Article Courtesy of The
Miami Herald
By David Ovalle
Published November 28, 2022
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For years, the board of the troubled Hammocks Community Association in West
Kendall has blocked state investigators from getting a trove of financial
records that may detail the theft of resident funds.
But with board members now facing allegations of stealing millions, a
court-appointed receiver on Tuesday allowed the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s
Office to finally access documents at the association’s clubhouse office,
widening the criminal investigation. A team of investigators arrived early
Tuesday morning on a prosecution bus, working throughout the day to scan
thousands of documents.
One cache of documents was found hidden under the floor of the office.
The seizure unfolded one week after Miami-Dade prosecutors charged four former
board members, alleging they schemed to steal over $2 million, writing checks to
vendors — for work that was never done — who then kicked back payments, mostly
to then-president Marglli Gallego.
Last week, a Miami-Dade civil judge dissolved the current board and placed the
association under receivership. The receiver’s team is getting copies of the
records as part of a simultaneous probe into the finances of the sprawling
suburban community about 20 miles southwest of downtown Miami.
“There are volumes and volumes of documents. We feel optimistic we will find
additional evidence of these horrible crimes against these victim homeowners,”
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in an interview on
Tuesday.
She declined to detail the records found, but added: “It’s even worse than we
feared.”
The Hammocks Community Association is the largest HOA in Florida, with over
6,500 units and 25,000 residents. In all, five people were arrested last week,
including board president Monica Ghilardi, current board member Myriam Rodgers,
former board member Yoleidis Lopez Garcia, Gallego and Gallego’s husband, Jose
Antonio Gonzalez.
Their defense attorneys have said they will fight the allegations. Gallego
remains jailed, while the others have posted bond.
Lawyer Hilton Napoleon, who represented the HOA under the now-dissolved board,
declined to comment.
The racketeering and fraud charges stem from a long-running probe that last year
resulted in Gallego’s first arrest. Since then, Miami-Dade prosecutors had
repeatedly subpoenaed financial documents, but found themselves stymied by HOA
lawyers.
Despite judges ordering the HOA to produce financial documents, the association
refused to comply, even appealing one judge’s ruling. An appeals court threw out
the appeal. At one point earlier this year, an attorney for the board told a
Miami-Dade judge the board voted to ignore the judge’s order because “the board
doesn’t trust the state.”
Along the way, the sprawling planned community has been in turmoil, its coffers
depleted, homeowners hit with 300 to 400 percent hikes in maintenance fees and
the launching of a contentious recall effort against the board. A civil case was
filed back in April by resident Ana Danton, who asked a court to place the
association in receivership after a botched election, the fee hikes and the
belief that HOA funds were being used to pay Gallego’s criminal defense
attorneys.
The legal wrangling had dragged on for months until Thursday, two days after the
arrests, when Circuit Judge Beatrice Butchko appointed the receiver — to rousing
applause from residents who crowded the courtroom.
Butchko appointed former Third District Court of Appeals judge David Gersten to
manage the affairs of the association and investigate the state of its finances
and property, and longstanding allegations of financial shenanigans by the
board. She also appointed a temporary “advisory committee” — drawn from a group
of residents who had opposed the previous board — and ordered that all
documents, hard drives and other potential evidence remain locked up in the
office.
“Get a locksmith out there,” she said.
Idalmen “Chicky” Ardisson, a longtime Hammocks resident who is part of the
advisory committee, said Tuesday that the seizure of the documents “will put the
exclamation point on everything this community has been saying about our money
not being used for the community.”
She said: “Finally, we’re going to see how deep this rabbit hole really went.”
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