Judge dismisses Michael Pizzi lawsuit vs town for legal fees

UPDATED: Talk about kicking a man when he’s down.

First, former Miami Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi loses his re-election just a couple of weeks ago, getting an abysmal 23% against newly elected Mayor Manny Cid, who was a councilman. Then — boom! — a Miami-Dade court tells him Wednesday that the town is not on the hook for $2.5 million in legal fees incurred during his 2013 federal bribery trial.

Circuit Court Judge Antonio Marin found that Pizzi was not acting in an official capacity as mayor at the time he was arrested so the town is not liable for his representation. Pizzi and his attorneys have 20 days to amend the complaint — and they will.

“The court spoke. They dismissed the case. The burden is theirs now,” Cid told Ladra Thursday. “My focus is to move the city forward and one way or another we need closure on this.”

Cid told me that the city had put aside about $600,000 in this year’s budget for the litigation and possible settlement and that he’d like to free that money up to use it elsewhere in the city.

But this is far from over, folks.

And Ladra is finding it hard to believe that they won’t make the case that Pizzi was, indeed, acting in his official capacity as mayor when he took bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as AmeriCorps officials ready to dole out federal grants that would never make it to the cities they were intended for. He would never have been targetted or bribed if he weren’t the mayor.

Pizzi, who called Ladra on Thursday after the first draft of this story was posted, said I was right: This was going to be the crux of their amendment.

“The only reason I was arrested is because I was the mayor,” Pizzi said. “If I wasn’t mayor, there’d be no bribe, there’d be no crime.”

Pizzi was arrested in August 2013 after a year-long sting set up by the FBI to specifically target local electeds, according to an informant who later spilled the beans. But Pizzi and former Sweetwater Mayor Manny “Maraña” Maroño were the only electeds charged after undercover agents caught them accepting cash and campaign contributions in exchange for getting grant requests passed through their own and other cities.

While Pizzi was found not guilty, Maroño entered a plea deal and got a 37-month sentence.

Guess he didn’t have the million dollar lawyers.

After Pizzi got off, he had to sue the state to get his suspension by Gov. Rick Scott lifted and then had to sue the town of Miami Lakes to get his job back. But, in August of last year, he still sued his beloved town for the $2.5 million bill from his legal dream team. He had up to eight attorneys at once — like he was O.J. Simpson or something. And the list included such prominent legal names as Ben Keuhne, Ed Shohat and David Reiner.

Guess you get what you pay for, because his acquittal is nothing short of miraculous, considering he had been recorded taking cash from a lobbyist/informant in an office closet.

Ladra always suspected that the $2.5 price — which was lowered from an original $3.2 million — had been artificially inflated, jacked up so that Pizzi could have a piece of the pie.

Maybe Judge Marin smelled something too and said nana-nina. The judge cited precedents that established that “for public officials to be entitled to representation at public expense, the litigation must (1) arise out of or in connection with the performance of their official duties and (2) serve a public purpose.”

City Attorney Raul Gastesi was pleased that the judge agreed with outside counsel’s arguments.

“The action taken was not in the context of his official capacity as mayor of Miami Lakes,” Gastesi told Ladra Thursday. “It is our position he was not acting as the mayor of the town.

“First of all, what he was doing in the city of Medley certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the town of Miami Lakes,” Gastesi said, referring to the

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Miami Lakes, Michael Pizzi

Judge dismisses Michael Pizzi lawsuit vs town for legal fees added by Ladra on December 15, 2016
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