The private investigator who finally bust open Pandora’s Box of absentee ballots in Hialeah was questioned at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office Monday afternoon — and came out with a much better attitude than the one he had going in.
Joe Carillo took an awful long time upstairs with investigators and/or prosecutors – ‘specially for a guy who was going to give them the bird and tell them to go fly a kite (my words, not his; his were more X-rated). But when he came out, he was far more subdued and told the journalists who waited in the hot sun for about two hours that he felt more confidence in the SAO investigation.
He also said “they have a good reason” for not arresting Daisy Cabrera and Matilde Martinez, the boleteras caught red-handed and on candid camera picking up what is now a growing tally of 31 absentee ballots (and Ladra thinks that number is the 12 first reported, held by one woman, and the 19 reported after, in possession of the other).
That can only mean that the boleteras are cooperating — and maybe the dominos will soon start to fall. Because although they women implied early on that they were supporting Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, and while Cabrera seems to be part of his campaign staff or volunteer team at several events, and though they were videotaped going into his Hialeah campaign office, Ladra and others doubt the Gimenez camp really knew what she was up to. That’s why the affidavits that Golden Boy is making his team of deputy consultants sign, according to the Miami Herald, don’t mean squat.
Sure, political strategists Al Lorenzo and Francois Illas — who runs the Hialeah office and is partners in Lorenzo’s Quantum Results company — can swear up and down that they didn’t hire Cabrera or Martinez. Just like campaign manager Jesse Manzano and fundraiser Brian Goldmeier and anybody else who signs the sworn statement. But it doesn’t mean they didn’t hire someone else, say like Hialeah Councilwoman Vivian “I’ll Notarize That” Casals-Muñoz — who had the mayor’s West 68th Avenue campaign office before Gimenez and ran her own AB runners out of there — to handle whatever “get-out-the-vote” measures she could implement in the City of Progress.
Duh. This is a futile exercise that means nothing legally and morally, but has tons of positive media exposure. It’s called good damage control or crisis management — but it doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Still, Carillo seemed to indicate that authorities are after bigger fish.
“I have been given information that not everything that is going on here is what it seems,” Carillo said when he left the state attorney’s office, echoing the same words prosecutors told Ladra last year when she provided them with information the Hialeah firefighters and I had compiled about people giving their ballots to candidates or campaign workers and tenants of public housing who told us that everybody in the building was instructed to give their ballots to a specific person. They told us about being 
threatened with the loss of their homes and other benefits and being bribed with trinkets and gifts.
Carillo did say that investigators wanted more information from him than he was ready to provide — though he would turn over the video and photos. He said he was not going to give up his client — at least not until after the Aug. 14 election — and that he would go to jail to protect whoever it was who hired him to follow the boleteras.
“They want to connect me with this but they can’t. They can’t connect me with any political candidate or party,” Carillo said, repeating that he was friends with Gimenez. “I would never do anything to hurt him. “This criminal who is out there stealing votes, led me to him,” he said.
The only campaign contribution he has made this election cycle is $100 — to Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez-Rundle‘s re-election effort.
He says he’s been followed but that he is not being investigated — by the SAO. He did say earlier that he had heard other private detectives had been hired to dig dirt on him — because now the top of the AB machinery is going to try to discredit him, of course. And he hinted he may be under investigation by someone else (note to Ladra: file a public records request with Hialeah Police regarding another possible politically-motivated police investigation).
But while he said he had more confidence in the inquiry than he did over the weekend, Carillo also said he was not entirely sold. “I’m still skeptical.” After all, he says, he brought them tons of documentation of this very type of manipulation of ballots and outright theft of people’s basic right to vote in 2004 or so, when he conducted an investigation of AB ballots for Miami Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi — who apparently asked for my phone number from someone today but has not called me. I’ll take your call, Mayor Muscles. Let’s talk.
Said Carillo about that case: “You know what happened? Nothing.”
And while he said that prosecutors did seemingly justify their delay in charging the boleteras, the P.I. also seemed miffed that they spent so much time trying to find out what his motivation was instead of theirs. And it does occur to Ladra that there is no legal reason to ask him who his client is. That’s not a crime, to hire someone to follow boleteras. It might be interesting to me and other journalists, because — depending on who it is — it could point to manipulation of another kind.
It also could be relevant to the person who he said hacked into his phone via a spoof application and went into his private and business emails.
“My telecommunications have been hacked overnight in an attempt to find out who is my employer,” Carillo said as the video cameras, including the one on my phone uploaded on YouTube, whirred. “I will go to prison before I tell anybody who has employed me. The real story here is not a citizen who reported a crime, who is me. It is who got into this email. I believe it was the private sector, and I believe I know who they are working for.”
He said he would not give any more information at this time, but did tell Ladra he turned over his computer to the FBI Miami field office.
Carillo shut down on Ladra late Monday night after I pointed out the discrepancy in his story and, since he is getting tired at the attacks trying to discredit him, probably thought I was doing the same. I was not. I was trying to clarify and make sure things are reported in context. But at one point, he says he was just a citizen pointing out a crime to the police, that he was contacted by “concerned citizens” who he had met during previous investigations who gave him a business card from Cabrera that said “Call me when your ballot arrives. I work all elections.” But he also admitted to having a client that, we assume, paid for him to follow Cabrera after he got that tip.
And, Carillo and others may not agree, but it is important to find out who that is. Not to law enforcement because, really, it’s none of their business. But it is, indeed, Ladra’s business because we need to know where this came from and if it was an effort to hurt anybody specifically, if not Gimenez.
Maybe, since he ain’t talking anymore, we should ask Cabrera what she thinks. Who does she think went after her? Could it have been one of the people she has worked for in the past or, more likely, someone wanting to burn one of the people she has worked for.
“This person has to be arrested and has to say who paid her. This lady has to be in that building there,” Carillo said, signaling across the street to the Dade County Jail.
Another reporter asked him if he had inquired as to why they hadn’t charged her yet?
“I did. They have a good reason,” he said, but declined repeatedly to go into details.
So, she’s talking. And who is she giving up? Well, let’s look at who she has worked with before. Former Sen. Rudy Garcia? State Rep. Eddy Gonzalez? Hialeah hoodlums Julio Robaina and Carlos “Castro” Hernandez? Councilwoman Vivian Casals-Muñoz? State Sen. Rene Garcia? County Commissioner Esteban Bovo?
Fernandez-Rundle herself?
Just because Cabrera isn’t on all the campaign reports, doesn’t mean she didn’t get paid by them all, even though she does show up on the reports for Gonzalez and Rene Garcia. But this business has a thing called “soft money” and people called “bagmen” who pay for “street operations” like boleteras.
What about political strategist Al Lorenzo, who works for both? He has ties to at least one of the boleteras, Daisy Cabrera, and several of the candidates, but has not answered any of my phone calls over the course of four days. Who can blame him, right? But will he be questioned about this? And by whom? By his client’s underlings?
State Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera told Ladra Monday that the SAO had contacted him, likely to come in and tell them about the time Cabrera offered him her services as well. He said he met her at a campaign event more than a month ago.
“I give everyone who requests it a meeting. I think it’s the respectful thing to do,” said Lopez-Cantera, who does not want to be involved in this mess because he has his own campaign, running for the Miami-Dade property appraiser against the incumbent — everybody’s abuelo and the Santa Claus-lookalike Pedro Garcia.
Lopez-Cantera said he told Cabrera to take a hike. My words, not his. He told her he didn’t need her “electioneering services,” he said.
Prosecutors should talk to former Hialeah Councilmembers Frank Lago and Cindy Miel, as well. They were both approached by Cabrera last fall during the city elections there and she offered to get them hundreds of absentee ballots and votes from assisted living facilities — in exchange for thousands of dollars. Both declined. Then both of them gave statements to Miami-Dade Police Public Corruption Unit Det. Myriam Gordils, who has since retired.
But the statements should still be there, right? Or, one would hope, with the investigators looking at this now.
They will likely talk to Carillo again. He said he will give them the evidence he has.
Meanwhile, Fernandez-Rundle is getting increasing calls to recuse herself out a potential conflict of interest or the perception of one, anyway, since Lorenzo also works for her campaign.
Facing the toughest challenge in at least a decade, possibly her 19-year career, Fernandez-Rundle is not making many friends out of this.
Carillo is making enemies, sure. But he is also making many new friends. That includes former Miami Mayor Joe Carollo — a longtime Fernandez-Rundle foe who has publicly criticized her before and is supporting Rod Vereen in the race against her. Carollo told Ladra there is no reason not to arrest the boleteras.
“It’s Law Enforcement 101,” he said. “You get these people, you tie them up and that’s how you get them to cooperate.”
There is also Hialeah Police Chief Rolando Bolaños, Hialeah Fire Union Vice President Eric Johnson and, yes, Ladra, who is going to give Carillo the benefit of the doubt — until she gets burned by it, as she so often does. Because we want to believe he is a legitimate knight in shining armor, don’t we?
And some of the journalists there waiting for Carillo seemed to feel a certain degree of outrage that prosecutors would want to know who hired him before they went after whoever it was that hired the boleteras he caught red-handed last week.
For many of us, Carillo is a blue-eyed prince who finally cracked open the corruption of this machinery — without a care to whoever it exposed, including Gimenez, who he said was a friend he went to high school with and who he would never have intentionally targeted.
Now that Golden Boy Gimenez has broken my heart – not because he did any of this but because he legitimized it and condoned it with his embrace of the unholy alliance with “Castro” Hernandez and because of the way he has reacted to questions about it or about his campaign’s role in the boleteras bust – there might be some space in there for a reluctant hero like Carillo.
Hialeah AB inquiry may have a bigger net added by Ladra on
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