Audio By Carbonatix
Sheila Alu sometimes feels like a marked woman. The Sunrise
commissioner has been called a “rat” on blogs and newspaper websites,
has been shunned at her day job as prosecutor in the State Attorney’s
Office, has lost friendships, and was personally attacked in a recent
deposition.
Her sin: coming forward about gross misconduct on the part of a
well-connected local judge.
Alu, a single mom first elected to office in 2001, came forward in
New Times last year about Broward Circuit Judge Ana Gardiner’s
improper socializing with a prosecutor during a first-degree murder
trial. As a result, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the
death-penalty conviction of Omar Loureiro last week and ordered a new
trial.
Although a number of courthouse insiders laud Alu for speaking out
about a courthouse rife with abuse and corruption, she has gained no
shortage of enemies for doing the right thing.
And real justice hasn’t come. The erratic Gardiner, whose career has
benefited from friendships with State Attorney Michael Satz and
disgraced former Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne, has yet to be punished
despite the fact that she had improper communication with a prosecutor
and clearly violated a defendant’s constitutional rights.
Worse, the judge demonstrably lied in an April 30 deposition in the
Loureiro appeal when she denied much of Alu’s story. In that
deposition, Gardiner also made unseemly personal allegations against
the Sunrise commissioner that Alu says are untrue.
The 46-year-old Alu says she’s not sure if speaking out about
Gardiner’s misconduct was worth it. “I’ll think I made the right
decision if other people come forward when they see misconduct at the
courthouse,” she says. “If they don’t, it wasn’t worth it.”
To understand why Alu came forward against Gardiner, why she put her
career as a politician and prosecutor on the line, you have to go back
to her childhood in Palm Beach County, where she grew up in an abusive
and neglectful household and was put into foster care when she was
11.
She says she suffered terribly in state-supervised care, an
experience that later motivated her to want to change the bureaucracy
and fight corruption. But before she ever thought about politics, she
wanted a family of her own. After a failed first marriage, she and
second husband, Joe Alu, a Plantation police officer, had a daughter,
Christina, in 1991.
Four years later, Joe Alu was blown up in a house explosion that
severely burned him and another officer, Jim O’Hara. Two young girls
were killed, as was their estranged and distraught father, who had
poured gasoline throughout the house.
While caring for her husband, Alu learned that if he were unable to
return to work, the city’s health coverage would run out for the
family. Her fight to change that put her in the public eye. “Go to the
mayor’s office,” she told the Sun-Sentinel. “Go bang down his
door.”
A political career was born. Her effort ended after a triumphant
trip to Washington, D.C., where she watched then-President Bill Clinton
sign the Alu-O’Hara Public Safety Officer Benefits Act on the lawn of
the Rose Garden.
The issue also led Alu to become politically involved at the local
level. In 2001, she won election to the Sunrise commission.
During her first term, she met lobbyist Ali Waldman, the girlfriend
and lawyer for land baron Ron Bergeron. Waldman was leader of a group
of political women who called themselves the Steel Magnolias. Alu
joined the club, which also included state Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff and
political operative Mary Fertig.
The women were hyped at one time in the media as corruption
fighters, and Alu took the role to heart. “I thought the Magnolias were
about ridding Broward of corruption and putting incorruptible people
into office,” she says. “I really believed that.”
Alu, who divorced Joe Alu in 2004, and Waldman became close. Alu
says she looked up to Waldman, who encouraged her to enroll in law
school at Nova Southeastern University. Waldman often brought Alu to
Bergeron’s expansive ranch, Green Glades, and the women were seen at
dinners and charities all around town.
But Alu knew that Waldman lobbied local governments on behalf of
clients, including the superwealthy Bergeron. She says she told Waldman
never to lobby her on Sunrise matters or the friendship would have to
end.
“We had an explicit oral agreement, ‘You don’t lobby me, we don’t do
any business together, we’re just best friends,’ ” says Alu.
There were a few gifts above the $100 limit she was allowed to
receive. In 2005, she had Waldman and Bergeron over to her house for
dinner. When Bergeron saw that only one burner worked on her stove, he
had a new one delivered for $1,200. Alu properly disclosed the gift on
state forms.
She didn’t see anything wrong with it because she never used her
political office to help Bergeron or Waldman. And neither of them ever
asked. Until 2007.
Early that year, Waldman began talking about a plan to build a large
housing development on the old Sunrise Country Club site. Alu says
Waldman told her that the company proposing it, Miami-based GC Homes,
was good and that she was a friend of the owners, Pedro and Michael
Garcia-Carillo.
Alu says she began to suspect that Waldman was using her friendship
to push the golf course development in her city. She tried to avoid the
topic.
Then came the night of March 23, 2007, when Alu met Judge Ana
Gardiner at Timpano on Las Olas Boulevard for dinner and drinks.
Alu says that Gardiner called before arriving and said she was with
someone she shouldn’t be with. Then the judge showed up with homicide
prosecutor Howard Scheinberg and fellow judge Charlie Kaplan.
What happened next is well-known to those who follow Broward news:
Gardiner and Scheinberg began laughing about a juror fainting at a
murder trial after seeing gruesome photographs of the murder victim.
They also laughed about the fact that both the defendant, Omar
Loureiro, and the victim were gay.
When Alu realized that Gardiner was the judge in the case and
Scheinberg the prosecutor and that the trial was still ongoing, she was
stunned. She had just taken the ethics portion of the Florida Bar test
the week before and knew this was utterly wrong — even cause for
a mistrial.
As Scheinberg rode with her to another bar, Alu says she immediately
asked him, with outrage in her voice, how he and Gardiner could talk
about an ongoing case. He told her that if she felt it was wrong, she
should report it to the bar.
When they arrived at the Blue Martini, Scheinberg was extremely
upset by the conversation and left almost immediately. Kaplan and
Gardiner left with him.
The next day, Alu sought advice from lawyer Stuart Michelson,
husband of County Commissioner Ilene Lieberman.
“He was astonished at what they’d done,” says Alu. “He started
spewing off canon violations. I asked him, ‘What should I do about it?’
He said that I wasn’t technically a lawyer yet so I didn’t have a legal
obligation to report her to the bar.”
Another friend, property appraiser’s investigator Ron Cacciatore,
heard about what had happened from Judge Kaplan, who has since died of
a heart attack, and called Alu about it. He says he told her that she
shouldn’t repeat what she had heard. “She was agonizing over the
behavior of a sitting judge,” says Cacciatore. “I told her to forget
about it… sometimes the right thing can cause you more problems.”
Now Alu was at odds with two friends, Waldman and Gardiner, over
serious ethical issues. To top it off, the trio of women flew to New
York City for a shopping trip the next weekend, in part to celebrate
Alu’s graduation from law school.
She says that it was the first real vacation she’d taken in nearly a
decade and that she was ready to have a good time. But once they were
there shopping on Fifth Avenue, it went downhill fast.
Alu rarely spoke with Gardiner in New York or ever again; their
budding friendship was already dead. (In a deposition taken more than a
year later, when the Timpano incident was finally investigated,
Gardiner denied talking about the case with Scheinberg. In an ad
hominem attack, Gardiner also accused Alu of drinking too much and
having an affair with the married Cacciatore — an accusation both
Cacciatore and Alu strongly deny.)
Alu says that she still wanted to save her friendship with Ali
Waldman but that the lobbyist wasn’t making that easy.
“Ali kept talking about developing this golf course,” she says. “It
wasn’t like she just brought it up once — she kept going on and
on and on about it. I finally said, ‘What is the deal with you and this
golf course?’ And she said, ‘This is one of my clients.’ My mouth
dropped wide open.”
Alu says she reminded Waldman of the no-lobbying rule. “I told her
she wasn’t even registered to lobby and she wasn’t supposed to be
lobbying me,” says Alu. “Ali said it was a gray area. I told her there
was no gray area and that she could either choose our friendship or her
client.”
About a month after returning from New York, Waldman made her
decision when she registered as a lobbyist for GC Homes with the City
of Sunrise. Alu and Waldman haven’t spoken since — and Alu, after
hearing complaints from residents about the golf course, killed the
plan before it even had a chance to come up for a vote on the Sunrise
commission. Waldman didn’t respond to a call for comment.
Months after the Timpano incident, Alu told me, off the record, what
Gardiner had done and said it still bothered her. I told her it was a
very important story, but she refused to go on the record, saying that
it might not do any good and that it could ruin her career as a
lawyer.
In January 2008, Alu was hired as a prosecutor for the State
Attorney’s Office. A month later, on Super Bowl Sunday, Judge Gardiner
crashed her car on a Fort Lauderdale street while spying on a boyfriend
at a party.
Using the bizarre accident as a springboard, I began reporting on
allegations of improper relationships with lawyers that have been made
against Gardiner over the years. Again, I asked Alu if she would go on
the record about what she’d seen. After first refusing, she called and
left a message on my answering machine.
“OK, I thought about it. I’m ready to give you my quote and what I
want to say about Ana Gardiner, and you can use my name,” she said. “I
realize by speaking out to the press about this incident… it could
lead some people from the legal community to shun me or potentially
blackball me, but I became a lawyer to seek justice… I still believe
in a defendant’s right to a fair trial. I feel the public has a right
to know.”
Soon we would find out.
