There are two heroes: Firefighter hired PI

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Surprise, surprise, surprise.

It ain’t a politician or a political operative. It isn’t a party or a PAC. It wasn’t a union or former Miami Mayor Joe Carrollo who hired private investigator Joe Carrillo to follow a known boletera in Hialeah and, finally, open the Pandora’s Box of absentee ballot fraud that has permeated the city for decades.

It was one pissed off firefighter.

Ladra kind of knew. Hialeah Fire Union Vice President Eric Johnson — who acted alone, without the knowledge of his fellow firefighters — never denied having hired the P.I. when I asked him. And I asked him before I asked anybody else. This had Slick written all over it. Instead, he always railed against the question.

“What does it matter who hired him? What matters is what he found,” Johnson would yell. Really. He is as loud or louder than me. And he can’t lie to me. I am his twin, separated at birth.

Johnson is the person responsible for Ladra taking a walk in Hialeah in the first place. He read my blog on former Mayor Julio Robaina‘s campaign bundling when I was covering the recall mayoral race and contacted me. Surreptitiously. He sent me leads. Tips. Public documents. Ladra has a thing for firefighters who love public documents, especially one with perfect hair who has been fighting absentee ballot fraud on his own since 2009. He had dossiers and files, names and dates and incidents. He made flowcharts! We bonded immediately.

And we bonded over investigating this stuff together for the past year and a half. I know that he had already reported Deisy Cabrera to the Miami-Dade Public Corruption Unit last October. Why, yes, that is the same boletera followed by Carillo, who had offered her services to Hialeah city council candidates Frank Lago and Cindy Miel for that city election. She could get them hundreds or thousands of ballots, specializing in ALFs, for hundreds or thousands of dollars, she told them. There was a scale. Police took notes. Eric is the one who took the two candidates by the hand to a public corruption detective who has since retired. We certainly hope the paperwork still exists.

He also told authorities about Sergio “El Tio” Robaina, uncle of former Mayor Julio Robaina, who has been collecting absentee ballots for years and delivered 164 of ’em to the Hialeah district office of Miami-Dade Commissioner Esteban “Stevie El Bobo” Bovo. Uncle Robaina was charged last week with voter fraud felonies.

Eric also went to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office to talk to the public corruption unit there about favors that Hialeah Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez was promising to someone if he’d run for council on his slate against political enemies. I know this because I went with him. We gave them emails that indicated Hernandez fast-tracked a permit in exchange for the businessman’s candidacy, an ultimate disaster.

See? My brother Slick is a natural whistle-blower — its in our DNA — and quite experienced at it, too. The problem is nobody was listening.

He was at the end of his rope. Under an illegal investigation into his personal facebook page, motivated by political retribution because he dares to expose the crimes committed against the very same vulnerable elderly victims that these people exploit and steal from — their vote and their dignity — and is vocal about his opposition to the administration’s illegal and strong-arm tactics. He is targeted because he gets more than 1,000 hits on his YouTube Braveheart speech before the city commission, where he unselfishly calls the falsified budget exactly what it is — because “it is what it is” — and because he openly supported then-Commissioner Carlos Gimenez against Robaina and then former Mayor Raul Martinez against Hernandez after that.

So, at the end of that rope, Slick acted on a tip that Cabrera was making the rounds again — he’s the one who provided Carrillo with her “business card,” you know, the one that says “Call me when your ballot arrives. I work every election” — and called an old friend and paid him out of his pocket for four hours of his time.

That’s all they needed. Law enforcement should be ashamed.

“I had to find someone to help me,” Slick told me when he could no longer keep it a secret. Slick can’t lie to Ladra. I’m his twin. “Nobody can turn their head anymore. Somebody must do something to stop the widespread abuse of the elderly to control the absentee ballots.”

Indeed. Wow.

Carrillo seems a little bit less stressed now that Eric came clean. “Eric Johnson has been going to law enforcement with his information for years,” Carrillo told me, as if I didn’t know. “I have a good history with the Miami-Dade public corruption unit. I have taken them good information before.

“Thank  God they listened to me this time.”

And thank Eric Johnson.

Now, this revelation should put any thoughts of political motivation at rest. Eric is one of the most diehard supporters of Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who was stained by this scandal through his alliance with the people that have been doing this year after year, election after election. He continued to support him afterwards, more convinced than Ladra that Golden Boy didn’t know anything about it (Ladra thinks he certainly should have known that would be part and parcel of the evil alliance). This relevation, also, should end all the investigations into Carrillo and the efforts to discredit him and the hacking of his computers and his phones (more on that later). Neither Carrillo nor Slick knew where the investigation would go. Obviously. But once it went somewhere, they weren’t about to stop it either.

Talk about lack of political motivation. All these two heroes want to do is stop the rampant and criminal exploitation of the senior voters in a city that continues to create public housing units for future voters hand over fist. Think of them as ballot centers.

Eric didn’t know where it would go. He didn’t care.

Neither should anyone care now about who hired Carrillo. I hired him. You hired him.

“I’m a nobody. I’m an average, typical guy,” Johnson told me.

But Slick can’t lie to Ladra. He is not a nobody. He is a hero. One pissed off firefighter with a burning sense for justice who has made a difference.

Now, it is up to the media to not only protect him from future retaliation, but take on the torch. Slick is a firefighter. He saves lives in Hialeah — one Cuban at a time. He needs to get back to that. There are a lot of patatunes and aires going around in August. And he treats every single caller like it was his abuela or abuelo. The gringo is kindness.

It is up to the media to continue exposing what he had the guts to start — years ago, really — so that law enforcement continues to be forced to do their jobs and this total exploitation can be stopped.

Or else Ladra is going to hire Joe Carrillo for the November elections.