You all remember attorney Stephen Orchard, don't you? Mr. Orchard was one of the two attorneys that were federally indicted as part of the Plantation Cops mortgage fraud case who on the eve of trial was given a sweetheart deal by the prosecutors and sent on his way. Let's not forget that Mr. Orchard was accused of committing among other things conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice for his part in the over sixteen million dollar mortgage fraud scheme that the feds labeled "Operation Copout". I'm not sure how, but somehow this evening I stumbled upon Mr. Orchard's law firm's website and couldn't help but wonder what's happened since the government cut him loose from the criminal case. From the looks of the website, Mr. Orchard seems to be doing just fine, but I wonder, what happened to the investigation into Mr. Orchard's involvement with the alleged frauds involved with the Plantation cops case? A quick glance at Mr. Orchard's bar page reveals no disciplinary actions...
That's all well and good for Mr. Orchard but what about his former boss and fellow defendant attorney Steven Stoll who was also federally indicted for his role in "Operation Copout", we know the government chose not to retry him after his first trial ended with a mistrial, but what about the Florida bar? From Mr. Stoll's bar page...
David Rodriguez
You guessed it, NADA. What's the big deal you ask? No big deal I guess, I just wonder, why is there such great disparity in how the organization that regulates and disciplines attorneys handles different cases? Those of you who've been following our blog for a while surely remember attorney David Rodriguez who was the target in one the Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud Task force's first cases. The cops had Mr. Rodriguez dead to rights, after all he was negotiating the crooked deals with an undercover cop who just happened to be one of the members of the Task Force! Surely by now nearly four years after his arrest and subsequent plea, Mr. Rodriguez must have been disciplined by the Florida bar, right? Once again, from his Florida Bar page...
Anyone surprised? Four years after his arrest, four years after a plea and the subsequent sealing of his criminal record, not a single action from the bar.
Once again, what's the big deal about any of this? No big deal I guess unless you've picked up on the fact that whether it's the Florida Bar or the state attorneys office, their choice of prosecutions seems to be highly selective. While some people are put through the ringer, others aren't even investigated. Maybe I'm nuts, but I'm of the belief that if an attorney pleads out to a crime, they should receive some sort of discipline from the appropriate professional governing bodies. Let's see if they still sit back and do nothing after we get done filing our complaints.
Go back and read the comments sections of our last weeks worth of posts and you'll find long winded diatribes both for and against the defendants in the Plantation cops mortgage fraud trial. Things like, Joe Guaracino is a crook, this guy drives a Corvette (the horror!), the other guy has a small penis, this one's innocent, the other guy's guilty, the jury did the right thing, the jurors are idiots, etc. So much emotion, so much anger, yet everyone seems to be missing the point.
Let's say for the sake of argument that the defendants charged in this nearly five year long investigation that's come to be known as "operation copout", were guilty. Say the government was right, they lied about their incomes, they fudged where the down payments for the homes in question came from, let's even assume there was some level of complicity from the attorneys charged as well, what's the net result? Remember, all the loans in question were paid back with the exception of a few that were under Guaracino's personal name, so in a nutshell, assume these guys were guilty of all of those things but in the end the banks all got their money back plus profits.
Now, with that assumption made, look at what was learned during trial, the mortgage brokers who made all these alleged crimes possible walked with a slap on the wrist and a $500 fine. Granted, they're going to do two or three years behind bars but anyone remember what they admitted to? Both Matt Gulla and Rene Rodriguez admitted to committing fraud on every loan they had processed over the last decade! While the government calculated the alleged Guaracino involved frauds to be somewhere in the +/- $16mm range, imagine the dollar figure for the frauds these mortgage brokers must have been involved with? It's easily in the hundreds of millions if not in the billion dollar range! We're talking a decade worth of loans, perhaps thousands of frauds. With that in mind, does the governments strategy of going after the cops really make sense? The brokers got immunity for all the other crimes they committed in exchange for their testimony against the cops that were charged as part of "operation copout", does that seem correct? At least in my opinion it doesn't. I thought that going after the mortgage brokers seemed like a more plausible scenario and therefore using the cops to testify against them, instead we got this wacky prosecution where in the end the real culprits, the real masterminds got away. Does anyone believe for a moment that Guaracino and his group of cops were the only group that the brokers worked with? Throughout the history of this case we've had plenty of people come forward and tell us that there were groups of teachers, firefighters and other cops that were all working with Gulla and Rodriguez on similar deals, why didn't anyone investigate those transactions?
The truth of the matter is that the guys who were the subject of the governments prosecution in this case were small potatoes. The "big fish", "masterminds" or "ringleaders" weren't the cops or even the lawyers that were charged, they were the mortgage brokers who in retrospect got the best deal of all considering the magnitude of their crimes. Whether the untold millions worth of fraudulent loans or destroying evidence, these guys should have gotten decades in federal prison, instead we're left with nearly 9 months of trials that seemed to never end and a two low level players whose convictions will probably be overturned on appeal. That hardly sounds like justice to me.
As the title states, our sources tell is that after six days of deliberation the trial ends with a hung jury! From what we're told it was 10 to 2, which means 10 of the 12 jurors were going to acquit. The question now is whether or not the government is going to retry the case or just walk away...
WTF with the timing of this story? The story is about the cops from the first part of the case, two of them were found guilty and two were acquitted, the two that got acquitted got their jobs back and the back pay and benefits they were entitled to. Really? How's this news? We covered this story almost a month ago! Why is this news now? My assumption is that this story was planted by the government over the weekend in order to in some way shape or form influence the jury that was about to render judgement against the remaining defendants. Dirty trick? No doubt as it's damn near impossible to get a juror to crawl under a rock and ignore what's in the media regarding a case their deliberating.
Assuming the intent of this story was to in some way to influence the jurors, maybe we can do a bit of the same? See the government fought tooth and nail to keep a ton of favorable information from the jurors that could have helped the defense. Let's take a quick run down of just some of the facts the jurors didn't get to hear...
Defendant Joseph Guaracino cooperated fully with the FBI and FDLE years before there was even an indictment including but not limited to handing over every single shred of documentation regarding all the properties that he ever bought and sold. Does this seem like the actions of a guilty man?
The government continually insinuated that the defendants tax returns were bogus, yet throughout the trial they were never able to prove the allegations. The nearly four months of trial were continually peppered with allegations of inflated appraisals for the homes in question, why wasn't this ever proven in court? Why didn't a single "expert witness" come forward and prove that the appraisals were bogus?
The defendants voluntarily took polygraph tests and passed, why weren't the results allowed in for the jury to consider?
How about handwriting exemplars which proved the defendants on trial didn't forge anything but again the jury wasn't allowed to hear about it.
There were several recordings where the brokers at the center of this mess admitted to forging hundreds if not thousands of documents throughout there careers, yet again the jury wasn't allowed to hear about it.
Most importantly though, why wasn't the jury allowed to hear about the lender negligence, especially when the federal government went ahead and sued all the big lenders for their role in the real estate meltdown that subsequently brought our economy if not the worlds economy to it's knees?
I have no idea how this is going to pan out for the defendants on trial, I just can't seem to understand how the jury can render a verdict when they weren't allowed to hear evidence that in my opinion was crucial to the defense. We'll have to wait and see, we could have a verdict as early as tomorrow...
It looks like federally indicted attorney Steven Stoll's defense team hasn't been sleeping much lately. Just last Monday they filed this excellent motion to dismiss, take a look for yourselves...
How ironic? The prosecution fought successfully to have even the slightest hint of lender negligence withheld from the jury, all the while not mentioning to anyone that since July 2011 the very same government that was fighting so hard to exclude lender negligence from the jury was investigating the very same lenders for “potential fraud related to the origination and/or underwriting of mortgage loans”. How do you like them apples?! What have we been saying all along about the banks being the unindicted co-conspirators in these mortgage frauds?!
It's not bad enough that the government fought to exclude this lender negligence/misconduct from the jury, but by withholding the information regarding the investigation from the defense, they've actually broken the law. Anyone remember us talking about Brady violations a while back? Let's take a look at some components of the Brady Rule...
Duty to Disclose: The landmark decision of Brady v Maryland (1963) places an affirmative constitutional duty on a prosecutor to disclose exculpatory evidence to a defendant. This duty has been extended to police agencies through case law, requiring law enforcement agencies to notify the prosecutor of any potential exculpatory information.
Exculpatory Evidence/Brady Material: Evidence in the government’s possession that is favorable to the accused and that is material to either guilt or punishment, including evidence that may impact the credibility of a witness.
The defense team had argued from the get go that the lenders negligence was key to their defense, yet the government didn't want the jury to hear a peep about it, considering the fact that the federal government had an ongoing investigation into the very lenders in question for their conduct and role in the real estate and economic meltdown, didn't the government have a "duty to disclose" this information to the defense let alone the jury? Even worse, Steven Stoll's attorneys specifically asked for information relating to any government investigation concerning these lenders back in the summer of 2010...
More specifically, by way of letter on August 20, 2010 (a copy of which is attached as Exhibit 3), Mr. Stoll’s counsel specifically demanded disclosure of “[a]ny criminal complaint and/or investigation to any state or federal investigative agency or any civil complaint or administrative action, relating to any lender involved in or associated with any defendant and/or the 68 loan transactions, as well as any civil litigation relating to these lenders.”
The government comes back with...
“[t]he government has no information or documents that are responsive to Defendant’s request #8 concerning criminal and civil complaints and investigations against lenders involved with the 68 fraudulently acquired properties, or associated with any defendant.”
No kidding? So these massive lawsuits being filed by our government against these lenders recently just appeared out of thin air? The complaints were just thrown together overnight? If the Plantation cops mortgage fraud case took nearly 5 years to put together, how the hell are we supposed to believe that the government hadn't done any investigating into their case against the lenders as late as last summer? BULLSHIT! Again, from the motion...
Although the Government has acknowledged the continuing nature of its Brady obligations to Mr. Stoll, no disclosure of the Department of Justice investigations or the damning allegations against the lenders regarding their failure to follow underwriting practices was provided to the defense by the prosecution in this case.
Why would the defense expect the prosecutors to hand over exculpatory evidence that could destroy their headline case? It's not like they're bound to do so by law or anything! Again from the motion...
To add insult to injury, the Government has actively resisted, and for all intents and purposes, has succeeded in thwarting the defendants’ attempts to introduce evidence of lenders’ willful failure to follow the underwriting guidelines, their financial incentive for doing so, and the resulting impact upon the reliability of the “lender files” in evidence. The Government did so under the guise that there was no evidence that these lenders were engaged in these practices. However, as demonstrated in the 17 complaints recently filed by the Government, as well as existence of one or more Department of Justice investigations into the underwriting practices of these lenders, the Government has taken a diametrically opposed position regarding these lenders elsewhere.
As the record stands, the jury in this case has been deprived of substantial favorable evidence to the defense regarding the lenders’ actions, intent, motive, and the lack of materiality of the statements and alleged omissions in dispute in this case.
Moreover, the Government, in a disingenuous substitute for testimony from lender representatives with actual knowledge of the underwriting and approval of the loans in this case, has presented testimony from former lender employees and purported expert witnesses with no personal knowledge about these loans to testify that the lenders did actually follow underwriting guidelines, and to testify that the statements and alleged omissions in dispute in this case were material to the lenders’ decisions to approve these loans.
In addition to being deprived of the favorable evidence regarding the failure of lenders to follow underwriting guidelines, the Government’s failure to disclose the existence of the investigation(s) of the lenders by the Department of Justice also deprived the defense of the ability to impeach the credibility of the “lender files” being relied upon by the Government, as well as the potential motive and bias of the lender representatives called by the Government as witnesses in this case.
Each of the lender witnesses, having been employed by lenders during a time period when according to the recently filed Complaints they were engaged in massive frauds on government agencies and others purchasing mortgage backed securities, had an undisclosed and unexplored motive to color their testimony so as to minimize their own potential culpability and involvement in the fraud. These witnesses had a similar motive to minimize the culpability of their former lender employers.
Further, if the Government had informed the defendants of the investigation of the lenders, and the fact that the lenders had a financial motive to conceal their failure to follow underwriting guidelines within their own files, the defense would have had the ability to impeach the credibility of the lender files produced in this case, and would have been able to present a compelling explanation for the absence of certain documents (such as conversation logs, escrow agreements, emails, etc.) from the lender files.
The Government, on the other hand, in taking full and unfair advantage of the lenders’ purging of files, has been pointing to the lack of such documents in the files as evidence that the lenders were never aware of the escrow withholds and sourcing of deposits from the third parties.
Accordingly, the Government’s Brady violation has impacted this case in multiple, varied and profound ways to the detriment of Mr. Stoll.
Defendant Stoll's attorneys killed it. Great job. The question now is what's the judge going to do? Will he do the right thing and throw this case out or is he going to cover the governments ass?
In other news, it looks like or least favorite attorney, Raquel Regalado, daughter of embattled city of Miami mayor, Tomas Regalado, has opened up a new law office. From the Florida department of state's website...
It looks like the Mayor's daughter has opened up a new law office, whose principal place of business is located at 1745 SW 15 st which is located in the city of Miami and just happens to be her home address as well. So from what we're to deduce from the filings with the state, is Ms. Regalado going to run a law office from her home? Deja vu anyone? More importantly though, what happened to Ms. Regalado's gig over at the prestigious IP law firm, Malloy & Malloy? Is it possible that all the Regalado monkey business of late was a bit much for the well established and conservative principals of the law firm? Who would want an attorney practicing within their firm with the air of possible pending criminal charges surrounding them? A quick search of the firms website reveals the conspicuous absence of Ms. Regalado from the firms attorney page, I wonder what happened?
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.
We can only assume this is a defendant's brilliant answer to some sort of paternity suit...
Brilliant in it's simplicity and brevity, unfortunately in real life nothing is that simple.
I'm not going to blather on today about how screwed up our court system is, what I will say though is that I'm deeply saddened by what I've seen transpire recently in the second phase of the Plantation Cops mortgage fraud case. We've seen several instances of the government objecting vehemently to the defendants introducing other instances of fraud committed by the governments cooperating witnesses, we've also seen several instances of the government objecting to the introduction of forged and or fake loan documents created by their cooperating witnesses Matt Gulla and Rene Rodriguez Jr, but that's not the worst of it. The defense has now come forward with allegations of witness tampering and even more grand jury misconduct by the government. From what we're told there have been several instances where people who were going to come forward and give favorable testimony for the defendants at the grand jury were told to leave if they were going to do so. We're also told that there's going to be evidence of FDLE and other government agents threatening to charge witnesses criminally if they didn't come clean with damaging testimony against the defendants. So far there hasn't been any evidence of these allegations provided to the court, according to what defense attorney Michael Dennis Walsh has told the court, the evidence of these nefarious deeds will be presented shortly.
Are any of these allegations by the defense plausible or are they simply a defense tactic designed to muddy the waters? Under any other circumstances I'd dismiss such allegations as being pure fantasy, but after watching how the criminal justice works over the last couple of years and seeing first hand the "win at any cost" attitude that seems to infect most law enforcement agents and prosecutors, I wouldn't be surprised if the allegations were in some part true. As outrageous as the claims of witness intimidation seem, they're no different in what we'd already seen in the Barrera mortgage fraud case where the cops basically intimidated their best witness into saying what they wanted under the threat of arrest.
Yesterday we discussed the allegations of prosecutorial misconduct by the government during the grand jury proceedings which led up to the Plantation cops mortgage fraud indictment. Specifically it's alleged that the government lied to the grand jury when they claimed that the subjects misrepresented facts on HUD-1 forms that were submitted to a Government agency, the Department of Housing & Urban Development. Our contention is that this is patently false as these loans were neither FHA loans or loans that were underwritten by the government therefore making the prosecutors allegations of "submitting false information to a government agency" an outright lie.
As shocking as these allegations of prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury were, I was even more startled at the prosecutors response to the allegations, take a look for yourselves...
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.
Really? So the government says disregard the fact that we may have made a horrific mistake (perhaps intentionally) when we convinced the grand jury to indict, now since we're in front of another jury, let them figure it out? If the "petit jury" convicts, the errors we made are harmless? How about taking into consideration that if you didn't make these "purported errors" the grand jury may not have indicted the poor schleps that are now before the "petit jury"?
I can only imagine the rage the defendants must have felt when reading this motion. Oh well, like the government says, fuck it, let the jury figure it out...
We left off last week discussing certain excerpts from the grand jury transcript from the Plantation Cop's mortgage fraud case, let's take another look at those excerpts...
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.
Filing a false statement with a government agency, specifically the Department of Housing & Urban Development? The loans in question weren't FHA or government insured, so why in the world would anyone think that the HUD-1's for the loans in question were filed with HUD?
In case there was any confusion, the prosecutors presented the grand jury with testimony from one of the agents working the case who confirmed that indeed the HUD-1's in question were filed with the Department of Housing & Urban Development...
Q. And the department or agency to which the HUD-1 is submitted is the Department of Housing & Urban Development?
A. Yes.
Isn't that nice? The obvious problem with these statements is that their flat out WRONG! The prosecutor presenting the case to the grand jury knows so little about the intricacies of mortgage and real estate transactions that he makes this obvious misrepresentation, to add insult to injury he brings in an agent to testify who knows just as little about the subject at hand as he does. Fabulous.
Here's something else to consider, could it be possible since grand jury proceedings are secret, that the prosecutor took some liberties with the truth? Take a look at the same two excerpts from the grand jury transcripts, this time without the obvious misrepresentations...
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 lender.
And...
Q. And the department or agency to which the HUD-1 is submitted is the Department of Housing & Urban Development lender?
A. Yes.
Doesn't that sound completely different? Somehow allegedly lying to a lender (or bank) sounds less damning than lying to a "government agency, the Department of Housing & Urban Development". The question that remains is why would the prosecutor and the case agent in question lie to the grand jury? Was the case too weak to go forward based on the truth? Did the prosecutors need this extra bit of "spice" to push the grand jury to indict or could the prosecutors and agents who worked the case actually know so little about the case that they were prosecuting that they made an innocent mistake? I doubt it. I'm more inclined to believe that this misrepresentation of the facts was designed solely to paint the subjects of the indictment in as bad of light as possible before the grand jury in order to guarantee an indictment. Simply saying the defendants lied to bank wasn't strong enough but alleging that they committed wire and mail fraud by lying to a government agency is a whole different animal.
The worst part of all this? All the grand jury proceedings are secret. More tomorrow.
Why not? If the truth isn't good enough, why not make up some bullshit to really get the job done? Say your a cop or a prosecutor who's itching to put a case together but can't close the deal, somehow you need that extra little bit of spice to push it over the edge to make your allegations more convincing. We witnessed Miami Dade Prosecutor Bill Kostrzewski do it several times, whether lying to a judge or to a witness to elicit the testimony he needed to help his case, as we said the other day, how about if you go one step further and lie to a grand jury in ordrer to get an indictment?
Take a look at these exceprts from the grand jury transcripts for the Plantation Cop's mortgage fraud case aka "Operation Copout"...
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.
Oh really?
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.
No kidding? Here's a snippet of the testimony from the agent who put together the case...
Q. And the department or agency to which the HUD-1 is submitted is the Department of Housing & Urban Development?
A. Yes.
Anyone see the problem there? Think it over and we'll discuss in detail tomorrow...
Due to the tropical storm last Friday that never came , we here in South Florida had an unexpected long weekend. The Straw Buyer and family attended a couple of barbecues and kicked back, wifey had a bit too much to drink though...
Steve Stoll, a politically connected Republican attorney in Fort Lauderdale arrested last month in a mortgage fraud case, is now under investigation by the Florida Bar. Florida Bar spokeswoman Karen Kirksey declined to provide specifics except to confirm that Stoll and fellow lawyer Stephen Orchard, also indicted in the fraud case, are under investigation. In June, a federal indictment detailed how a group of attorneys, police officers and mortgage brokers falsified documents to obtain $16.5 million in loans they used to buy and flip properties. Stoll's attorney, Robert Nicholson, who has said his client is innocent, was unaware the Bar was investigating but wasn't surprised. ``The Bar as a matter of course opens an investigation anytime a licensed attorney is charged with a criminal offense.'' Stoll and his wife, Rebecca Stoll, a former North Broward Hospital District commissioner, are familiar names in Broward political circles. They have supported candidates in recent years, including Gov. Charlie Crist in 2006 and in 2009 and Bill McCollum in 2009, and raise money for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Discovery and Science. -- AMY SHERMAN
Uh oh, that certainly doesn't sound good for the lawyers involved now does it? Throughout the course of our blog we've noticed that the Bar has moved at glacial speeds against the attorneys that have been charged with crimes, yet in this case they seemed to be moving quickly against these two.What struck me as strange about this article was the following quote from Mr. Stoll's attorney...
`The Bar as a matter of course opens an investigation anytime a licensed attorney is charged with a criminal offense.''
Is that right? If indeed that is the case, what happened with the attorney from the Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud Task Forces inaugural case, Attorney David Rodriguez? You all remember him don't you? This was the attorney that was charged with setting up an illegal home purchase where the buyer was getting tens of thousands of dollars from the closing without the lenders knowledge as well as paying off the sellers mortgage weeks before the closing actually occurred according to the state. He was also accused putting the deal together with an undercover cop acting as the sellers accountant. With those kinds of allegations, surely Mr. Rodriguez had some sort of investigation initiated by the Bar regarding his alleged involvement in this fraud, but as we mentioned before, there's no record of any discipline arising from this incident...
We're gonna take a closer look and see what we can find...
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...
