MIAMI – Recruitment of the fake candidate started with a Facebook message around 4 am on May 15, 2020. “Call me,” wrote a Florida lawmaker who became a lobbyist for an old friend. “I have a question for you.”
Later that day, former state senator Frank Artiles, a Republican, asked Alexis Pedro Rodriguez over the phone if he still owned a house in the suburban Miami village on Palmetto Bay. Because, in that case, Mr. Artiles wanted something else: to put his friend’s property and surname to use in the next elections.
The current Democrat, state senator José Javier Rodríguez, was on the ballot. And Artiles, an astute political operator with a dubious reputation, had a plan: to implant his friend as a candidate and divert votes that could defeat Senator Rodríguez.
The plan worked, unleashing one of Florida’s most blatant election scandals in years – even by the heady standards of a state that has long been a breeding ground for political coup d’états. What is still uncertain is how widespread the scandal is, whether it has reached other races and whether it was part of an effort organized by Republicans or an interest group to influence legislative disputes.
Mr. Rodriguez, a machine parts dealer who was struggling financially, agreed to help Mr. Artiles, who promised him $ 50,000 in return. He changed from Republican to no party affiliation and qualified for the vote as Alex Rodriguez. He did not reveal that he actually lived far from the district, in Boca Raton, or that the money for his candidacy came from Mr. Artiles.
In November, Senator Rodríguez, an effective legislator who had fought for Florida to tackle the climate change crisis, lost to Republican challenger Ileana Garcia by a mere 32 votes out of more than 215,000 votes. Alex Rodriguez received 6,382 votes and played the spoiler.
It was a devastating loss for Florida’s Democrats in a year of Republican successes in the state. It was also the result of criminal behavior, prosecutors say.
On Thursday, Mr. Artiles, 47, and Mr. Rodriguez, 55, surrendered to prison. Each has been charged with three counts of third-degree crime related to violating the campaign finance law, including conspiracy to make campaign contributions beyond legal limits, making such contributions in excess, and making foul words in connection with an election.
Artiles declined to comment to a crowd of reporters who threw him out of prison on Thursday after he paid $ 5,000 bail. “That will be decided in the courts, thank you,” he said.
His lawyer, Greg Chonillo, said in a statement on Friday that his client, whose home was raided by investigators on Wednesday, cooperated with prosecutors “during the course of this investigation”.
“We will be investigating this matter thoroughly and zealously, representing our client in court against these charges,” said Mr. Chonillo.
The story of how Artiles planned the scheme, according to the arrest papers, is a classic South Florida racket with the sale of a nonexistent Range Rover and bundles of money stored in a home safe.
But it leaves unanswered the questions of where the money for the scheme came from – the Senate Republican president said the party had nothing to do with it – and whether the funds were tied to secret dark money that flowed through two other Senate contests. state last year. Republicans have controlled the state government for more than two decades.
On Friday, Democrats called for a reform of campaign funding – and for Garcia’s resignation so that a new election could be held. “Her victory is clearly tarnished,” said Manny Diaz, president of the Florida Democratic Party.
Prosecutors said they found no links between her and the Artiles and Rodriguez scheme. On Friday, state senator Wilton Simpson, president of the state senate, issued a joint statement with Ms. Garcia saying that they “support ongoing law enforcement efforts”.
“Senator Garcia has full support from President Simpson as she continues to serve her constituents,” said the statement.
South Florida has a shameful history of political and electoral antics, both high profile – fraud that was so violent in a 1997 Miami mayoral election that a judge rejected the results – and low rent, like small brokers being caught harvesting. illegally absent votes.
In 2012, former deputy David Rivera, a Republican, was involved in a covert campaign to try to undermine the electoral chances of his Democratic rival, Joe Garcia. The recruited candidate and Rivera’s ex-girlfriend, who acted as an intermediary, ended up in prison. Rivera, who was never charged, was sentenced last month to pay the Federal Election Commission a $ 456,000 fine.
On Thursday, Katherine Fernández Rundle, the Miami-Dade County state prosecutor, a Democrat, noted that recruiting a false candidate to deliberately influence an election was not illegal unless the candidate was also secretly funded.
“Is it an attack on our democracy? Is it a dirty political trick? ” she said. “Absolutely.”
At the center of the latest scandal is Mr. Artiles (pronounced is-TEE-less), who before his arrest this week was perhaps best known in Tallahassee, the state capital, for resigning the Senate in 2017 after cursing in and used a racist slander in front of a group of black lawmakers. His political committee spent money on “consultants” who were models from Hooters and Playboy with no campaign experience. He once denied punching a college student at a bar near the Capitol.
His involvement in recruiting the false candidate for the Senate race for District 37 last year went public in December, when The Miami Herald reported that Artiles had boasted of putting Rodriguez on the ballot for a crowd at an election night party held in Irish Pub in Seminole County. “This is me, this was all me,” The Herald quoted Mr. Artiles, citing an anonymous source who was present.
The furor surrounding Rodriguez’s suspected candidacy began after election day, when the results that separated Senator Rodríguez and Mrs. Garcia, founder of the Latinas for Trump group, were so intense that they led to a manual recount.
Local reporters in Tallahassee, Orlando and Miami found that Rodriguez, along with two mysterious candidates under the radar in two other Senate contests, one in the Miami area and one in Seminole County, were all likely plants. (The results at the other races were not close.)
Politico Florida tied the three dark money candidates from two political committees that sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in leaflets attacking voters during the campaign. The only donor reported was an entity that listed a UPS box in Atlanta as its mailing address. The committees changed their financial reports after election day, changing the source of the money to a different donor, this time in Colorado.
Investigators at the Miami-Dade County Public Corruption Investigation Unit began sniffing on November 11, eight days after the election.
“It was suspected that Rodriguez did not appear to have actively campaigned,” Miami Police Department detective Eutimio Cepero wrote in one of the arrest documents. “In addition, it was known that political committees were spending money in support of Rodriguez’s candidacy, although Rodriguez did not actively campaign.”
Investigators found that Artiles ended up paying Rodriguez $ 44,708, violating the state’s $ 1,000 campaign contribution limit for legislative disputes. Payments came in several forms, including payments of $ 3,000 and then $ 5,000 that Mr. Artiles had stored in his home safe and recorded in a ledger on his desk, as well as $ 2,400 that Mr. Artiles had transferred it to Mr. Rodriguez’s landlord.
There was a lot of suspicion between Artiles and Rodriguez, who told investigators that he thought Artiles would not deliver on the money he had promised. At one point, when Artiles was looking for a Range Rover used to buy his daughter, Rodriguez made up a story about how to find one in Jacksonville for $ 10,900. Artiles paid Rodriguez for the car, although he did not exist. (This money was not considered by prosecutors to be part of Mr. Artiles’ payments to Mr. Rodriguez for his candidacy.)
But where Mr. Artiles has made so much money is still unknown.
“Frank Artiles is not a lone wolf,” said William R. Barzee, Rodriguez’s lawyer. “More than half a million dollars has been spent by political agents working in the shadows to support phantom candidates in three separate Senate contests, all in one cycle. This was a well thought out, calculated and coordinated plan to steal Senate seats across Florida. “
The “biggest beneficiary of these actions,” added Barzee, “is the Florida Republican Party.”
Simpson, the Senate president who led the Republican campaigns for the Senate in 2020, said he had nothing to do with the effort. “I don’t think we have all the facts,” he told reporters in Tallahassee on Thursday. “We are learning what you are learning from reporting.”
“I hope it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said former state deputy Juan-Carlos Planas, known as JC, who was a lawyer for Senator Rodríguez during the recount and who has already fought against a candidate planted against him: his second cousin , who appeared on the Republican primary ballots as Juan E. “JP” Planas.
Senator Rodríguez, 42, lamented that weak enforcement mechanisms continue to allow questionable candidates to reach the ballots.
“It is a pity that it has to reach this level of criminality in order to have any kind of consequences, because this is not the first time that these types of schemes have been put together,” he said. “But this is the Wild West here in Florida.”