Terrible Trio

Gallagher's list of pals is a who's who of everybody in Broward who ever wanted to make a dime at the public trough. There are lobbyists like Jim Blosser, Ron Book, Andy DiBattista, Bernie Friedman, W. Earl Hall, Alex Heckler, Jim Kane, Howard Kusnick, Dan Lewis, Mike Moskowitz, the aforementioned Platt, William Rubin (called "Billy" on the invite), and, of course, Sterling and Miller.

There are also builders and developers like Silvio Cardoso, Austin Forman, Charles Ladd ("Charlie"), Tony Mijares, Dwight Stephenson, Michael Wohl, and, of course, Pirtle.

That's just a sample. Also on the invitation are several phone numbers to call to give contributions to Gallagher's campaign, including her School Board number. It's illegal to solicit contributions from government buildings, so she might want to be careful about that bit of sloppiness.

Another name on her buddy list is lobbyist Russ Klenet, which leads us to the next name on the list:

• Stacy Ritter. A Broward County commissioner, Ritter is Klenet's wife. And because of her marital tie, she would be shaking in her boots if Satz were truly serious about prosecuting corruption.

Since Ritter's election to the County Commission, her husband and his new lobbying company, Dutko, Poole, and McKinley, have been linked to several companies doing business with the county for whom Ritter has voted, including airport manager URS, Vista Health Care, and voting-machine company ES&S.

Just last week, Ritter voted to buy $5.4 million worth of optical scanner machines from ES&S, which had come under fire for the performance of touchscreen machines the county is scrapping after only five years of operation. So she doesn't seem very nervous, but there might now be reason for her to be. Patti Lynn, a longtime community activist in Tamarac, filed an official complaint, based on coverage in this newspaper and the Miami Herald, against Ritter with Satz's chief corruption prosecutor, Tim Donnelly.

From my experience, Satz doesn't investigate political corruption without a complaint from a citizen, even if an open-and-shut case is laid out before the department in the public arena. But his spokesman, former Herald reporter Ron Ishoy, tells me I'm wrong on that score:

"Public-corruption prosecutors here have always pursued any viable tip about possible criminality no matter what the source. From even you, as we've shown, and from even me. In 1982, I wrote a story about an elected official supposedly offering a political job to someone if they got out of a political race. The SAO investigated and took it to the grand jury."

I don't know what happened 25 years ago, but it's true that Satz's office has investigated several corruption cases based on my coverage, including Wasserstrom. But I believe all of them were predicated on a citizen complaint. And, in the case of the third nefarious politician, who knows if one has been lodged or not?

• Al Capellini. Almost like a comic book villain, the mayor of Deerfield Beach has managed to escape justice at every turn. Consider, for instance, that Wasserstrom was convicted of two felony counts of official misconduct for failing to disclose the full nature of his dealings with sewage company Schwing Bioset. Capellini has taken it a step further, more than once failing to disclose his conflicts at all.

At times, rather than face a vote in which he has a conflict, he has gone to the bathroom, disappearing until a more impersonal matter comes before the commission. At other times, he didn't even bother with the bathroom trick and simply voted on matters that stood to benefit either himself or his private firm, Atlantis Engineering, which has done extensive work in his city.

His conflicts have been so myriad that it's impossible to go over them all here. But one particularly egregious violation of the public trust — and likely Florida law — involves his dealings in an office-building project in his city called Deerfield Park.

The mayor used his clout to push the Deerfield Park plan through his city and voted on its initial approval in 2003 — without disclosing the fact that his engineering company was overseeing the project. Then he secretly manipulated both his city and the county to remove an entrance designed to alleviate traffic for residents in the Natura retirement community and cut costs on his own project. That enraged residents, many of whom called for his ouster last year.

On top of this conflict and others, he partnered with a convicted drug kingpin named Sam Frontera, who has resurfaced in Pompano Beach, where he runs a music venue called Club Cinema.

Capellini is an excellent example of how abjectly scurrilous politicians, aided by a combination of voter indifference and prosecutorial laxness, survive in South Florida. And if Satz doesn't start doing his job, it might be time to kick another politician out of office — Michael Satz himself. He's running for his ninth term right now and, like Gallagher, picking up checks from lobbyists and other interested parties (state campaign records show Satz has raised $35,000 through May).

Maybe he thought the Wasserstrom conviction would be enough to assuage voters. If that's the case, we should all make it a point to prove him wrong next year.