Ana Sol Alliegro is back — with a vengeance and a story

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First in a series: Ana Alliegro has a story to tell.
It’s not David Rivera’s story. It’s all hers.

Ana Sol Alliegro is a woman on a mission.

She did the crime. She did the time. Actually, she is still doing it. Now she wants real justice.

Alliegro, who was charged with conspiracy in a campaign finance fraud scheme with former U.S. Rep. David “Nine Lives” Rivera, has been quietly — save for a Facebook rant now and then — spending most of her days at her family’s Little Havana home, reconnecting with her daughter and her parents, since her release from federal detention in September.

Now, suddenly, she is in the news again these last few day sounding a lot like a woman scorned.

“Why is David Rivera out there, walking the streets freely and doing whatever he wants when I’m under house arrest,” she asks. “Go ask the prosecutor. Is this what they caged me up for? Is this justice?”

But while most of the scandal-crazed media here concentrates on her “breaking the silence” with her former boyfriend and political partner, they are ignoring the other — and, in Ladra’s opinion, more important — question she’s asking. Que en carajo is the U.S. Attorney’s office waiting for?

Nicaraguan national police dragged Alliegro from her ex-pat home in Grenada — where she was cutting hair and teaching her girls English — kept her in a hole with scorpions scurrying across the dirt floor for four days and then handed her over to the FBI, who held her in detention in a maximum security prison for 184 days so that she would give up the goods on Rivera and they could finally nail him for something — anything. Rivera, who has shimmied his way out of charges before, was accused of secretly financing a plantidate in the 2012 congressional primary against then challenger Joe Garcia.

Let’s go over that one more time because Ladra doesn’t think it’s sunk in for too many people: All this time and all these resources have been spent on an investigation into and prosecution (if you can call it that) of a campaign finance law violation that is, love it or hate it, basically a well-heeled political strategy in the 305.

Anyone who has been observing or involved in politics for even a short amount of time knows that ringer candidates abound. Former Congressman Joe Garcia, who did beat Rivera under the cloud of suspicion only to lose his seat last November, is also under investigation for financing a ringer in his 2010 race against Rivera, which he lost. But these are not isolated incidents unique to FL26. There have been plantidates in municipal races and even state House races. And did you really think that there were really 11 candidates who all on their own decided they wanted to be county mayor the year of the recall in 2011?

This is why the politicians run circles around us.

Maybe Rivera is running circles around U.S. Assistant Attorney Thomas Mulvihill, the prosecutor that made the deal with Alliegro and who now, presumably, has everything he needs from her to make a case against ol’ Nine Lives. They let her out, right? They held her for 184 days and only let her out after she talked, which was after she was made to believe that her hospitalized mother was in grave condition, maybe near death. They would not have let her out had she not told them what they wanted to hear.

So what’s the hold up? It’s been five months since they got this information. David Rivera has been free to go to the theater and have dinner with a former state colleague and a pair of journalists in Doral, attend a fundraiser for a Sweetwater candidate and drive to Tallahassee for the swearing in of his buddy, Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera — even collect petitions to run for state House.

Read related story: David Rivera collects petition signatures for 2016 House run

Is the information no good? That would mean that they held a woman in prison without charges for 184 days for information that was of absolutely no use to them whatsoever. Really? Or is Mulvihill trying to cut some deal here with Rivera? That’s what las malas lenguas say. Rivera himself has cast

There’s more. Please press this “continue reading” button to “turn the page.”

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  Ana Alliegro, David Rivera, Joe Garcia