Ten days after she submitted petitions for the recall of Doral Vice Mayor Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera — and more than a week after she said the city clerk stole almost half of them — gypsy political con-artist Vanessa Brito still hasn’t produced the 1,936 signatures she claims to have collected.
Or the 898 she says went missing.
She told reporters Friday after the special meeting in Doral — the one to pass a knee-jerk recall ordinance, that they really don’t need, to stop her from trying it again (more on that later) — that she would send them a zip file by the end of the day. Yours truly included. And I, for one, can’t wait.
Because if she’s telling the truth (wait a minute, I have to stop laughing) and City Clerk Barbara Herrera “disappeared” some of the petitions intentionally — not knowing she wouldn’t have had to because too many were going to be invalid, as the ones that were counted showed — it’s an even better story than it is right now.
But I doubt it. And this is still a really good story. Because if Rodriguez and her supporters are right, as Ladra suspects, then Brito will finally be exposed for the flat-out fraud that she is. She has to produce the missing petitions. She can’t get out of this one any other way.
Why is there doubt? Well, first off, look who we are talking about here: A self-promoting hack and political mercenary that flits from client to client, municipality to municipality — and unsuspecting sugarmama to unsuspecting sugarmama — like a locust, latching on to whatever candidate or issue she thinks she can squeeze for a buck or some publicity stock with bad data crunching and fake “grassroots” campaigns. There’s a track record, people.
Secondly, there is no reason to think that Herrera — who was elected as the first Hispanic to the Weston commission and whose career is unblemished, unlike Brito’s — would commit a crime to protect anybody, let alone a council member who was elected a mere six months ago. People who have known Herrera for years say she is incapable of that kind of thing. Meanwhile, people who have known Brito for years know that she is quite capable of making wild and baseless allegations if they suit her.
Thirdly, she hasn’t gone to any law enforcement agency or Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez-Rundle with her complaint, like any rational person who was defrauded or robbed of an election would. And you know why? Because she could be charged with filing a false police report. And if she gives a sworn statement, she could be charged with perjury.
Finally, there is the fact that the whole recall effort has been shrouded in mystery from the get-go. Who is paying for it? We don”t know. Vanessa purports it to be a grassroots effort, but we have never seen any outraged Doral residents standing next to her in her multiple TV opportunities. And almost all the signatures — a whopping 99.6 percent — were gathered by people who live outside the city.
Some suspect the effort was backed by political operative Al Maloof, who has ties to Brito through multiple PACs and may have been promised the city’s legal business for his firm, and perhaps in cahoots with Councilwoman Sandra Ruiz, who has been a longtime enemy of Rodriguez Aguilera’s with all kinds of allegations and ethics complaints thrown back and forth for years.
What we do know from campaign reports is that Miami Voice, Brito’s facade of a PAC through which she carries many of her unethical and perhaps illegal operations, only raised $50 in the last quarter, through March 31. Sure, she had funds from earlier. So, in the same time frame, she was able to spend $1,768 — $1,500 of which came from her last year in what Ladra suspects is one of at least five illegal third party contributions that should be investigated (more on that later). A little more than $1,200 went to paid signature collectors and $500 went to her Myami Marketing firm for voter data that usually costs between $20 and $60.
She won’t say who is really paying for this. She wouldn’t even tell me who her attorney was when she said he was reviewing her options in court and the copies of the petitions would be released to the media after he gave her the okay. That’s just another stalling tacgtic. Later, she told the other reporters — who I had to prod to ask — that it was David Reiner, the same attorney that represented her against the slander lawsuit by a Miami Lakes activist who she maligned and, well, slandered under a fake name and on behalf of Lakes Mayor Michael “Muscles” Pizzi, one of her longtime allies.
Reiner lost his motion to keep “Jane Doe” a secret. He’ll lose this, too.
Why? Because the county elections department has ruled that of the 1,038 petitions she submitted, nearly a quarter were invalid for one reason or another. They counted 795 valid signatures. So even if she does produce the “missing” 898 petitions — and all of those are good, which is doubtful — the total would be 1,693, or about 70 short of her needed 1,760, which is 10 percent of the eligible voters.
Since the recall is technically dead, Brito doesn’t need an attorney, does she? She told reporters she had no intention of suing Doral, Herrera, Mayor Luigi Boria or City Manager Joe Carollo and that she didn’t have the funds to do so anyway. But she seemed afraid of Carollo, who she inferred was behind some alleged threats and intimidation toward herself and her family. Key word: Alleged.
Because maybe she is feigning the fear. Part of the whole smoke and mirrors campaign. Plus, it may give her an out when she finally realizes she can’t come up with the petitions. Her “fear” under the “intimidation” “worked” and she was “silenced.” Wait for it.
Brito already laid the groundwork for that new message line Friday.
“I’m not going to get into a legal problem with Mr. Carollo,” she said. “Joe Carollo went on TV and called me a liar. He told me to get a criminal defense attorney.”
She also claimed that her mother got three phone calls the day she left the last encounter in Doral and that someone said “death would arrive at our door.” She said there is a police report on that.
“Someone called to tell me they were following me, which I already knew. They know where I live,” she said, now playing the victim. “I have a family.”
She implied the tactics all stemmed from the Mighty Joe. “It’s not un cualquiera. This is Joe Carollo.”
Like he’s a scary guy or something.
Still, despite the intimidation, Brito said she was there Friday to seek a meeting with the manager, not to take advantage of the TV cameras, naturally. She brought her latest unwitting accomplice, girlfriend Heather Gray, and invited reporters to go in, too.
“I don’t want to go in there alone,” she said breathlessly.
Of course, I waited around. I was not about to miss that.
But Carollo had a meeting and couldn’t see her right away. So she left. Not, however, before going in front of any TV camera that still gives her the time of day (and that’s going to change soon, Ladra predicts) to make her baseless allegations in her signature dramatic form.
Carollo had a few choice words of his own about her.
“This woman is a compulsive liar and a total clown,” the manager told Ladra. “What she needs to do is go to law enforcement and file a complaint, go under oath and make these statements.
“Instead, she’s gone to the media that is friendly to her to see how she can try to harm the administration of Doral by making false and slanderous allegations that some 1,000 petitions have been stolen by someone on our staff,” Carollo continued. “I don’t understand why nobody in the media asks her one simple question: Why haven’t you gone and filed a report with a law enforcement agency?”
I don’t understand that either and Ladra challenged the media today to dig deeper. Hope they do.
But Carollo agrees that she hasn’t filed a complaint because she won’t go as far as to perjure herself. Well, maybe if the price is right. But she would have to get more out of whoever paid her to begin with. And he or she would have to be crazy.
“She thinks these are the streets of Chavez’s Caracas,” Carollo said, in a gratuitious shout-out to Mayor Boria’s background and the city’s growing Venezuelan demographic.
“She thinks she can get away with this.”
He said she won’t and that the sham will unravel soon.
Again, Ladra can’t wait.
Are there really 898 missing petitions in Doral? Doubt it added by Ladra on
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