A woman was driving alone at 10:45 at night near Lake Mary’s Colonial Town Park when she realized a black sport utility vehicle with a flashing white light on its dashboard was following her.
Barbara Hawkins was “suspicious and fearful for her safety,” she later told deputies, and kept driving. But the driver of the SUV persisted, pulling up close to her car two more times before she finally stopped just after turning into her subdivision off Lake Markham Road.
The man in the SUV, later identified as then-Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, emerged from his vehicle wearing shorts, a t-shirt, tennis shoes, a backward baseball cap and a tax collector badge that looked “like a deputy star,” Hawkins said. He yelled at Hawkins for cutting him off and “driving like a bat out of hell,” according to the report.
Hawkins reported the incident to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office that night. A little more than a week later, the 18th Circuit State Attorney’s Office sent a letter to an investigator in charge of the case, saying the prosecutor wasn’t going to pursue it. Greenberg’s actions, the office determined, did not constitute the crime of false personation of an officer, a third-degree felony, or unlawful use of a badge, a first-degree misdemeanor.
Reached by phone this week, Hawkins said she was “livid” when she learned Greenberg would not face legal consequences.
“He didn’t identify himself as anything, but he certainly did impersonate an officer, in my opinion, and I don’t know how the State Attorney’s Office could say anything different,” Hawkins said.
It wasn’t the only time that Seminole-Brevard State Attorney Phil Archer decided not to prosecute Greenberg, despite evidence he may have committed a crime.
Federal prosecutors have indicted Greenberg four times since June. He now faces 33 federal charges, including stalking, identity theft, wire fraud, bribery, theft of government property, conspiracy to bribe a public official, and sex trafficking of a minor.
Many of the allegations are tied to the local office Greenberg held. Among other things, he’s accused of stealing from the county coffers, using his office’s machinery to make fake IDs and falsely tarring a re-election rival as having sexually abused a child.
But state and local authorities have never charged Greenberg with anything more than minor traffic violations, even though he has repeatedly faced allegations of abusing his office and authority, and mismanaging its financial resources.
Last November, a county-ordered audit found that Greenberg billed $65,860 to the tax collector’s office in 2019 to buy computer servers for Government Blockchain Systems, a business he established. That same report detailed how Greenberg “wasted” more than $1 million in taxpayers’ money on questionable contracts and spent $384,000 with credit cards on weekends and after hours to purchase body armor, weapons, ammunition and a drone.
Behavior similar to what local officials dubbed waste, federal authorities this week deemed a crime. The latest indictment against Greenberg, filed Tuesday, accuses him of embezzling more than $400,000 from the agency, including through Government Blockchain Systems, and purchases with an office American Express card, like a $600 autographed photo of basketball legend Michael Jordan.
Early in Greenberg’s tenure, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement declined to investigate allegations from a former tax collector’s office employee that Greenberg had asked him to attack the county’s computers and demand a $500,000 ransom paid in Bitcoin.
A former network security specialist told authorities the tax collector in mid-2017 offered to “tumble” the cryptocurrency through several Bitcoin wallets to hide its origin, then split it with him. But FDLE said it couldn’t probe the matter because it was Greenberg’s word against his former employees’. The two had a falling out, the agency said, so it couldn’t wire the employee with a listening device to record Greenberg.
And in late 2018, Archer asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office to weigh in on whether Greenberg should allow his employees to wear guns strapped to their waists at work. Bondi’s office wrote in an informal, nonbinding opinion that the workers shouldn’t be openly carrying firearms, typically prohibited by Florida law, as part of their job duties because they’re not law enforcement officers.
But it’s unclear whether Archer ever told Greenberg, who said those employees provided security at branch offices, to stop the practice.
The state attorney’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday. An automated message said the office was closed.
Archer has told the Orlando Sentinel in the past that his office does not investigate possible crimes; it only prosecutes them. He said he was “very concerned about public corruption,” but does not have a special unit to deal with it as some state attorneys do.
That’s why, he wrote to the Sentinel last month, his office isn’t probing the use of dark money to promote an independent candidate in the race for the Florida Senate District 9 seat, which includes all of Seminole and part of Volusia County. His counterpart in Miami-Dade county recently filed charges against former State Senator Frank Artiles, who is accused of paying nearly $45,000 to a sham candidate in hopes of siphoning votes away from the Democratic incumbent, a violation of campaign finance laws.
No such charges have been filed against anyone connected with the Central Florida race, but the same dark money group paid for ads promoting the independent candidates in both races, suggesting a connection. Artiles was overheard bragging about his involvement in the South Florida race at an election night party for Jason Brodeur, who was elected to the District 9 seat, the Miami Herald reported.
But Archer’s office has not investigated whether any elections or campaign finance laws were broken in Brodeur’s race. Instead, he said, it’s the duty of the FDLE or the Division of Elections to investigate any complaints about the matter.
He said he has just two sworn investigators to serve four felony trial divisions and six misdemeanor trial divisions in Seminole.
“There is no way they could devote the considerable hours of investigative time that would be required on a case like this,” Archer wrote in an email to the Sentinel.
But Hawkins said she felt like the prosecutor’s office let her down when it decided not to pursue charges against Greenberg three years ago.
“The state attorney just washed their hands of it,” she said this week.
Archer’s office agreed with Hawkins that Greenberg’s tax collector badge resembled one typically worn by a law enforcement officer and he shouldn’t have been wearing it when he confronted Hawkins because he was acting outside of his official capacity. Greenberg’s actions were “inappropriate,” according to a letter signed by Chief Assistant Stacey Straub Salmons, but they didn’t violate the letter of Florida’s laws.
“One could be left to conclude that Mr. Greenberg’s decision to wear his badge during these two incidents was a purposeful attempt, on his part, to exert undue power and influence, or to mislead those who he was interacting on Dec. 4, 2017, into thinking that he was a law enforcement officer, when in reality, he is the Seminole County Tax Collector,” the letter dated Dec. 13, 2017 read. “So, while one could conclude these points, I will not; rather, I will give Mr. Greenberg the benefit of the doubt and assume his intentions were pure, in that he was trying to slow traffic in an attempt to make his community safer.”
Prosecutors have a lot of discretion to determine which cases they want to pursue, and most try not to nail people unfairly, said Scott Fingerhut, a professor at Florida International University’s law school.
He added he can’t speak to the reasons why Archer decided not to prosecute Greenberg in 2017. But he was skeptical of the state attorney’s rationale for the decision as outlined in the letter sent to the sheriff’s office.
“That is garbage,” Fingerhut said of the explanation and of the assumption that Greenberg was simply trying to improve traffic safety.
“Is it possible? Yes, but even if that were his motive, it’s still an improper use of his non-police credentials,” he said.
Greenberg himself has been cited for speeding at least five times in Central Florida, including once a little more than a month after he pulled over the Lake Mary woman. A Lake Mary police officer using a radar reported Greenberg was driving 39 miles per hour in an area where the limit is 25 just after 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. He asked for the officer who stopped him not to cite him as “a professional courtesy,” footage from a body camera worn by the officer shows.
“You’re going to give a constitutional officer a ticket?” Greenberg said. “Are you serious? … This is unprofessional. You know this is unprofessional.”
A month later, Greenberg paid the $206 fine.
anmartin@orlandosentinel.com
