They didn’t stop there.
Detectives outfitted a cooperating conspirator’s car with a hidden video camera, capturing Lopez accepting cash in an alleged scheme to peddle sensitive information to companies bidding for city contracts. Prosecutors later flipped Lopez’s wife against him — at his upcoming corruption trial, she is expected to testify to helping him launder the ill-gotten money. The aggressive investigation is a model the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office aims to replicate with a new public corruption task force, one intended to cast a wider net on crimes against taxpayers across the county.
The formation of the task force comes nearly one year after what was once the largest police anti-corruption unit in the county, run by Miami-Dade police, was gutted in an money-saving reorganization. The budget-crunched county sent four detectives to a federal anti-corruption task force but the bureau’s breakup also sharply reduced scrutiny of public sector crime.
“We had to really regroup, restructure ourselves, rebuild ourselves,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle said. “We went to the various involved municipalities and said, ‘You need to help us. We need the manpower, the staff, the ability to go out and conduct these proactive investigations.’ ”
