Falsified Court Records stay on Public Docket

An investigation into the planting of false court records by two Miami-Dade judges found no wrongdoing, even though the phony information remains on the public docket in one case.

The Judicial Qualifications Commission’s inquiry also missed evidence of false records in another case after the clerk’s office deleted it from the public docket.

A spokeswoman for the JQC, an independent agency that investigates complaints of judicial misconduct, declined to comment.

The JQC opened an inquiry into the actions of Miami-Dade Circuit judges Daryl Trawick and Victoria Sigler after receiving a complaint from a Broward circuit judge in February.

The complaint alleged ”judicial misconduct based on the falsification of records,” according to a Feb. 21 letter written by JQC Executive Director Brooke Kennerly. In Florida, it is a crime for anyone, even a judge, to falsify court records.

In the case handled by Trawick, 10 phony docket entries purported to show that criminal charges were dropped against a defendant who was cooperating with prosecutors and police. In fact, the informant pleaded guilty to laundering drug money.

In the case handled by Sigler, an informant pleaded guilty to attempted murder and kidnapping, but the plea was not docketed.

And for nearly a year, misleading entries were added to the docket that made it appear that a trial was pending.

Through a court spokeswoman, Trawick and Sigler acknowledged last month that they approved altering the court dockets. They explained the secrecy was supposed to be temporary and wasn’t intended “to arbitrarily conceal case activity.”

”In both instances, both the defense and the prosecution approached the court and jointly requested the placement of temporary entries on the docket to protect defendants cooperating with law enforcement,” said court spokeswoman Eunice Sigler, who is not related to the judge.

Dead End Inquiry

The JQC began to check out the Feb. 13 complaint against the two judges, but its inquiry went nowhere fast, according to a letter that offers a rare glimpse of how the secretive JQC does its job.

”A review of the dockets for the two cases you listed does not reveal any factual basis for action by the commission,” Kennerly wrote to the complainant, Broward Judge Robert Lance Andrews.

By then, the phony records in Trawick’s case had been erased from the public docket.

Eunice Sigler said the false entries were deleted by “a supervisor within the Clerk of Courts, most likely after receiving notice of an error in the docket.”

Still, the JQC could have found the records if it had requested access to the clerk’s non-public docket.

Mike Henderson, a top assistant to clerk Harvey Ruvin, said the deleted false entries in the case of Salim ”Johnny” Batrony still exist on a non-public side of the clerk’s electronic docket.

He gave a copy of that information to reporters.

The JQC, which can issue subpoenas, has the authority to obtain such information, but never sought access to it, according to Ruvin and Henderson.

The false information was on the public docket for more than four years before it was deleted between late August and October after The Miami Herald asked about it.

Now the case file also is missing.

According to court spokeswoman Eunice Sigler, clerks typically insert into the file a written explanation as to why docket changes were made.

”But because the original file cannot be located, the clerk’s office has no way of giving us further information,” Sigler said.

‘PHONIED UP’ DOCKET

Batrony’s Miami lawyer, Paul Petruzzi, has said the clerk’s office ”phonied up” the docket at the direction of Trawick and an assistant state attorney to allow Batrony to work undercover. Trawick now is assigned to the civil bench.

The JQC’s inquiry regarding Judge Sigler involved the docket in the case of Michael Scott Segal. Kennerly’s letter said the JQC found no evidence of false docket entries. But a recent review by The Miami Herald shows the false entries remain on Segal’s public docket.

Segal, who cooperated with authorities, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and kidnapping at an unusual secret hearing at a Miami-Dade police station on May 13, 2003, according to a transcript obtained by The Miami Herald.

Segal’s plea, taken by Sigler, was not docketed.

Kennerly declined to be interviewed because JQC investigations are confidential until formal charges are filed. If no charge is filed, they remain confidential forever. Andrews, the judge who filed the complaint, did not comment.

The Florida Supreme Court has said it is examining the falsification of court records to protect informants — a practice Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle’s office said has gone on quietly for decades.

Information gathered from MiamiHerald

Former Keys attorney avoids jail sentence gets probation

The former Monroe County attorney wound up with probation for his role in a bribery and corruption case dating back nearly a decade.

Former Monroe County attorney James Hendrick — who was convicted last month for his part in a bribery and corruption case connected to a 1997 land deal — was given five years’ probation and a $50,000 fine on Friday in Miami federal court.

”An awful lot of people came forward on your behalf,” said U.S. District Judge Shelby Highsmith. “Do not disappoint us.”

”I will not,” said Hendrick, and leaned over the bar to hug his wife. Her eyes brimmed and she said something quiet to him.

Sitting in the courtroom: Hendrick’s family, friends and business partners.

Hendrick, 59, was convicted in February of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and witness tampering.

The case was part of a lengthy FBI investigation that uncovered a $29,000 bribe paid in 1997 to then Monroe County Mayor Jack London. In return for the bribe, London used his influence to win zoning approval for a stalled 79-room hotel project called Hall’s Resort in Marathon. Hendrick received no money in the deal.

By the time the FBI had evidence of the bribe, the five-year federal statute of limitations for bribery had expired.

But the FBI pursued the case and won the cooperation of political consultant Randall Hilliard, who paid the bribe after collecting $82,500 in fees from developer Marvin Rappaport.

He testified with immunity that the bribe was orchestrated by London and Hendrick, a partner at the time in a high-powered law firm with U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh Morgan.

London, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion for not reporting the $29,000, was given immunity for three counts of lying to prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against Hendrick. The two men had been best friends for nearly three decades.

London died before he could be sentenced; Hilliard was never charged.

In 2003, after learning that a grand jury investigation was underway, Hendrick told Hilliard to explain the $29,000 payment away as a consulting fee for work London had done on a Key West real estate project. He later told London to leave town to avoid testifying before the jury.

He even told Hilliard: “I’m sure no one would counsel me to sit here and talk with you because it would be considered witness tampering.”

Those words were later used against him because Hilliard wore a wire that recorded the conversation.

On Friday, the judge read at length from letters from Hendricks’ friends. They described him as a good-hearted, naive man.

The judge also noted Hendrick’s charitable and pro bono work, and that no one else involved in the bribe or its coverup would receive any prison time.

He concluded that probation was more appropriate than prison.

”We’re terribly disappointed.” said Brenda Morris, one of the prosecutors, afterward. “This sends a bad message to the community.”

Hendrick had a short walk over to the Probation Services office, where the electronic monitoring anklet he’d worn since his bond hearing two months ago would be cut off.

”I tried to help two friends who appeared to be in trouble,” he said. ”One of them was a false friend.” He was speaking of Hilliard. “He came to my home, came to Thanksgiving dinner, and he was a total — he was Judas. He posed as a friend and he was not. He’ll have his own reward, through karma.”

It took two probation officers and two pairs of scissors to get the anklet off. ”There we go,” said one of the officers.

”Thank you, gentlemen,” said Hendrick. Then he walked out with his wife and son.

Training future mobsters?

Two accused members of a notorious New York crime family turned a strip club into a training ground for mobsters, prosecutors told the jury on Thursday in closing arguments in a Mafia extortion trial

Salvatore “Fat Sal” Scala, 64, an accused Gambino crime family captain, and Thomas “Monk” Sassano, 61, an alleged soldier in Scala’s crew, both face extortion charges in Manhattan federal court.

Prosecutors said the men used the VIP Club to host lavish parties for business associates and extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from the club.

“Scala and Sassano used that club as a junior varsity” to groom future mobsters, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Honig, referring to a training squad of a high school sports team.

Defense attorneys countered that the men were protecting legitimate business interests as investors in the VIP Club.

If convicted, Scala faces a maximum of 60 years in prison and Sassano faces 40 years.

Honig said the then-owner of the club, Frank Marcello, sought help from the Gambino crime family to protect it against other members of organized crime. Marcello died in 2002.

Scala installed several underlings in bogus jobs at the club, prosecutors said. They conducted mob business, including one they called “the bathroom extortioner” for using the lavatory to collect payments.

Sassano was brought in to do Scala’s bidding after Scala was sent to prison on an unrelated extortion charge in 2001, prosecutors said.

Biweekly payments of thousands of dollars were funneled up to Scala to “keep the peace,” according to prosecution witness, Steve Aslind, a club co-manager.

Defense attorneys Ronald Rubenstein and Lindy Urso said the club’s financial woes were not due to ties to organized crime but because the club’s managers failed to pay taxes and one ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling debts.

Info provided by Reuters

Foxy Brown – Rapper plead not guilty

Inga Marchand aka Foxy Brown, plead not guilty to 2 counts of misdemeanor assault charges stemming from an altercation she got into at a Pembroke Pines beauty supply store February 2007.

The judge, who had issued an arrest warrant for Brown when she failed to show up for a previous hearing, dismissed it after learning her ‘notice to appear’ had been mailed to a wrong address.

Earlier this month, Brown pleaded guilty in New York to a probation violation for leaving that state without permission for the trip to South Florida that resulted in her arrest.

During that hearing, the judge warned Brown that she could be sentenced for up to a year in jail if she violates her probation again.

Brown was on probation from a fight she got into in a N.Y. nail salon in 2004.

Child Porn in Supreme Court

The case of a former Miami-Dade police officer convicted of possessing child pornography will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

WASHINGTON — Can a grandparent’s innocent e-mail promising ”good pics of kids in bed” — actually photos of toddlers in pajamas — become criminalized speech under a 2003 federal law directed at illegal child pornography?

That’s among hypothetical questions raised in an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to review — a case that got its start in 2004 with the arrest of a Key Largo man on charges of both ”promoting” and possessing child pornograhy.

The appeals court last April sided with Michael Williams, finding that the ”promoting” or pandering charge under the federal PROTECT Act of 2003 was ”unconstitutionally overbroad” because it gives police officers ”incredibly broad discretion to define whether a given utterance or writing” breaks the law.

For example, the appeals court said, an e-mail titled simply ”good pics of kids in bed” — even if sent out by proud grandparents — could be called into question because the “pandering provision requires no inquiry into the actual nature or even existence of the images.”

The review panel reversed Williams’ conviction for pandering child pornography on the Internet — but upheld his conviction of possession of child porn. Williams continues to serve a 60-month sentence in a federal prison in Miami.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Atlanta ruling in the fall at the behest of the Bush administration.

The administration views the pandering charge as critical in stemming the tide of child pornography because ”even fraudulent offers to buy or sell unprotected child pornography help to sustain the illegal market for this material,” U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement wrote to the court.

”Congress sought to provide the government with a means to prosecute those who make direct requests to receive, or offers to provide, what purports to be illegal material, regardless of whether the government can prove that such material is in fact real child pornography or that it even exists,” Clement wrote.

Williams was living in Key Largo at the time of his 2004 arrest in an undercover operation aimed at combating child exploitation on the Internet.

A special agent with the U.S. Secret Service who was working in the agency’s Miami field office on an electronics crimes task force went into an Internet chat room and spotted a message posted by a member using a ‘’sexually graphic screen name,” according to court documents.

Williams is a former Miami-Dade police officer, said his attorney, Richard Diaz of Coral Gables, who served on the force with Williams in the 1980s. Diaz, who said he and Williams were acquaintances, said he took the case believing the federal statute is unconstitutional.

”You cannot make someone a criminal based on what you think they said, or what you think they meant, because you may be wrong,” he said.

Indeed, the appeals court agreed, saying that ”non-commercial, non-inciteful” promotion of illegal child pornography, “even if repugnant, is protected speech under the First Amendment.

”We do not question that strong federal laws are needed, but they must pass constitutional muster,” the appeals court wrote. ‘In other words, Congress may not `burn the house to roast the pig.’ ”

The Atlanta appeals court found that the federal law’s pandering provision criminalizes “not the speech expressed in the underlying materials . . . but the speech promoting and soliciting such materials.”

It says that the provision could criminalize ”even when the touted materials are clean or non-existent,” such as in the case of the hypothetical grandparent’s e-mail.

”Any promoter — be they a braggart, exaggerator or outright liar — who claims to have illegal child pornography materials is a criminal punishable by up to 20 years in prison, even if what he or she actually has is a video of Our Gang, a dirty handkerchief or an empty pocket,” the decision said.

In the Internet posting, the man later identified as Williams wrote, ‘Dad of toddler has `good’ pics of her an (sic) me for swap of your toddler pics, or live cam.”

During an Internet chat, he and the agent swapped non-pornographic photographs. At one point, Williams accused the undercover officer of being a cop and then allegedly posted seven images of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

Secret Service agents executed a search warrant of his Key Largo home, finding on two computer hard drives “at least 22 images of actual minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct . . .”

Williams was charged with one count of promoting or ”pandering” material ”in a manner that reflects the belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe” that the material is illegal child pornography along with one count of possession of child pornography.”

BY LESLY CLARK
The Miami Herald