Some fun with Googlemaps and I need a favor, can someone help me find an auto tag agency near South Miami?

I'm a bit confused as it seems that there must be no auto tag agencies anywhere near the City of South Miami.  Let's say for example that I was standing in front of the City of South Miami's city hall, how far is the nearest tag agency?  Let's start by going through a list of tag agencies that I got online along with their proximity to City Hall in green thanks to Googlemaps...

18655 S. Dixie Highway 33157 9.2 miles

5400 NW 22nd Avenue 33142 13.7 miles

1418 Ponce de Leon Blvd 33134 5.0 miles

30708 S. Federal Highway 33030 22.7 miles

11287 S. Dixie Highway 33156 4.0 miles

1375 NW 36th Street 33142 12.0 miles

8530 Bird Road 33155 4.9 miles

13710-K SW 56th street 33175 8.9 miles

20 West 49th Street 33012 15.3 miles

1834 NE Miami Gardens Drive 33179 21.8 miles

804 NW 183rd Street 33169 21.0 miles

140 West Flagler Street 33130 9.0 miles

1550 West 84th street 33014 15.6 miles

10930 West Flagler Street 33174 9.9 miles

800 71st street 33141 19.4 miles

313 NW 167 Street 33162 19.9 miles

12935 West Dixie Highway 33161 18.1 miles

8404 NW 103rd Street 33016 13.8 miles

6402 NW 186th Street 33015 19.3 miles

10201 Hammocks Blvd 33196 11.2 miles

11035 NW 27th Avenue 33167 21.2 miles

2517 SW 8th street 33135 6.2 miles

5759 SW 40th street 33155 2.6 miles

3636 NW 36th street 33142 8.8 miles

5747 NW 7th street 33126 5.6 miles

That's rather interesting, so say for example that I was the City of South Miami and I needed a tag renewed, wouldn't logic dictate that I'd go to the closest tag agency to my office?  Or just to be a model City of South Miami employee, wouldn't it be great to patronize a tag agency in my own city?  Based on what I see there's a tag agency within the city limits located at 5759 SW 40th Street, just 2.6 miles away from City Hall! 


I was a bit bored last night and found myself trolling through the City of South Miami's website where I accidentally stumbled upon the city's finance department.  What's really neat about the city's website is that you can see an itemized list of the city's monthly financial reports, I took a quick look at a few months worth of reports and found this, I've outlined the most interesting part in red...

Would you look at that?  City of South Miami vendor number 3592 is none other than Airways Auto Tag Agency!  The very same auto tag agency that we've been talking about over the last few months!  After a cursory review of the city's financial reports, I managed to find four different transactions totaling $1,776.25 involving a private company that's owned by the city's police chief's wife.  Now, don't get me wrong, these transactions are more than likely legitimate, I honestly have no idea what these transactions are about but I do find it highly suspicious that the City of South Miami would chose to do business with this tag agency when there are seven other tag agencies that are closer to the city, even worse one of those seven is within their own city limits!  


I guess it doesn't hurt that the city's police chief's wife owns this tag agency.  We're going to have to do a little more digging to find out what's going on...

Our friend Al Crespo gives us a shout out and we have to ask, why isn't anyone in the mainstream media covering the Airways Auto Tag scandal?

Our friend and collegue Al Crespo of the Crespo-Gram report gave us a shout out last week regarding our coverage of the Airways Auto Tag story.  You can read his article here.  Al brings up a great question regarding the story in his article...

In years past, this is a story that the Herald would have featured above the fold on it’s front page, because by any criteria, this is a major story about how 3 women were falsely setup, and how a Miami-Dade police detective and a Miami-Dade Assistant State’s Attorney should be considered co-conspirators in this scheme.
But, because a “blogger” is the one that uncovered it, chances are you’ll never see a mention of it on the Herald’s pages, because not only has the Miami Herald squandered it’s journalistic integrity when it comes to acting like a big city newspaper, but, when it comes to “bloggers,” they might cite us once in a while in passing, but what they won’t do is build off of the work and efforts of someone like Mike, and let the whole community know about this nasty deal.

So where is the Herald?  How about any of the local news stations? Is the story of three hardworking innocent women who were wrongly arrested by an incompetent cop not worth covering?  Perhaps the people watching what they try to pawn off as local news are more interested in hearing about Whitney Houston dying again and again rather than hearing a story about one of their own?  Where are all the investigative reporters?  Jim DeFede?  Hank Tester?  Jeff Weinsier?  Anyone?  I guess they're too busy working on breaking news...

Taking a closer look at the those close out sheets from the Airways Auto Tag Agency mess...

Yesterday we went over the "closeout sheets" that are at the center of the Airways Auto Tag Agency case.  These closeout sheets are used by the tellers to account for the money they turn in at the end of the day, the sheets allow the tellers and bookkeepers to break down what's in the tellers drawer by denomination, once all the money is accounted for, everything is totaled up for review then the sheet is signed by the teller and the bookkeeper.

 
The owner of the tag agency tells the state that the tellers entered erroneous information on these handwritten closeout sheets to cover up their alleged theft of tens of thousands of dollars.  Let's take another look at the closeout sheet from December 23, 2010, the date that the owner claims there was thousands of dollars missing, as always, click on the image to enlarge...

Ok, here we have a form that's filled out by hand simply inventorying what was in the tellers drawer for the day broken down by denomination and by check.  Simple enough.  According to the owner of the tag agency, Ileana Martinez de Castro, the agency checks these "close out" sheets for accuracy, scans them then destroys the originals.  Ok, so far so good.  The first problem that jumps out after a quick glance at the sheet is that the numbers don't make sense, IE eight quarters don't equal one dollar and four twenty dollar bills don't equal two hundred dollars.  Strange.  What's even stranger is that no one on the bookkeeping side of equation picked up on these simple mistakes that a second grader should have been able to recognize?  Even worse, whoever reviewed these closeout sheets didn't see this mistake till several months later when they realized there was all kinds of money missing?  That's hard to believe at the very least.

What set me off yesterday was Ms Castro's rambling testimony and her mention of something about lines on the sheet being distorted as a result of the scanning, that caused me to take a closer look.  I reexamined the closeout sheet again and found several issues, issues that I suppose Ms. Castro attributes to scanning.  Here is a another look at the closeout sheet with the anomalies pointed out by the red arrows...

Let's start with the item labeled "A", here's a closeup...

What we're looking at is the number "1" in the box that accounts for quarters.  Look at the top of the one where it meets the horizontal line, see anything strange?  See how the line on the top gets thinner just to the left and right of the one?  Now look to the left of the one and follow down, see what I see?  I've outlined it in red here...

See what I'm saying?  You can clearly see handwriting underneath what looks to be a cut and pasted image of the number "1".  Here are the two images side by side for comparison...

When you look at the two images side by side, it's clear that there's been some sort of alteration to this document.  Let's move on, now we're going to look at item "B"...

Now, what's bizarre about this item is that the number "2" we see here doesn't match the number "2" that we see anywhere else on the sheet.  For comparisons sake, I've collected all the number 2's from this sheet and put them side by side...

Does that number two look like it was written by the same hand?  Hardly.  Moving along to item "C"...

Once again we see a number that looks like it had something else underneath it.  Another anomaly attributed to scanning?  I don't know about that.  Now let's look at item "D"...

What happened to the line under the number two?  Another issue created by the scanning process or was there some sort of alteration here that obscured the line?  Oddly enough this is in the twenty dollar row where the math is screwed up as well.  Somehow this number two doesn't exactly match the other number two's that we know were written by the teller in question.  On to item "E"...

Now here we have two issues, first we have a handwritten number "3" that doesn't match the other number 3's on the closeout sheet...

...as well as a handwritten number "2" that doesn't match any other number 2's anywhere else on the sheet...

How did that happen?  Last but not least is this strange area towards the bottom of the sheet that I've circled in red and labeled  "noise"...

Could that simply have been "noise" generated by the scanning process or was there something written there that was poorly blocked out or altered leaving this mess on the scanned copy of the closeout sheet?  I don't know, perhaps this question is best left to a forensic document examiner.  What I can tell you is that something is definitely not kosher here, whether you look at each individual anomaly or all of them together, there is something wrong with this closeout sheet.  If the teller wanted to make up a bogus closeout sheet, she could have simply grabbed a blank one and put in the bogus numbers then turned it in.  


What we seem to have here is a closeout sheet that appears to be either digitally altered or whited out and altered by someone other than the tellers that were charged for stealing the money.  Why do I say so?  The difference in handwriting suggests that the person who originally filled out the closeout sheet was not the same one that went back in and put in the new numbers as evidenced by the different handwriting style.  These anomalies coupled  with the simple arithmetic errors that we're to believe went unnoticed till months later suggest that there is something nefarious going on here.  Like our old Italian painting from yesterday, when you look closely at this closeout sheet, someone is definitely getting fucked and it isn't a dog that's doing the fucking...

Details, details, details...

Almost all of the cases that we've written about since the inception of our blog are paperwork intensive.  There seems to be mountains and mountains of documents in each case, either documents and exhibits that the state turns over as part of the discovery process or voluminous deposition transcripts that easily exceed several hundred pages.  In these instances it seems utterly impossible to get a proper handle on whats going on in these cases considering the seemingly insurmountable pile of paperwork that accompanies each case.  Yet to fully understand these cases, you have to go through these documents over and over and over again. 


There's been several instances to date where I've looked at a specific document dozens if not hundreds of times and have noticed nothing then somehow miraculously after looking at the document for months on end, something literally just jumps off the page is if it was outlined in neon lights.  This seventeenth century painting of an Italian piazza is a perfect example, at first glance there's nothing unusual about the painting...

Nothing strange going on there, just an old painting with some buildings and some people, you could walk by this painting a thousand times and never notice anything, that is till you take a closer look...

The minute you focus in on the painting, you realize there's something in the middle of the painting just in front of the tower so you squint and take another look then BAM...

There it is, right in the middle of the damn painting, TWO DOGS HAVING SEX!  Once you see the two dogs having sex, you realize that there's a crowd of people in the painting all watching what the dogs are doing.  Now when I see the painting, the dogs are the first thing I see and to think I've seen this painting for years and never noticed the dogs!


So what's two dogs having sex in the middle of a several centuries old Italian painting have to do with our blog?  Luckily for us, the Airways Auto Tag case has very little in the way of documents in the states case file, what little I've been able to find on my own outside of the criminal case file consists mostly of transcripts of an unemployment compensation hearings where the tellers that were accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars and subsequently fired from their jobs at the tag agency were simply looking to collect their unemployment benefits.  Luckily for us, the owner of the tag agency, Ileana Martinez de Castro, fought vehemently to deny these girls their unemployment benefits, her testimony during these hearings has turned into a treasure trove of information that I believe will ultimately be used against her if this case ever goes to trial.


According to the state and the allegations made against the tellers by the owner of the tag agency, the three tellers that were charged were accused of stealing money from the tag agency by accepting cash from the customers then after the clients left with their tags, the state alleges that the tellers would go ahead and void the transactions and pocket the money.  As I've mentioned before, the tellers have cameras and supervisors constantly monitoring them as well as keeping track of every dollar that the tellers take in.  At the end of every day, the tellers are required to fill out "closing sheets" which are basically an itemized inventory of every dollar that the tellers have at the end of the day when they close out their drawers.  Here is an example of a blank closeout sheet from the tag agency...

Simple enough and easy to understand, it's nothing more than a way for the teller to inventory the money in their drawer, itemize the various denominations, total everything up, sign and date it.  Then I suppose who ever does the bookkeeping then checks for inaccuracies then signs and dates it themselves.  


Now, lets move on to the tag agency owner's testimony regarding these closing sheets during the unemployment hearing specifically the close out sheet from the day the alleged thefts occurred, December 23, 2010...

Ms. DeCastro:  Okay, the paper that she turned in is on Page 11.  Page 11 is in her own handwriting.  And, she says that she put the wrong amount of the bill because, obviously, four $20 bills do not add to $200.  But the amount of money that she put on the right hand side add up to $14, 835.82; her handwriting which she signed and date, herself.  All we do is scan it.  The reason it has those lines on it is because we were making copies of copies, in order to do a closeout sheet; therefore, it looks like that.  But, we scan everything exactly the way they turn it in, their page. 

Huh?  What?  This excerpt of Ms. DeCastro's testimony shows a weird trait that she exhibits throughout all the unemployment hearing transcripts, she seems to ramble on at the slightest provocation.  I didn't think anything of the closeout sheet in question, till I read her her testimony for the third time.  Anyone who's every been to a deposition or a hearing of this nature is told by counsel again and again, simply answer the questions with a yes or a no, don't volunteer anything, keep your answers short and simple.  In this case all this talk about the scanning of these closeout sheets and "those lines" that she mentions that appear on the closeout sheets as a result of the scanning really got me wondering so I picked up the closeout sheet from December 23, 2010 and took a closer look to try to figure out what Ms. DeCastro was talking about.  Take a look for yourselves, as always, click on the image to enlarge...

First off, we notice at the top of the page, the fax header is from Duane Morris, LLP which we've learned is the law firm that represents the tag agency therefore authenticating the document as being a genuine close out sheet from the tag agency.  Now, as we just read, the owner of the tag agency mentions something about lines "looking like that", I can only assume that what Ms. DeCastro is referring to is the slight distortion in the lines because ostensibly as a result of the scanning process.  Once we blow up the closeout sheet, it's easy to spot the distortions Ms. DeCastro is talking about...

I went ahead and pointed out some of these distortions in in red in case you weren't able to spot them.  


After reading the transcripts, I was startled by Ms. DeCastro's willingness to ramble on, almost unprovoked.  I've learned over the years that no matter what the situation, if you give someone that's got something to hide enough rope, they're eventually going to hang themselves and in this instance Ms DeCastro didn't disappoint. Take a really good look at that closeout sheet from December 23, 2010 again and see if you see anything strange, for the astute among you it should be clear as day.  We'll discuss tomorrow...

The Airways Auto Tag Agency story, a quick recap...

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Before we get back into discussing the Airways Auto Tag Agency story, I think it's best to do a recap of the story as we've told it to date.  In a nutshell the state is alleging that three tellers that were employed by Airways Auto Tag Agency were stealing tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of days by voiding transactions after the customers had left and subsequently pocketing the money at the end of the day which created massive shortages in the tax revenues that the agency had to turn into the state at the end of the month.  Here is a quick glance at our various posts over the last couple of months with the links to the posts highlighted...

• 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.

Well then!  Let's go back to the states motion to revoke the tellers bond from last week...

Motion to Revoke Bond for Lizbeth Mojica and Yamela Romero

The crux of this motion is the allegation that the defendants violated the terms of their pre trial release by contacting the victims, specifically through the testimony of a current employee of the tag agency, Nydia Espana, the state alleges that the tellers told her that "...the victim was going to "pay now" and that everyone would know through the use of the internet who the victim "really was".  

The state goes on to say that the defendants were seeking to harass and intimidate the victim(s) through this blog and "coupled with the statement made to the tag employee (Nydia Espana) by one of the defendants" that this violates the terms of the Pre Trial Release.  So what happened in court last Thursday?  Well, being the asshole that I am, I decided to clear my schedule and go over to the courthouse that morning and see whats going on.  When I arrived on the sixth floor just outside Judge Bloom's courtroom, I saw the owner of the tag agency, Ileana Martinez de Castro, her mother (who the state also claims was harassed by the defendants) and another older lady who I later learned was none other than the tag agency employee, Nydia Espana, who was there prepared to testify before the court against the three tellers.  

There was a slight problem though, something I noticed immediately, Ms Espana was there sitting outside the courtroom trembling.  She looked scared shitless.  At first I chalked it up to a simple case of nerves from someone who's never been before a judge, but that changed quickly.  I watched one of the defense attorneys asking her some questions outside, instead of simply answering the questions the poor woman would look over at the tag agency owner before she'd answer.  That seemed rather strange till I realized that this woman didn't know what to answer!  The attorney picked up on this strange dynamic as well and asked to question her without the tag agency owner, Ileana Martinez de Castro, present.  Strangely enough under questioning without her boss present, Ms Espana recanted her testimony regarding the alleged threats from the defendants!

Now what?!  The whole basis for the state's motion to revoke the defendants bond just went out the window!  So at this point the only thing that the "victims" have managed to do is suborn perjury by making their employee give this bogus statement against the defendants and have made the prosecutor, Warren Eth, look like a complete douchebag before the court.  NICE GOING!  If that wasn't bad enough, later in court when the prosecutor pressed on about the blog being used to "harass" the "victims" the judge had to remind him about some obscure concept called the "first amendment" thereby making the prosecutor look like even more of a tool!

Prosecutor Warren Eth

Don't get me wrong, Prosecutor Eth seems like a nice enough guy but I think that in this instance he was royally screwed by the alleged "victims".  You have to feel for the guy considering the pinch he was in, he puts together this motion whose sole intention was to get these girls who couldn't afford their ridiculous six figure bond amounts, locked up till their trial rolled around, all based on the statement given by a current Airways Tag Agency employee who claimed that the defendants had made some sort of threats against them.  Now, after the current employee recants her injurious statement against the defendants, what is the poor prosecutor left to do other than to withdraw his motion?  What this prosecutor should have done after being embarrassed and used like a worthless tool by the owners of the tag agency was to turn around and throw a perjury charge against the woman who recanted her statement as well as whoever put her up to making the statement!

Lonnie Richardson, Esq

Consider for a moment if the defendant's attorney, Lonnie Richardson, wasn't smart enough to catch the uneasy body language between the owner of the tag agency and the woman who made the statement against the tellers, the judge could have revoked their bond and thrown them in jail all based on some fabricated statement designed to keep these tellers from exercising their rights to free speech and to keep some asshole on the last page of the internet from investigating and writing their story.  WTF kind of shit is that?


I hope that after this incident, prosecutor Eth thinks twice before filing this kind of motion and will properly vet a statement that could ultimately cause innocent people to be thrown behind bars before they have their day in court.  After all, the only thing the alleged "victims" in this case have done here is manipulate a young, gullible prosecutor into filing a bogus motion that ultimately did nothing but embarrass himself and the office of the state attorney.