking around then stumbled on to this website, as always click on the image to enlarge...
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! Take a closer look...
Here's the text of that quote...
The credit workshop was very informative. The real life scenarios were exceptional and very realistic. I related to some of the scenarios and such was able to come up with realistic solutions. The information on short sales and foreclosures was invaluable and right on target. I will be referring my clients and my friends to "Crbcredit.com" for credit restoration. -Veldora Arthur
HUH?! "I related to some of the scenarios...The information on short sales and foreclosures was invaluable and right on target." No kidding! The feds certainly seem to think so! Could this be for real?!
Let's disregard all the bullshit in this quote and cut right to the "I will be referring my clients" part. Clients? WHAT CLIENTS? Let me see, as an employee of the City of Miami fire department, who the hell are your clients? The guy whose house just burnt down? Or maybe the little kid who got her cat stuck up in a tree? Perhaps the guy who called 911 after getting his penis caught in a bottle? (not me I swear) Why would any of these people need "credit restoration"?? The question that we're left to ponder is WHO THE HELL ARE THESE CLIENTS SHE'S REFERRING TO?! A quick trip to the Florida division of corporations website helped answer that question, here's what we found...
Here we have the articles of incorporation for a company owned by Ms. Arthur named Capitol Investment Enterprise, LLC. Interesting, next we find this...
Nice, here we have the articles of incorporation for a second company owned by Ms. Arthur, Hidden Bay Properties, LLC, a company that coincidentally is named after the condominium where all the units involved in the federal mortgage fraud indictment were located. Another important detail to note is that the company is co owned by none other than Neil Fagan, the man who is accused of orchestrating the mortgage fraud scheme that they were both federally indicted for. So much for her lawyers "she didn't know what was going on" explanation, right?
Last but not least we have this third corporation owned by Ms. Arthur...
No kidding, Ms. Arthur also owns a company called Financial Solutions Team, LLC. Now that's nice isn't it? You think the clients she was referring to in her testimonial for the credit repair company were customers from Financial Solutions Team, LLC? Now comes the next question, when did Ms. Arthur find time during her work day to service these clients? After all, her position at the Fire Department didn't call for odd hours, from what we understand she had a nine to five desk job so where did she find the time to attend to this or any other business let alone it's clients?
If Ms. Arthur's glowing review of the company that lists among it's products a book called "It's OK not to pay" wasn't bad enough, now we're left to consider the fact that she was running not one but at least three other businesses while on city time. That's where I draw the line, we're all wallowing through the mud of this economic downturn and this woman is running three different businesses whilestealingcollecting $300,000 per year from struggling tax payers? Not to mention whatever she garnered from her foray into mortgage and real estate fraud and then having the gaul to want to help her "clients" repair their credit?! WTF!
Our justice system operates on the presumption of innocence, so put the federal fraud indictment aside for the moment, Ms. Arthur needs to be investigated and held accountable for what shes been doing on City time while being paid by the tax payers. Based on what little research I've done and the comments that we've had on our blog over the last few days, it certainly sounds like she's got some explaining to do.
I read a story in the Miami Herald on October 7, 2008 regarding a mortgage fraud case that didn't make any sense to me, I did a little digging and what I found left me stunned. A tale of a task force head whose political ambitions have run amuck, a detective without a modicum of common sense, a reporter that prints anything that's put in front of him, the railroading of an attorney by this machine to further the ambitions of its head and the lengths that those involved will go to in order to salvage a case that should have never been. Please take the time to start from the oldest post first and enjoy...
