Saturday, March 13, 2010

British politician William Gladstone is credited with the quote, "Justice delayed is justice denied." But we are wont to add that delayed justice is sometimes better than denied justice.

Such we believe is the case with former Key West Public Works supervisor Gilbert Suarez, who very nearly walked away from a 2006 public corruption guilty plea for pocketing your money without so much as a criminal record.

There now is a good chance that Suarez' alleged involvement in a federal income tax return scam will be a violation of his probation on previous counts of grand larceny, possession of cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia -- and will negate a very sweet plea deal he got from former Monroe County State Attorney Mark Kohl.

Suarez, you might recall, is the former city supervisor who spent his Sundays emptying parking meters to augment his income. After another city employee tipped off the police, they followed Suarez, videotaped him emptying meters, and found more than $2,000 in coins -- as well as cocaine, pot and paraphernalia -- when they followed him home. The coins, which Suarez' wife told police came from a child's piggy bank, included a couple dozen marked quarters police had planted in meters.

Employees at two bank branches and a credit union told investigators that Suarez' wife and mother were regulars, bringing in $300 to $2,000 in rolled quarters each week to exchange for paper currency.

Investigators were convinced he had been emptying meters for as long as five years, and had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"The case is solid," said police investigator Detective Dan Allen at the time.

But the State Attorney's Office disagreed. Prosecutors lamented that the city had no documents showing that the quarters drivers had been dropping into parking meters had gone missing. And the banks didn't keep records of rolled coins exchanged for paper -- prosecutors would have been forced to rely on testimony from bank tellers based solely on their memory. And what proof was there that all those quarters they were bringing in each week were stolen?

So Suarez was offered a deal in 2006 -- five years probation and he had to forfeit about $11,000 in accrued vacation and sick pay. And best of all, adjudication was withheld. In other words, if he successfully completed probation the crime would go away -- no record.

Perhaps prosecutors were right about the lack of hard evidence to show the scope of the theft. Nonetheless, the plea deal was not warmly embraced by the public.

Now Suarez faces more serious federal charges that clearly will take precedence over a probation violation. He, his brother, his sister and a niece are accused in a scheme in which income tax forms were filed requesting refunds based on nonexistent jobs with companies that no longer existed.

Yet, if it is established that Suarez violated his 2006 probation, he stands a good chance of finally facing the consequences he so nearly evaded four years ago.

When you consider State Attorney Dennis Ward's intolerance for public corruption, the odds for justice -- albeit delayed -- just got a lot better.

-- The Citizen