In the Bag

The judge then said that his wife would love to have the purse for her birthday. ¨The implication was that if I didn´t do this,¨ Roberts said, ¨the appointments would dry up.¨

The lawyer had his then-secretary, Nikki Jarema, go to the Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale to pick up the purse.

I contacted Jarema, who is now a real-estate agent, and she told me she remembered buying the purse, which she said was for Seidlin´s wife for her birthday. Later, Roberts met Seidlin in a parking lot at the intersection of Federal Highway and State Road 84 to deliver the purse, which Seidlin took with him directly to the airport. The judge and his wife were traveling out of town for her birthday, and Seidlin presented the purse to her on the flight as a gift, Roberts says.

Roberts says it wasn´t the only time Seidlin had instructed him to buy him gifts. There was another expensive purse purchase, and the judge also instructed him to buy a specific polo shirt for him, he says.

Well, it doesn´t take a lawyer to know that if Roberts´ stories are true, some of this might be just a little bit illegal -- and not only because the judge didn´t report the gifts on his financial disclosure forms.

Trying to reach Seidlin, I spoke with his wife, Belinda, and told her the story. ¨There is no way Larry would do anything like that,¨ she said. ¨He is so careful, and he´s not stupid. He would never do anything that´s not appropriate or not right.¨

Bogenschutz, however, told me that Seidlin had admitted that he received the purse -- but said he later returned it to Roberts.

Roberts laughed when I told him that.

¨He came into my office later,¨ Roberts said, ¨with an old beat-up Publix bag that had some old leather junky purse in it. He said, You bought my wife a purse; now I bought your wife a purse.´ It literally stank. I threw it in the trash can.¨

Bogenschutz told me he would get back to Seidlin on the matter and didn´t comment further. But the issue isn´t an easy one for him.

¨They both are friends of mine,¨ Bogenschutz told me. ¨I don´t know where the truth is. I think it´s somewhere in the middle.¨

But the gifts pale in comparison to what he´s gotten from Broward taxpayers. Seidlin went through his morning dockets in a flash, courthouse sources say. Broward County Chief Public Defender Howard Finkelstein says the judge was known to run a ¨rocket docket¨ and was so easy on defendants that lawyers relished working in his courtroom.

In May, WSVN-TV (Channel 7) investigative reporter Carmel Cafeiro followed him for four days and found that he took three-hour lunch breaks and rarely worked more than an hour in the afternoon before heading off to the tennis courts. For this, he was making $145,000 a year off taxpayers -- and will make that much for the rest of his life from his pension.

Seidlin´s family members have also made out at the public trough. His wife, Belinda, worked as an investigator for Al Schreiber, the former chief public defender, who was the best man at the couple´s 1999 Las Vegas wedding.

When Finkelstein replaced Schreiber, his chief investigator, Al Smith, looked into Belinda´s work.

¨There was three or four months´ of work on her desk that she had never even touched,¨ Smith recalls. ¨And there were a lot of complaints about the work she was assigned, because it was incomplete.¨

Finkelstein quickly fired Belinda, who now works as a real-estate agent.

Seidlin´s father-in-law, Oren Ray, also works at the courthouse. Several years ago he got a job as a courtroom deputy for the Broward Sheriff´s Office. Seidlin´s sister-in-law, attorney Wendy Seidlin, made the Miami Herald in 2000 for being among the top recipients of special public defender appointments at the courthouse.

And half the tight-knit clan seems to be involved with Barbara Kasler, the elderly woman who has lavished the family with the financial windfall. Kasler, though, says she doesn´t believe she´s being exploited in the least.

¨I´m waiting for him to bring me my lunch right now,¨ she said of the judge. ¨And I´m hungry. I´m taking advantage of him.¨

I asked Kasler, who is originally from Indian-apolis and acknowledges that she has a net worth in the millions of dollars, about the transfer of the Palm Bay land to Belinda Ray Seidlin.

¨I didn´t want to bother with it anymore, so I gave it to Dax,¨ says Kasler, referring to Seidlin´s daughter. ¨I thought she might want to build a house on it someday.¨

When I told her it was assessed for $45,000, she was incredulous, saying she didn´t think it was worth nearly that much. She acknowledged that she has given Seidlin cash gifts but wouldn´t say how much she´s given him. ¨I don´t remember,¨ she said.

When asked about her paying for Dax´s education at Pine Crest, she replied, ¨That´s between me and Dax.¨