A Cool $20 Million

By the late 1960s, George Wackenhut was living large in a 57-room Gables mansion called Tyecliffe Castle. Tyecliffe was known to locals as "Castle Wackenhut." Although a huge financial success, his company has been plagued by scandal. Through the years, it fumbled myriad prison contracts owing to allegations of guard abuse (rape in Texas, mismanagement in New Mexico, beatings in Alabama). It lost a $12-million-per-year deal in Texas, relinquished its juvenile facility in Alabama, and suffered a hellacious riot when Wackenhut-guarded prisoners in New Mexico were told by the governor that violence would get them transferred to state-run jails.

In 1991 Congress grilled a Wackenhut executive for spying on whistleblowers on behalf of a consortium of oil companies. The company fired the exec following a media frenzy and a Congressional investigation. No one was indicted.

Locally Wackenhut has done much better. In 1989 the county booted an ineffectual minority contractor from Metrorail and handed the $2.3-million-per-year security deal to Wackenhut. Since then, commissioners have awarded Wackenhut three no-bid renewals — and the total cost of the contract has increased almost tenfold. By the time the firm's deal is up in 2009, Metrorail security will be worth almost $20 million per year.

In late 1997, commissioners hired Wackenhut to help oversee the JAC, where arrested juveniles make first contact with the criminal justice system. Today that deal is worth roughly $1.3 million per year.

Complaints about Wackenhut's performance began to crop up last fall. Former employee Michelle Trimble filed one lawsuit alleging bogus termination and then another to recoup the money she said was stolen from the public. Next Ben Gilbert sued, claiming he was fired for threatening to go to the media with dirt on the JAC. Then came Mark Mitnick's claim. Omar Rosario, a Metrorail guard, filed the final whistleblower action in January 2006.

During that time, H. Mark Vieth, the quartet's attorney, hired a private investigator to interview current and former Wackenhut employees. The result of his work — thousands of pages of depositions and transcribed interviews, a small part of which made it into the Miami Herald this past winter — prompted county commissioners to consider the charges.

"Wackenhut has been able to keep enough staff to patrol all the posts," Miami-Dade Transit Director Roosevelt Bradley told county commissioners this past January 19. An audit expected soon could change all of that. Heads are already starting to roll.

Yanir Hill was hired as Wackenhut's human resources director in 2003 — around the same time Mitnick was fired. After reviewing the guard's objections, she decided to investigate. A voluminous March 3, 2005 memo directed to her superior, Eduardo Esquivel, indicated Mitnick had done nothing wrong.

His case was just the beginning, she reported. Employees had complained to her in exit interviews about huge staff shortages that forced them to work more than 200 hours in two weeks. Wackenhut still couldn't fill all the required posts, they claimed. "[Metrorail guards] talked to me about being uncomfortable with signing times on sign-in sheets and not being there those times," she said in her deposition.

"We are facing a major problem with morale [on Metrorail]," Hill concluded in her memo regarding Mitnick's termination. "The officers feel mistreated and feel they have no job security ... they feel betrayed by their chain of command and have lost faith and respect in said chain of command."

In late 2005 she claimed she told Esquivel about the faked time sheets. According to her sworn deposition, "if it was not in writing, he did not want to hear it."

Hill says Maj. Arnold Bair, a Wackenhut higherup, overheard the conversation and pulled her into his office. "Close the door; I'm going to show you something," she recalls Bair mentioning before handing her a thin stack of paper and saying, "It [is] an audit I did before. Be careful."

The audit mirrors many of the claims made by current guards and supervisors. It details more than 100 billing discrepancies between December 1998 and April 1999. "Great emphasis seems to be placed on ensuring that the invoice total hours never reflect a lack of coverage on a station," Bair wrote in the report. Time sheets had been doctored "after the fact" with correction fluid.

Bair told Hill he had submitted the report to Wackenhut brass in mid-1999. Bair claims a company vice president assured him he would "talk to the [county] and compensate them for any losses." (Esquivel denies seeing the audit. He also claims neither to have received a report from Hill about Mitnick's termination nor heard about unmanned posts.)

In response, Rene Pedrayes contends the company "tweaked" Metrorail sign-in procedures. "There was no loss of hours ... no money reimbursed," he said in a deposition. The county did not see a copy of the audit until last year, when it was presented to them by the Herald.

According to guards, shenanigans of all types have played out at the rail since Bair's audit. A quick review reads like a twisted version of the twelve days of Christmas. One guard admits to falsely signing blank time sheets given to him by high-level supervisors. Two supervisors state they witnessed blank sheets being handed out willy-nilly. Three guards describe a habitual double-billing. Six admitted they were paid for unworked hours. And some nights there were as many as seven posts where no security was present.