Thank God for the feds coming to the rescue. I’ll call them the cavalry.
The scandalous claims that came out Sunday about former Miami Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi wanting three years ago to plant cocaine on former Councilman Richard Pulido or take him out more permanently — as in hire someone to whack him — are only the most salacious of several allegations federal agents are digging into now, years later — all because Pizzi won’t cooperate on the more recent bribery and extortion charges.
Several sources have told Ladra that the federal agents and prosecutors are not too pleased with Pizzi’s cocky innocence stance and they are a little embarrassed that the case against him for allegedly taking kickbacks to streamline a grant request he knew was fraudulent seems less solid than the one they have against former Sweetwater Mayor Manny Maraña Maroño, who is cooperating but is getting all his sins dragged out anyway.
And, so, they are digging into Pizzi’s colorful past to see what else they can make stick.
They are looking into the $200,000 allegedly “stolen” from his office safe, the intentional fire that followed that, Pizzi’s relationship with developer Lowell Dunn, who had a series of projects in Miami Lakes, including the extension of Northwest 87th Avenue that Pulido voted against. They are looking into whether or not Dunn got him the job as town attorney in Medley and if that resulted in Pizzi changing the language on what a landfill was, something he had to abandon on second reading because folks were on to him (read: someone tipped him off).
They are also looking into work Pizzi subcontracted to his friends — including Miami Lakes Vice Mayor Cesar Mestre — and other contracts he pushed as city attorney in the town of Medley, which also has business with Dunn and for which Pizzi had also gotten to approve a contract with the bogus company that he allegedly knew were stealing federal grant monies with bogus economic development reports, the sting in which he got busted Aug. 6 along with Maroño.
Ladra had heard about this widespread net last week. I must admit, the accusations about him wanting to “take out” a councilman by planting drugs on him or rigging the brakes on his car, exposed in the Herald Sunday, are new to me. But they are just the tip of a federal iceberg intent on sinking the SS Muscles.
Activist David Bennett, who has fought Pizzi for years, told Ladra he has a meeting next week with FBI special agent in charge Paul Rice to go tell him what he knows about these incidents and show him the trail of evidence in many of these matters, including the timing of his job in Medley and the 87th Avenue deal.
“I have all these files that show the timing of the land deals and the Medley landfill,” Bennett told me.
Bennett’s complaints about the mayor’s abuse may stretch into the way that local authorities have turned the other cheek. “I have been five times to the state attorney’s office, three times to ethics,” he said, referring to the Miami Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust. He said Terry Murphy, former chief of staff to former Miami-Dade Commissioner Natacha Seijas, had been to both offices on multiple occasions, too.
“These institutions are supposed to protect us,” Bennett said. “How can we have faith in them?”
“The hard evidence was there. It was obvious.”
Among that evidence, we suppose, is the July 30, 2010, tape of Pizzi’s obscenity-laced orders to Tom McGrath, who was then chairman the Miami Lakes planning and zoning board. It has some technical issues, but you can clearly hear Pizzi tell McGrath to do whatever he had to do in order to get Pulido, who Muscles did not have in his pocket, out of his hair.
Pizzi does not sound drunk, as he said he was in his defense in the story broken by David Ovalle and Jay Weaver at the Miami Herald. And McGrath, a former Hialeah Police officer had gone to police and wore a wire because Pizzi had allegedly asked him twice before to plant drugs on Pulido.
McGrath: “How do I get it?”
Pizzi: “The coke?”
“Yeah,” says McGrath.
“How difficult is that, Tom,” the mayor shoots back.
But he also gives him other options.
“I don’t care what you do. Rig the f——- brakes on his car. F—— take him out. I don’t want to see him anymore. I don’t want to see him anymore,” Pizzi told McGrath around 11 p.m. outside Shula’s Steak House, promising him a payoff.
“If he’s off the council, $100,00 in cash. You have my word,” Pizzi said. “Figure out a plan.”
On tape, he keeps insisting he is serious.
“Call me before the weekend is out. I want to know what your plan is. I’m serious. You think I’m f—— around? I’ve got the cash,” Pizzi said.
Somehow, all this was swept under the rug by state authorities — who followed Pullido for a while but didn’t think he needed to know about Pizzi’s intentions — just because Pizzi declines to follow through on the threat. Really? Really? He has to have come through on the threat? Ladra finds it hard to believe prosecutors did not have enough to charge on.
Some say Pizzi was tipped off by someone once the investigation got to the state attorney’s office and that is why the next time McGrath mentioned it, Pizzi slipped him a piece of paper that said he would call him. And that is why he never did call him.
For those of you who wonder where Pizzi might get $100,000, allow me to introduce one of the other incidents our locals ignored and that is under investigation by the feds — the “theft” of $200,000 from Pizzi’s office in 2009, shortly followed by a fire many suspect Pizzi started himself (or someone he trusts, like a McGrath type), which they are also looking into.
Maybe the feds should talk a little more with McGrath now that they are looking into Pizzi’s past. And they likely will talk to McGrath more, since they already talked to Joe Carillo, who called them again Sunday to add that McGrath was the guy who called him in 2009 to see if he could “recover” the “stolen” $200K.
Carillo had already talked to the FBI about the $200,000. He was the one who Pizzi called in 2009 about it to recover the funds.
“I need you to come to my office, where he told me that from his credenza, someone came in and stole $200,000. ‘They left me with $12,000,’ he told me,” Carillo told Ladra. But Pizzi did not want to call the police.
“Once he tells me that I’m not comfortable sitting in the seat I’m sitting in,” Carillo said, adding that when he left, he called his attorney, Fort Lauderdale’s Richard Rosenbaum and told him the story.
“He told me to contact law enforcement,” said Carillo, who promptly reported the incident to Miami-Dade Public Corruption Det. Luis Rodriguez, the same one who later said he was retaliated against by Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos “Not So Golden Boy” Gimenez (oh, and in a bizarre twist, Pizzi’s son, Stefan Pizzi, worked on Gimenez’s re-election phone bank).
This tip to police, like so many others, went nowhere.
Now with the feds, Carillo explained that McGrath must be a confidant of sorts that can be questioned about other things, since his name comes back to the number that called him a few days after he left Pizzi’s office on that day they talked about the $200K.
“I never got back to Michael Pizzi. I went to Costa Rica and I get a call in Costa Rica from this guy and he wants to know how I am doing on the recovery,” Carillo said. “I told him I wasn’t working on it and didn’t want to know anything about Pizzi or about him.”
After he read the name in the Herald story, Carillo put two and two together and gave the connection to the authorities.
Many of us have heard and talked for years about these allegations, which were always swept under the rug for one reason or another by the local authorities. Many of us suspected that was because Pizzi was some sort of informant (must have been at the state level) and that is what made him such a sin verguenza. Un descarado.
If nothing else, this taped discussion — even if a drunken joke, and haven’t people been convicted for joking around like that? — shows that he is not the kind of man you want to have in elected office.
Thank God for the feds. Looks like the cavalry is here.
New claims about Michael Pizzi is tip of federal iceberg added by Ladra on
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