A Cool $20 Million

The county's Juvenile Assessment Center is housed in a five-story glass and concrete building on NW Second Street in downtown Miami. Back in the mid-Nineties it took police officers up to six hours to search, fingerprint, identify, book, and charge an arrested juvenile. After the facility opened in 1997, cops began dropping off youths at the JAC and leaving in less than fifteen minutes.

These days about 1200 juveniles are brought to the facility every month on charges ranging from murder to petty theft. They are held together in a large, open room for anywhere from four to twenty-four hours, guards say. A handful of Miami-Dade Police officers oversees between six and seven Wackenhut employees, who are charged with processing and supervising the youths until they are picked up — either by the State Department of Juvenile Justice or their parents. The JAC is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Nine current and former Wackenhut employees have admitted to a private investigator gathering evidence for the plaintiff that they were paid for hours not worked at the JAC. Their taped statements describe practices similar to those on Metrorail. (New Times contacted all of those interviewed. Three confirmed the truth of the statements, two had no comment, and four could not be reached.)

The stories of two former project managers at the JAC — Luis Garofalo and Rudolfo Vazquez — reveal how this might have happened.

Vazquez began working as a guard at the JAC soon after it opened and took over as its project manager a year later. In two taped statements, he claims staff shortages were constant. Sometimes, he contends, guards had to work sixteen-hour shifts.

Though all of the guard positions weren't always covered, he alleges he always reported the completion of 920 contract hours. Reporting anything less was not acceptable to management. (This is confirmed in Ben Gilbert's deposition.)

Guards say they were hopeful the staffing and other shortfalls would end in February 2002, when the county approved two vans and salaries for two additional guards. The guards never appeared, and the vans spent the next two years sitting in a company parking lot, bleeding taxpayers of $3200 a month, according to Bair.

In January 2005 the county's Office of the Inspector General seized the facility's time records and Vazquez was fired. Wackenhut assigned Major Bair to look into the allegations. According to his deposition, Bair noted numerous "questionable" things about time sheets at the JAC (correction fluid used on sign-in records). Bair informed his superior but was not told to investigate further.

Vazquez claims he was terminated for committing fraud. But Wackenhut is unclear on this point. "While employed at the JAC, Rudy Vazquez signed-in for, and was paid for, the time he actually worked," the firm maintains in its answer to Trimble's lawsuit. Bair maintains he discovered Vazquez clocked in simultaneously as a JAC supervisor and a county parks and recreation employee.

Luis Garofalo, a former Metrorail supervisor, replaced Vazquez in February 2005. On paper, Garofalo appears to have done his 40-hour-per-week job diligently. During the first week of August 2005, he signed in for 96 hours in a variety of capacities, which a schedule obtained by New Times reflects.

Yet one year after Garofalo's hiring, a guard named Tameeka Allen alleges she discovered paperwork that seemed to show he had worked one of her eight-hour shifts. She says she reported her discovery to Wackenhut's Palm Beach headquarters, which deployed a company investigator to interview the staff.

The investigator questioned four guards at the JAC, who all told him they hadn't seen Garofalo during times he was signed in. "[Officers] don't understand how he can be working all those hours when a lot of times he won't be in for a full shift," a guard, LaSawn Rene Merrick, said in a taped statement taken August 1, 2005. Another guard recalled seeing paperwork that showed Garofalo claiming 40 hours of a vacationing guard's time.

In his December 2005 deposition, Bair asserted that no one at the JAC had been paid for time not worked since he came to oversee the facility in August last year. "Not while I was the supervisor," Bair stated.

Garofalo resigned this past March while under investigation.

Furthermore, Wackenhut never expressly addressed Attorney Vieth's charges that Garofalo had billed the county for false or inflated hours in its answer to the guards' suit, but maintains its overall innocence. "Wackenhut denies that any investigation by [the inspector general] or anyone at Wackenhut revealed that false or inflated hours were billed to the county."

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On January 19, 2006, eleven days after the Miami Herald published an article describing Michelle Trimble's lawsuit, county commissioners asked Wackenhut's Rene Pedrayes to answer the charges. "I guess what was reported in the Herald was actually the allegations of a couple of employees that you had fired?" asked Chairman Carlos Gimenez.

"That's correct," Pedrayes answered. "That's correct."