Absentee Ballot Queen Sasha Tirador — who has diversified in the kind of shenanigans she specializes in — is the subject of at least two investigations into her campaign practices.
One is sorta new and has to do with last year’s mayoral bid in Doral. One is sorta old and revolves around the alleged mingling of campaign funds in the myriad races that she consulted on during the same time. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll intertwine somehow.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has been looking into a complaint filed last summer by former State Rep. JC Planas, who has become the attorney to the pols and was representing his buddies, State Reps. Eddy “Here Comes Hialeah” Gonzalez and Jose “Cigar Czar” Oliva. It all started when Tirador planted two candidates just to piss the incumbents off: Mykel “Miguel” Balboa, a one-time employee of hers (if not during the race) and her own mother, Ileana Abay, respectively.
But that’s not illegal. Stupid? Maybe. Illegal? Nah. What’s illegal is using the campaign funds from other candidates to pay for costs incurred by these grudge match campaigns, which is what Planas alleges and what the campaign reports seem to indicate. In one entry, her mother lends herself $50,000 that Planas claims she must have gotten from Tirador because Abay’s financial disclosure shows she doesn’t have that kind of money.
But the big claim is that Tirador stole from candidate Peter (read: Commission Chairman Joe Martinez, in his failed mayoral bid, to pay the bills for candidate Paul (read: Balboa and her mother).
The State Attorney’s Office will not officially confirm or deny the mere existence of this investigation, but Ladra’s sources say the case against Tirador is very strong (read: rock solid) — with boxes of bank record and other evidence waiting in Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Isis Perez‘s office. And while I can appreciate crossing all your Ts and dotting all your Is so that you get the job done, the longer you allow Tirador to continue her “business,” the more damage she can do to our community. Right now she is aggressively pushing the re-election of Hialeah Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez. So, step it up Ms. Perez. Please.
And let’s try not to make some silly no-meat plea deal here. Ladra understands that it is difficult to make people talk, particularly her own mother. But let’s try really hard, okay?
Oh, and maybe you should interview Martinez. I mean, he was the victim here (as was anyone who contributed to his campaign). The former chairman, who is running for Congress in District 26, says he has not yet been contacted by investigators.
Martinez told Ladra that Planas mentioned the allegations to him way after he lost in the primary and that he went back and looked over his expenses after that.
“When you’re a candidate, you go and knock on doors and talk to people. I didn’t worry about the bills,” said Martinez, recalling that he signed off on some pretty hefty ones, including $30,000 or $41,800 a couple of times for “communications,” according to the campaign finance report. When he went back and “did a cursory check,” he learned that of the $750,000 he spent through his campaign and his Get It Done PAC, Tirador’s G&R Strategies was paid around $540,000. Records show at least $250,000 of that was for “communications,” which can mean anything.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ That’s a lot of money,” said Martinez, who thought the investigation had gone nowhere.
“You would think that I would have been called,” he told Ladra.
Ya think?
Some critics of the state attorney’s office — who gave Tirador a pass in absentee ballot fraud they found likely but could not prove in 2008 — are afraid that the boxes could get sat on until it is too late. But the statute of limitations for this case is not until July and Planas, the complainant, did not seem too worried.
“I hope that law enforcement continues to investigate the illegalities that we uncovered in last year’s election,” he told Ladra. “I have faith in the legal system, but I realize how complex these cases are.”
So, if there’s time. Maybe they will call Martinez in, after all. Maybe they will also call Boria, who may have had enough buffer in his $550,000 treasure chest to mask a little subsidizing here and there. Boria is certainly involved in Tirador’s second investigation.
That one seems to have started after Doral City Manager Joe Carollo exploded on the dais last week in a three-hour diatribe of accusations against the mayor, including some tidbit about Boria getting his campaign office space at a huge, enormous discount, which would be a violation of campaign laws. El Nuevo Herald reported that the office, which should have been rented at about $3,500, went for $250 for the four months that Boria’s campaign used it. A candidate cannot legally pay less than market rate because that becomes an in-kind donation. And in-kind donations, like others, are limited to $500 so that no one person who, say, maybe wants to build a medical center — like the owner of the shopping strip where the office is located wanted to do — has undue access or is owed a favor.
“Getting cheap rent is not a crime,” Tirador was quoted as saying. “When a campaign gets a contract directly, it has to be at market rate… but I was renting the office like a private corporation, and that is legal.”
Except that the rent was paid for by the campaign, according to a $1,000 expenditure to G&R Strategies, Tirador’s company. So she sort of acted like a third party go-between, which seems like a violation of the spirit of the law, at the very least.
Either way, there are two investigations… which increases the likelihood that one of them sticks.
AB Queen Sasha Tirador faces multiple investigations added by Ladra on
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