Graft in Miami Lakes: A tale of 2 council members, A & B

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The federal kick-back sting that led to the arrest this week of two Miami-Dade mayors and two of our local lobbyists also sheds light on some stark differences between two council members in Miami Lakes.

The feds call them Councilmember A and Councilmember B in the affidavit that supported the arrest of Miami Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi and details how he went about ensuring that a town resolution was passed in exchange for $5,000 in cash and $1,750 more in campaign contributions.

We’ll call them by their real names: Councilman Tony Lama and Vice Mayor Cesar Mestre, who became the mayor after Pizzi was suspended by the governor Tuesday.

According to the sworn testimony in the affidavit by FBI agent Paul James Wright, Pizzi had already single-handedly passed a resolution to do business with Sunshine Universal, the fake firm the feds had set up for their prop extortion game, in Medley, where he is (was?) the town attorney. He couldn’t do it himself in Miami Lakes, right? It might look funny, you know, raise suspicion.

So he and lobbyist Richard Candia arranged for the two Chicago businessmen — who everyone now knows were undercover FBI agents — to meet with Lama. The document makes clear that Lama was not told about the kick-backs or that a substantial amount of money would never make it to the town’s coffers. It also states that the paid confidential informant who first told the feds in May of 2011 that he could lead them to politicians willing to break (more on that later) was there for the Feb. 27 meeting at a restaurant in Miami Lakes.

Lama told Ladra it was at Shula’s on Main Street.

“I’m going to give you the same exact story I gave the FBI,” he said. And while that’s an unfortunate use of the word “story,” his seems reasonable.

“Richard Candia reached out and said he wanted me to meet with people from a firm called Sunshine Universal,” Lama told me. “He was our lobbyist. I made the assumption that as our lobbyist he is working in the best interest of the city. He said it would really go far in attaining economic development and jobs in Miami Lakes. I ran with it on that.”

But “ran with it” might be the wrong phrase. Too strong. Because the freshman councilman, newby that he is, had the gumption to ask questions. He’s too naïve to know how this works, God bless him.

“I met with him [Candia] and who I now realize were FBI agents for lunch,” Lama told me. “They said they were former AmeriCorps employees who could get us grant monies.

“I, of course, asked questions. ‘Who have you done this for?’

‘Other municipalities.’

‘Which ones?

‘Sweetwater.’

“For me, it didn’t make a lot of sense. Miami Lakes is 95% developed. I asked them to explain how we were going to use the study to further develop Miami Lakes. I told them, ‘I’d like to see some sort of output as to what you delivered to Sweetwater,’” he said he told them.

“I was going to do my homework,” he told me.

And that included asking town staff, including a grants writer that the town already has working full time, to look at the company and see what they could do together. So he put the item on discussion for the March meeting this year. For discussion! Imagine that!

Well, that wouldn’t work: Staff would find a sham. You can almost envision the alarm bells going off in Candia’s head. But, no, according to the affidavit, it was Pizzi who noticed the flaw in their plan.

“According to Candia, Pizzi had reviewed the agenda for the March 2013 meeting and noticed a request by Councilmember A that additional research be conducted regarding the grant,” the agent swears. “Accordingly, Pizzi had directed that Candia have the item removed from the March 2013 agenda and Pizzi would have it put on the April agenda through another commissioner.”

When the confidential informant called Pizzi to thank him for “what you caught last night… caught what [Councilmember A] did and you were able to help fix it,” Pizzi confirmed that he would get it back on the table.

“Yeah, I got an idea. It’s coming back in April,” Pizzi told him. “I fixed it, yeah.”

Lama told me that the lobbyist did, indeed, fix it.

“Richard says to me, ‘Go ahead and pull it.’ I asked him, ‘You’re not going to provide what I need?’ And he said something about the sequester and funds having dried up. He said we’d come back to it later.”

But when it came back, it came back via Mestre, who sponsored a motion in May to approve an agreement with Sunshine Universal to seek economic development funds from AmeriCorps.

Lama said he didn’t think much of it. Mestre was the right person to go through, anyhow, as the chairman of the city’s economic development committee. Lama – who works on items like lake water quality and elderly affairs — told Ladra he suggested it at the meeting at Shulas’s.

“To be 100% honest, my thought was that this should be something that goes through our economic development committee anyway,” Lama said. “My immediate reaction was, ‘Ok, they did this the right way.’”

Well, think again, Councilman.

It never got to any committee.

This, even though Mestre had reason to raise his eyebrow. He noted that the company wasn’t registered in the Florida Division of Corporations and he expressed his concern to Candia. Candia told him the company was based in Chicago and they would incorporate to do business in Florida. Mestre also told Roberto Rodriguez-Tejera on his TV show that he had googled Sunshine Universal and found nothing. Candia told him that the company did not need publicity since it worked directly with the government, he said, adding something about them wanting to fly under the radar.

But Mestre is not only a former police officer, he is also a lobbyist on zoning issues in Hialeah and he is an attorney, so he has access to far better search tools than google. And why, even though he had reservations, would he just push this through without going through the proper pipelines? He just gets the resolution language sent to him by Candia and runs with it. Now we can use that phrase. And why, if he noticed it was the same item that Lama had pulled from the draft agenda a couple of months earlier, didn’t he ask his colleague about it?

“Because I can’t talk to another councilmember about these things,” he told Rodriguez-Tejera, referring to Sunshine laws that prohibit elected officials of the same body to talk out of the public eye about city business matters. Key words: out of the public eye. Which means Mestre could have brought it up and asked Lama on the dais at the meeting. “Hey, Tony, isn’t this the same outfit you were looking to get usinvolved with? Why did you pull it?” That might have made sense.

That would have not worked with the plan, however.

It also, however, might have been smart for Lama to ask a question or two at the meeting. Even passive aggressively. “Hey, Cesar, this is a great idea. I’m glad you checked this company out. That’s what I wanted in March, for this to go through you and your economic development committee.”

But, basically, there was too much silence.

Mestre also said he never met with the owners of the company. Pizzi told him to call Candia about the opportunity for federal funds and this is supported by the affidavit, which makes no mention of a meeting but shows how suddenly the resolution was back with a different champion.

All that makes sense and falls in line with Mestre’s role as one of Pizzi’s puppets.

Mestre said that he fully trusted Candia because the lobbyist’s partner, Jose “El Chino” Fuentes, had been his friend for 30 years. Come to think of it, El Chino Fuentes is also the one with the closer relationship to Sweetwater Mayor Manny Maroño — the other mayor arrested in the same sting but independently of this one — from his days as director of the South Florida Water Management District.

Anyway, after short discussion in which Pizzi was the one to take pains to assure everyone that it would not cost the city a dime, the motion was unanimously approved. Nothing ever happened though because of legal requirements the company didn’t meet, Mestre said Wednesday.

Nothing was supposed to happen at that end, of course. Pizzi was supposed to send an endorsement letter to the fake businessmen and then start seeing the money come into his pockets, not the city’s.

Mestre and Lama both said they had talked to FBI agents and were scheduled to meet with them again next week. Lama said he couldn’t tell me why. Mestre told Rodriguez-Tejera that it was to testify on Aug. 15.

Hey, isn’t that when the grand jury meets?

  Cesar Mestre, Manny Marono, Miami Lakes politics, Michael Pizzi, public corruption, Tony Lama