Where are the authorities and why is Miami-Dade Commissioner Steve “El bobo boletero” Bovo still a free man?
Hey, Senator or State Representative or whatever-we-call-you-now Alex Diaz de la Portilla! Save your PAC money. Bovo doesn’t need to be recalled. He needs to be handcuffed!
The latest out of the Hialeah absentee ballot fraud scandal investigation by the journalists — who are leading law enforcement on this crusade for justice and electoral integrity — is that the commissioner’s aide was basically coordinating the boleteros and boleteras from Bovo’s taxpayer-paid district office after having done favors for them from Bovo’s office throughout the year.
El Nuevo Herald reporters Enrique Flor and Melissa Sanchez got the emails where Anamary Pedrosa helps several known ballot collectors with this official document and that translation. In one favor, the commissioner’s aide lobbies on behalf of Deisy Cabrera — who was arrested weeks before the Aug. 14 election for carrying more than a dozen ballots on her and possibly fraudulently filling some out — for benefits from the Department of Children and Families (ahem, if I were a young ambitious investigator of any kind, I would pick up that lead right there. There could be welfare fraud involved here. Trust me.).
But welfare fraud or not, there was definitely an absentee ballot operation going on in a county commissioner’s office and, call me crazy but I don’t believe for one Okeechobee second that Bovo knew nothing about it. C’mon! Does anybody?
These dogged reporters reached out to Bovo, who at first admitted hearing of Pedrosa’s work from a competing ballot broker, then asked for questions in writing and then refused to answer any, deflected and denied — indeed, tried to misdirect the discussion into alleged hidden motives behind a perfectly legitimate story — which is what one does when one is super guilty.
“After reading your questions it is abundantly clear to me that the only interest you have is in writing a sensationalized story that is based on negative inferences, distortions of the truth from individuals who have less than stellar credibility and just outright pure speculation,” he wrote in an email to the Herald.
Well, Commissioner, would you have us simply ignore this possibility — however far fetched it may turn out to be when you prove your innocence — that a government office was used as a ballot repository for candidates who are obviously your friends and allies? If you have nothing to hide, why not answer questions and be totally open about it? If it is “pure speculation,” I have faith in my colleagues that they won’t ignore evidence to the contrary of your involvement. But for you to suggest that there isn’t even a trail here for Ladra to sniff, that’s ludicrous. And stinks you up even more.
Or is your attorney, former State Rep. JC Planas — who is also reprehensibly representing your victim assistant — telling you to stay quiet. Maybe you’ve said enough on the police recordings. I can dream, can’t I?
Pedrosa has not been arrested because the state attorney’s office said she is cooperating. Which can only mean one of two things. Either she is lying to them and buying herself time, or she went back to that commission office with a wire and got Bovo and his wife freaking out and ordering her to resign and getting her his attorney and promising to help her if she takes the bullet. I can hear Viviana Bovo — who works in Sen. Marco Rubio‘s office, so this could get uglier, folks — saying “Stevie can only help you if he stays commissioner, Anita.” Can’t you hear it, too? It’s only a matter of days before we see Bovo arrested and charged with racketeering for ballots from his government, taxpayer-paid office.
Well, I mean, you know, one would assume law enforcement can’t keep their collective head in the sand now. Even if Florida Gov. Rick Scott did pay boletera extraordinaire Emelina Llanes $5,000 on Aug. 26, 2010 for his election. Yes, that’s right. The governor — who is pally wally with former Hileah Mayor Julio Robaina and Sweetwater Mayor Manuel Maroño, who has also been linked to iffy AB operations — paid Hialeah Mayor Carlos “Castro” Hernandez’s favored boletera five grand for campaign work, according to his campaign reports. She also got like $450 more from the Republican Party of Florida. What do you think she did for him? For the GOP? No wonder state prosecutors and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement haven’t moved on any of this widespread and ongoing and documented electoral feraud despite glaring evidence and subpoena power that can get them the phone and bank records that Ladra is missing from her flowcharts.
Geez. Let’s hope they keep getting embarrassed by the journalists enough so it lights a fire under their, um, badges.
Let’s give them a roadmap, shall we?
It is no coincidence that Bovo, after all, was the one supporting his three buddies for which Pedrosa was collecting ballots. Those would be State Reps. Eddy Gonzalez and Jose Oliva and candidate Manny Diaz, Jr., whose victory over School Board Member Renier Diaz de la Portilla for the new seat in district 103 will be forever tainted by this corrupt campaign.
t is no coincidence that the commissioner’s aide, alone and by herself, has no access to absentee ballot lists that can only be obtained from the Miami-Dade Elections Department by candidates like him and his friends and political action committees like his and the ones that belong to his friends. Convenient? Yes. Coincidence? No.
It is no coincidence that the commissioner’s aide has had communications with these people since at least March helping them with their red tape in exchange for a few ballots when the time came and that, as a commissioner’s aide, she would be seeking these favors for these boleteros and boleteras on his behalf. Even if only implied.
It is no coincidence that Pedrosa, who worked for Bovo when he was a state rep, worked in his recall-domino campaign for commissioner last year, making $2,000 for “campaign work” while he paid Absentee Ballot Queen Sasha Tirador more than $50,000 for “get out the vote” and “grassroots” operations. Like Ladra has told investigators right here before, those are code words for AB field operations. Not even very good code words. And especially where it is a non race with pitiful non candidates. I suspect Pedrosa learned a lot about absentee ballot collecting from the queen, who according to the Herald story heard about her one-time protege striking out on her own and warned Bovo about it.
It is no coincidence that Bovo and the three aforementioned chosen ones met twice — once at La Carretta in Hialeah and once at the home of Hialeah Gardens Mayor Yioset de la Cruz — to talk about, they say, solidifying support for the three state rep candidates.
Really? Really? You needed two meetings for that? When you are all old friends already?
Again, call me crazy but I think that more was discussed. That’s why de la Cruz told me that some in the group — and he wasn’t sure if it was Oliva or Hernandez or Robaina — had said they wanted somewhere they could talk privately. Maybe something, ala, “Don’t worry boys, I got a hotshot young assistant in my office… she wants to be a lawyer one day… but right now she’s going to help us with those absentees. We don’t need Sasha.”
Okay, so I wasn’t there. Ladra doesn’t get invited to those kinds of things. But I still suspect something like that was said. Because if they didn’t talk about absentee ballots at all, they aren’t even good candidates, let alone representation. And wbo knows if they decided to go with the Tirador trainee after the queen turned on them with plantidates she made out of an employee and her own mother or before, maybe leading Tirador to strike back.Because, afer all, these men are not new to these kind of operations — even if they have borne the brunt of the backside.
Rep. Oliva, for example, says he was elected despite an absentee ballot machine that worked against him. And he’s pretty cocky about it.
“If these absentee ballot machiens are so all powerful and so important how does a Jose Oliva get elected?”
He didn’t give me a chance to tell him that the $190,000 he loaned himself for a $325,000 campaign war chest may have had a little bit to do with it. He was too busy tooting his own horn.
“I had all these same machines against me,” Oliva told me. “I think you give too much credence to this person or that person. Look at the empirical evidence of my election. I am flying solo, no political machine, no real understanding of a ground game in politics. And I win my election hands down. I win it in absentee ballots. I win it in early voting and I win it on Election Day.”
He said his protege Manny Diaz, Jr., did the same thing winning across the board. “If there was a great disparity between absentee ballots and Election Day and early voting, well, that’s a valid position,” Oliva told me about my suspicion that the AB fraud was revolved around the 103 race in his desperate bid to be Speaker.
I tried to explain that people like Robaina’s uncle, Sergio “El Tio” Robaina, who was also arrested in the ballot fraud probe for having turned in ballots, including some he forged himself, worked in the polling places, where they could exert untold amounts of pressure on voters who depend on public housing or services. I tried to remind him about the email from Pedrosa to Hialeah about a visit by Manny Diaz, Jr., the candidate, to a housing unit. There was a follow up email to confirm the event was scheduled. These were sent during Pedrosa’s taxpayer-paid workday. Of course, however, we are to believe that she was a renegade secretary who was just so adamant about helping her jefe’s buddies in their campaigns that she did it on the sly without telling him a thing.
I’m going to ask one more time: Where are the authorities and why is Commissioner Bovo still a free man?
Oliva says he did not know anything about Manny Diaz’s visit to public housing. Nor does he believe, he says, that Bovo knew anything about his secretary’s activities — which means he is either lying to our face or is too stupid to deserve Speaker of the House designation. Again, he turned to the so-called empirical evidence the numbers imply on their face — without all the circumstantial stories.
“Supposedly, the DLP machine couldn’t be beat,” Oliva said in a dig at his nemesis. “And they had [former Congressman] Lincoln Diaz Balart. And they had 15 mailers. And they had 15,000 robocalls. And they had a supposed 10-point lead. And look what happened.”
Oh, no he didn’t?
Baby DLP and the Dean have been increasingly cagey with Ladra since they’ve been licking their wounds after the shocking, brutal 103 loss that can only be explained by the use of a number of fraudulent schemes. The DLPs do not lose well. They are used to winning. All I could pry out of the Dean was a righteous, one-liner because he can’t be bothered with this nonsense. He’s too busy making sure that Oliva never becomes house Speaker. Oh, yeah, and winning that easy breezy Coverboy race he’s got in district 112 against Democrat rising newcomer Jose Javier Rodriguez (more on that later).
“Fortunately, we followed the law,” Alex Diaz de la Portilla, who runs his brothers’ campaigns, told me. That was it. So, no, I am obviously not his favorite blogger anymore. Or he’s not pretending that I am anymore.
He did go on to say something about how he was in the business of running campaigns, not challenging and investigating elections, and how they have investigators and prosecutors for that kind of thing and how his name was not Kathy Fernandez-Rundle.
But we all know that the Miami-Dade State Attorney is involved up to her eyeballs and the local cops are either lazy or their hands are tied. It is no coincidence that the police director retired just shy of his retirement right after Mayor Carlos “Not so Golden Boy” Gimenez, who keeps insisting he had nothing at all to do with the absentee ballots that secured him a first-round win without a runoff.
There’s a court challenge from Commission Chairman Joe Martinez on that, to force the runoff. There’s another one from Miami-Dade Property Appraiser Pedro Garcia against termed out State Rep. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, who beat him for the county office solely with the AB vote.
But let’s get back to Oliva — who was the only one of the Boletero Bandidos who called me back — and his involvement in all this, which he says is zip, nada, nil. Naturally, since Ladra don’t play that, he didn’t want to talk too much about it. He wanted to talk about how he beat the odds and how he still thinks going to be speaker, as if that wasn’t nipped in the bud the minute he started a war with the DLPs.
“I never believed in any of this machinery and you know what? I’m sitting in a pretty good position for leadership,” he told me, referring to his promised Speakership in 2018 (during which none of his homeboys can have any kind of choice position because they are termed out so they will all be lobbying him).
You mean were in pretty good position, before all this came out.
He is so sure of himself because he’s got some sort of backroom deal with State Rep. Richard Corcoran, who Oliva helped get the Speakership in 2016 for his turn.
But, also in return, Corcoran’s PAC, Florida Forward, gave Oliva’s PAC, Conservative Principles for Florida, a $50,000 contribution on July 23, just a day or two before Cabrera got popped by the cops and the dominos started to fall. That’s just the one PAC Ladra found so far involved in this. Because I bet there are more.
Hey, investigators (and I really hope I’m talking to federal agencies by now)! Add the future Speaker’s name next to Oliva on the growing list of people you have to question about this.
Is it possible the future Speaker of the Florida House was funding an absentee ballot fraud operation?
Hey, it’s Florida. The governor paid the Hialeah boletera $5,000 to get elected. Anything can happen.
Commissioner Bovo’s office was boletero central added by Ladra on
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