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UPDATED: Sylvia Poitier, the controversial former Broward County commissioner who is now an elected official in Deerfield Beach, has been charged with five misdemeanors related to her family’s involvement in a city-sponsored housing organization, according to the South Florida Times.
The newspaper didn’t specify the charges but reported that they stem from a loan her brother, Lionel Ferguson, gave to the Westside Deerfield Businessmen Association, which is a designated affordable-housing provider in the city.
Activist Chaz Stevens spent months digging into Poitier, prompting the investigation. Some are tossing racism allegations around against him, which is totally baseless. But his acidic and personal style — in which he personally taunts officials — has earned him numerous enemies. Stevens told the the SF Times that his dog was recently poisoned.
Poitier was recently reelected in a landslide in her district.
More on the investigation as information surfaces.
— Over the weekend, the Sun-Sentinel published an op-ed from former Broward County Judge Robert Zack urging the county to use less pretrial release and more bail bondsmen when letting go those awaiting the outcome of criminal charges.
In a piece that only a bail bondsman could truly love, Zack urges support for state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff’s bill that would curtail the pretrial release program in favor of the bail bonds industry.
But you have to wonder if Zack wasn’t helping to pay off a debt of his own with the Sentinel‘s ink.
Judge Zack, remember, was very friendly to bail bondsmen when he was in office — and they to him. In fact, the relationship caused a bit of a scandal a decade ago when it was discovered that Zack had accepted a $75,000 loan from bail bondsman Wayne Spath and failed to report it — as legally required — on his public financial disclosure forms for seven years.
Spath is the chief political force behind state and local efforts to curtail pretrial release in favor of the bail bonds industry. As head of the Broward County Bail Bondsmen Association, he hired none other than Broward County lobbyist Ron Book in 2008 to help him push through his agenda on the county level.
It was an obvious conflict of interest, since Book is the county’s lobbyist. And it was very much opposed by the Broward Sheriff’s Office — which administers pretrial release and says it has worked — and the county’s iconoclastic and at times heroic public defender, Howard Finkelstein. Book has allegedly since stopped lobbying for the bail bondsmen, but now the industry has Bogdanoff sponsoring its legislation and Zack in the newspaper cheerleading for it.
I wonder if Zack ever paid off that loan from Spath. If he didn’t, then one would imagine this weekend’s handiwork might help alleviate the debt. Zack, it must be noted, resigned from the bench in 2008, shortly after it was revealed that he also took loans from Chris Roberts, an attorney who routinely appeared before him.
You can’t blame Zack for helping out Spath, his old friend and bankroller, with an article in the daily newspaper. But you can sure as hell blame the Sun-Sentinel for printing it without a disclaimer.
Inside, see the original article on the Ron Book hiring. You’ll see that Book flooded the county commissioners’ campaign coffers with cash. Guess which commissioner spearheaded the issue for him? Hint: It’s someone disgraced political operative Beverly Stracher told prosecutors could never be bought.
New Times Broward-Palm Beach (Florida)
December 18, 2008 Thursday
”When I look at what we would pay if the jail were overcapacity
versus what we’re paying for the program, we’re probably better off letting the
jail be overcapacity, and we’ll save more money that way,” Lieberman said during
the November 13 commission meeting.
The idea is outrageous. Not only does Lieberman endorse violating
the law, but her idea would also add tens of millions of dollars in jail costs
for housing the extra inmates and likely prompt the feds to force Broward County
to build a new $70 million jail. On top of that, it would leave hundreds of
inmates, most of them simply too poor to post a small bond, to rot in jail for
no good reason.
Yet Lieberman isn’t alone on the commission in at least wanting
to cut some of the funding for the program, even as the Broward Sheriff’s
Office, State Attorney’s Office, Public Defenders Office, and Clerk of the Court
oppose the idea.
In fact, an ordinance has been proposed to limit the program that
will be discussed at a public hearing next month.
The question: Who got to Lieberman and the rest of the
commissioners?
The answer: A lobbyist. Of course.
And it’s not just any lobbyist. It’s their lobbyist, Ron
Book, who makes about $50,000 a year in
taxpayers’ money to lobby for Broward County in Tallahassee.
Book has been hired by the Broward County Bail Bondsmen
Association to hobble the pretrial release program, which right now is
monitoring about 2,200 criminal defendants. The program, after all, puts a dent
in the bail bonds business. Most of the inmates chosen for the program get out
of jail on their own recognizance – which of course doesn’t require posting a
bond.
Book’s ordinance would preclude non-indigent inmates from
participating. Currently, they make up about 40 percent of the program. A second
version has been hammered out that singles out only non-indigent inmates who
have committed dangerous crimes or have a history of missing court dates. The
change would force them to pay a bond to get out of jail and, ultimately, force
more people facing trial to sit in jail.
And it would also allow bail bondsmen to get their hands into
more pockets.
Of all the public officials who think the ordinance Book has
cooked up is a bad idea – and there are plenty of them – none are more outspoken
than Public Defender Howard Finkelstein.
“The people that work in the system, that run the system, whose
mission is justice and equal justice, say, ‘Don’t do this,'” Finkelstein told
the commission during the November 13 meeting. “Mr. Book says, ‘Do it.’ And
we’re going to do it? Don’t sell out the justice system.”
Of course, that’s not how the industry describes the effort.
Veteran Fort Lauderdale bondsman Wayne Spath, who is a member of the county’s public safety advisory board,
says it’s all about “accountability.”
“I make them go to court,” he said of criminal defendants. “And
we think the program should concentrate on indigent people. Don’t give people
who can afford it a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Spath is a businessman, and you can’t begrudge him and his
brethren for trying to write more jail bonds. And there are surely some
advantages to having bondsmen keeping track of the defendants.
But the facts don’t seem to back up his assertion that the
pretrial release program isn’t accountable.
The program, which was expanded last January with an infusion of
$2.7 million in county money, has worked smoothly, says Kristina Gulick, who
heads BSO’s Department of Community Control. She says that only one to four
percent of the 5,700 inmates who have gone through the program in the last year
absconded, depending on how you count them.
“People don’t understand that you either have this program or you
have to build a new jail,” she says. “For the bondsmen, it’s in their playbook.
Their national associations have print-out material on how to beat pretrial
agencies. They do this all over the country. They tried to do it in Miami-Dade
but were unsuccessful. Unfortunately, it’s a competitor’s game.”
Gulick recounts statistics with ease. The program costs a total
of about $6 million a year – after the county expanded it by $2.7 million last
January. On average, there are 2,200 criminal defendants being monitored by the
program on any given day. Jailing them would cost $115 a day — or about $42,000
a year each. That’s $92 million worth of jail time saved over the last year
alone.
On top of that, the program accomplished its mission: keeping our
jails uncrowded. The 5,622-bed system, which includes five jails, generally runs
at 90 percent capacity. Last Wednesday, for instance, there were 5,207 people
incarcerated, according to Gulick.
Limiting the program would lead to higher jail populations — and
those who did get out would have to go through Book’s clients, the bail
bondsmen.
And don’t worry, the bondsmen aren’t starving. The percentage of
inmates that bond out of jail is still at about 28 percent, says Gulick, a
slight rise over last year.
So why is this even an issue?
That answer is easy: Ron Book. If not for his considerable influence, the
suggested ordinance probably would never have been a glint in a commissioner’s
eye.
Book not only works for the commission, but he also has poured
literally hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaign accounts. A look at
just the last election shows that his wife, his daughter, and his lobbying firm
contributed a total of $10,000 to four sitting commissioners – Ilene
Lieberman, John Rodstrom, Josephus Eggelletion, and Stacy Ritter.
Think about it. Book collects $50,000 from taxpayers and recycles
a fifth of it back into commissioners’ accounts. See how that works?
The bail bonds industry pumped in a few thousand to the four
campaigns as well, just for good measure.
Book’s history representing the bail bond industry hasn’t been
without controversy. In 1999, he played a role in tacking on a provision to a
crime bill that made it illegal for defendants charged with violent crimes to
participate in pretrial release programs. Gov. Jeb Bush vetoed the provision
after it was discovered that such a move would cost jails across the state tens
of millions of dollars, including an extra $4 million to $7 million for Broward
County alone.
Book publicly apologized to the Broward County Commission that
year for pushing a measure detrimental to the county while he was being paid by
taxpayers to lobby for its interests in Tallahassee. “Let me formally
apologize,” he said to the commission. “I did not know it would cost anybody
money.”
For his part, Book says Gulick’s statistics are “lies.” He says
the low rate of absconding by those in the pretrial program is basically an
accounting trick. Book also complains that the program has been taking in
violent criminals that shouldn’t get the privilege.
“Don’t buy their bullshit,” says Book, who is very good at what
he does. “They are trying to dupe you. Don’t let them. Everybody knows that
pretrial release services have been taking people it shouldn’t, child molesters,
drug users, batteries on law enforcement officers, burglaries of occupied
dwellings, not once, not twice — thousands of cases.”
That’s true — but the funny thing is that Book doesn’t oppose
allowing those defendants to bond out through his clients.
The truth, according to numerous officials and lawyers, is that
no horror stories have emerged about rampages by defendants who are monitored
under pretrial release in Broward or several other counties where pretrial
release programs are utilized.
The system might not be broke, but that hasn’t stopped several
commissioners from following Brook’s lead and trying to fix it. Commissioner
Lieberman, a longtime Book friend who is closer to him than any other
commissioner, has been the strongest advocate, as her contemptible pronouncement
about violating the federal order indicates.
But she isn’t alone. Several commissioners, all of whom have been
lobbied heavily on the issue by Book, appear to favor the measure, including
Mayor Stacy Ritter and Rodstrom, who said he has met with Book and bail bondsmen
on the issue and believes the cost of the program must be reduced.
Commissioner Kristin Jacobs was the only commissioner to speak
out against the Book ordinance at the November 13 meeting.
It’s due for a public hearing next month, where Finkelstein
hopefully won’t be alone this time in railing against it.
“This is about bondsmen having a secure income stream and they
are trying to achieve it because their lobbyist isn’t just at his job, but he
works for the county commission,” says the public defender. “To me this is pay
to play. I admire and respect Ron Book’s
abilities, but that doesn’t mean the county commission should submit and succumb
to him.”
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