Why are Mayoral candidate Julio Robaina's properties worth so little? Taking a closer look at Mr. Robaina's campaign qualifying documents...

I know the Miami Dade county mayoral race isn't our standard fare, bare with me though as I think what I've found may be of interest to our readers that are going to vote on Tuesday for former mayor Carlos Avarez's replacement.  I was bored the last couple of days so I decided to go through mayoral candidate Julio Robaina's qualifying documents.  Here they are in their entirety...

Julio Robaina Mayoral Candidate Qualifying Documents

At first glance there seems to be nothing out of the ordinary, that is until I came across the list of real property that Mr. Robaina owns, here it is appears on his financial disclosures, as always, click on the image to enlarge...

For the moment, let's take a look at the property identified by the first arrow which is located at 499 West 33rd street and the one just below it which is located at 455 West 33rd street.  These two addresses refer to the same shopping center, the same shopping center that our friend Frank Alvarado of the Miami New Times wrote about back in April (here's a link to that article).  From the article...

While Miami-Dade County residents paid higher property taxes last year, Hialeah Mayor and Miami-Dade County mayoral candidate Julio Robaina did not pay property taxes on a shopping center he owns in his city. In fact, it appears Robaina has avoided paying taxes on the building since 2006, when he and a business partner finished it.

Ok, so according to the article for some reason or another the Property Appraisers office only calculated the property taxes based on the land value and not the value of the complete shopping center.  Worse still, the property appraisers office takes the blame for the "miscalculation"...

"...it was the property appraiser's office's fault Robaina's building value was not recalculated."

Sounds like bullshit to me, but for the sake of our argument, let's accept that the property appraisers office screwed up and failed to collect tens of thousands of dollars from Mr. Robaina.  We've also learned from the New Times article that Mr. Robaina had borrowed in excess of one million three hundred thousand dollars against this property, with that in mind, how can you explain these numbers on his campaign qualifying documents...

According to Mr. Robaina, his shopping center is worth a total of  $75,325!  WTF?  I wonder what the bank who lent Mr. Robaina 1.3 million dollars would think of that?  Now I understand that the first screw up could have been blamed on the property appraiser not reevaluating the property after the shopping center after it was built (pffffft!) but how can we explain this miscalculation on his campaign qualifying documents?  Based on what's listed in the qualifying documents it looks like Mr. Robaina's wife prepared these documents, so is it possible she wasn't aware of what her husbands assets were worth?  

Let's move on to the property identified by the second arrow in the list of real properties owned by Mr. Robaina that we posted at the beginning of today's post, the property located at 5590 West 16th Avenue which appears to be a prosperous Chevron gas station.  From Google maps...

From the looks of it this Chevron has six gas pumps (two dispensers per pump) as well as a convenience store.  The station seems to be sitting on a prime corner and based on what a few of my friends who own gas stations have told me, the station, convenience store and business is worth upwards of 1.5 million dollars, the property alone has got to be worth in excess of a million dollars.  Based on the $610,000 mortgage Mr. Robaina obtained when he purchased the property back in 1995 the property had to be worth at least that much if not much more, so then why would he list it's value at $192,071 on his campaign qualifying documents?

I don't get it?  Once again from the campaign qualifying documents and the mortgage for the gas station, we learn that the tenant who occupies the station is a corporation that's also owned by Mr. Robaina...

Just the convenience store and it's lease for the gas station and store is worth more than what Mr. Robaina claims the whole station is worth!  What gives here folks? 

I wouldn't want to suggest some sort of impropriety on Mr. Robaina's part regarding the gross undervaluing of these two properties that we've discussed.  Maybe it's something that's easily explainable?  Perhaps an oversight by his wife who handles the day to day affairs while Mr. Robaina was busy governing Hialeah?  Really, why would anyone want to undervalue their assets in a financial disclosure anyway?

This brings us to this final detail regarding Mr. Robaina's campaign qualifying documents...

By signing these documents, Mr. Robaina swears "...that the information disclosed on this form and any attachments hereto is true, accurate and complete."  As we sit here on the eve of our mayoral election how are we to interpret the fact that Mr. Robaina swore that the facts regarding his own personal finances contained in his campaign qualifying documents are correct when it's blatantly obvious that they're not?  If Mr. Robaina isn't intimately familiar with his own finances then how can we expect him to handle the job of managing the multi billion dollar Miami Dade county government?

"Before he knew it, he was in the middle of a Ponzi!"

OH SNAP! Everything was great then next thing I knew, I found myself in the middle of a $40 million dollar Ponzi scheme! WTF!? That's how we're to believe Hialeah jeweler Luis Felipe Perez got caught up running a $40 million dollar Ponzi scheme. From the Miami New Times article last June...

Havana-born Perez ran a jewelery and pawn shop business, and promised investors returns of anywhere from 18 to 120 percent a year through monthly payment.

Investors thought they were investing in two of Perez's companies, Lucky Star Diamonds Inc. and Luis Felipe Jewelry Design Corp. (neither had employees other than Perez), and that their money was collateralized by diamonds. In fact, Perez said he kept diamonds in deposit safes, however they turned out to be fake.

There's a sucker born every minute, isn't there? Who could possibly believe that some two bit jeweler could provide a 120% return on an investment? Like many many other Ponzi schemers of the last decade, Mr. Perez's house of cards came falling down during the economic down turn when he was no longer able to recruit new investors. Read the SEC's press release and complaint against Mr. Perez here.


Today we learn that the real cause of Mr. Perez's downfall wasn't the unsustainable lavish lifestyle that he led, but in fact according to his attorney, Alvin Entin, the blame for Mr. Perez's indiscretions lay at the feet of loan sharks, one of which just happened to be the Mayor of the City of Hialeah, Julio Robaina, who's recently announced that he's got his eye on the county mayor seat. Take a look at this story by Jim Defede on Mayor Julio Robaina and his alleged dealings with Ponzi schemer Perez...

Now that's some funny shit. I find the suggestion that Mr. Perez was paying the private lenders that he worked with 36% interest simply laughable. During the real estate boom there were hoards of private lenders running around Miami that routinely lent large sums of money for anywhere from 7% up to 18% annual interest. The suggestion that Mr Perez was paying Mayor Robaina and the like an additional 18% under the table (cash no less) in addition to the 18% that's on the recorded mortgage docs is ludicrous considering how many people were willing to lend at the time for far less. Regardless, if you were to believe Mr Entin, his client Mr. Perez got caught in this vicous cycle of borrowing and paying back money from these "loan sharks" which ultimately led him to this life of crime, in his own words...

“Luis Perez is a nice young man,” Entin said. “He had a jewelry business and borrowed money from people who were loan sharks to get the business moving, couldn’t keep up with the payments to the loan sharks, started borrowing more money and before he knew it he was in the middle of a Ponzi.”

WHOOPS! First you find yourself borrowing money to keep your little business going and then next thing you know, BAM, you're stuck in the middle of a $40,000,000 Ponzi scheme! God damn it, don't you hate when that kinda shit happens! It's even worse when it happens to a "nice young man"! CRAP!

A little further in the interview, we get a some insight into the real motivation behind this amazing tale of private lenders who charge 36% interest rates...

“I can tell you that my client is still cooperating,” Entin said. “There are other subjects and targets of governmental interest out there. My client has provided some very useful information and I think the government is proceeding on it.”

Did you expect any less? Mr. Perez is staring at a ten year stretch in Federal prison and now all of a sudden we get this quasi "press release" with all kinds of documents and personal photos from an "unknown" source that paints a prominent politician in a bad light. Only time will tell if Mr. Perez's "useful information" will succeed in shaving time off his sentence. I've been caught off guard doing a lot of things Mr. Entin, running a 8 figure Ponzi scheme has never been one of them.

It's Miami though, a very, very small town indeed. For those of you following our blog, the old school criminal defense attorney, Alvin Entin, shouldn't be a stranger to you, Mr. Entin represented the central figure in the Barrera Mortgage fraud case, Mr. John Romney.