Jury Finds Florida Ex-Mayor Guilty

For the second time in a month, a South Florida mayor had confidently vowed to beat corruption charges in court. It didn’t take long for jurors to decide that this time around they weren’t buying a politician’s spin. After less than three hours of deliberation Monday, jurors found that ex-Homestead Mayor Steven Bateman broke the law when he took a secret job as a consultant for a health-care company that needed government approval in building a clinic in the city’s downtown.

 

They convicted Bateman, 59, of two felony counts of illegal compensation and one misdemeanor count of illegal lobbying. The decision stunned Bateman and his lawyers.

“I think they got it wrong,” Bateman said afterward. “I don’t know where it went wrong with the felonies.”

The verdict in state court comes less than a month after a federal jury acquitted suspended Miami Lakes Michael Pizzi of accusations he accepted cash from undercover FBI agents in exchange for his support for a city grant application.

The allegations against Pizzi came in an unrelated, more complicated and murky bribery case based on a “sting” operation complete with undercover recordings and cooperating informants. The Bateman case was built on reams of documents and tedious testimony about the inner-workings of city bureaucracy.

The jury’s message was resounding, said Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle.