The Mess Left Behind by Dirty Cops

Six years after investigators first realized corrupt Biscayne Park cops were framing innocent people – many of them Black – public defenders and prosecutors are still working to clear the false charges from the victims’ court records.

“We’ve already dealt with about 60 felony cases,” said Miami-Dade County Public Defender Carlos Martinez, who calls the behavior of the Biscayne Park cops “bone-chilling.”

The oldest of those cases goes back to 2010. Martinez’ office is now starting to deal with probable false misdemeanor charges, which “probably are closer to 800,” he said. “And frankly there are problems on multiple levels with those.”

Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said her office is “making this a top priority. … This was so corrupt, and so intolerable and so frightening at this time in our history.”

Whether a person was eventually convicted or the charges were dismissed, the mark of an arrest “has lifelong consequences,” said Martinez, including a stain any time the person applies for a job.

“Our focus was on our clients,” Martinez said, “but I couldn’t ignore all the other atrocities. On one arrest log, 22 people in this tiny town on one day were arrested for trespassing on the railroad tracks – and 21 of the 22 were Black.”

On top of that, there were 22,000 traffic tickets meted out over four years in this town of 3,100 people – tickets written by a police force of 11 full-time officers. Martinez’ staff has examined a sample of those and found that “most of them were bogus.”

Martinez figures that more than a few of those ticketed had their licenses suspended because they didn’t show up in court or pay their fines, but with traffic tickets, “there are no remedies. That’s not the public defender’s work, not the state attorney’s work.”

Even without traffic tickets, the amount of work to clean up the records has been stunning. Scott Dunn, Fernandez Rundle’s deputy chief assistant dealing with the problem, said prosecutors are “well into the hundreds of hours of work” to correct faulty records, and public defenders are likely to have spent considerably more time on trying to clean the mess up.

How It All Began

For years, Biscayne Park prided itself on being tough on those who drove through it. The village, tucked between North Miami and Miami Shores, even had road signs warning “Don’t Even Think About Speeding.”

About 10 years ago, the village hired Raimundo Atesiano as an officer even though he had been fired by Sunny Isles Beach for falsifying a police report.

Atesiano proved to be an unusually aggressive officer. In 2011, he was named Florida Officer of the Year for small departments by the Florida Police Chiefs Association. That same year, the village praised him for making 305 arrests and writing 2,236 traffic tickets.

In 2013, Atesiano became chief. That year, he boasted that his men had made arrests for every home burglary in the village.

The next year, the village manager received anonymous letters from officers who accused Atesiano of asking them to target Black men with criminal records to make the department’s arrest rate look good. After a brief, unpublicized investigation, he resigned.

Soon William Saladrigas of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Trenton Reichling of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office were examining the Biscayne Park’s arrest records. They soon found odd patterns – such as a man who allegedly confessed in a single day to committing four burglaries. Cops claimed he voluntarily showed officers where he had committed each of them.

The village’s demographics are 43% white non-Hispanic, 35% Hispanic and 17% Black, but North Miami to the north and an unincorporated area to the east, on the other side of the tracks, have significant Black populations. Many of those who drive through the village are Black, and investigators found that Black men and women tended to be targeted, especially for house burglaries and car thefts.

The feds were brought in, on the theory that the best legal remedy was to charge the cops with violating the victims’ civil rights. In July 2018, ex-chief Atesiano and ex-officers Charlie Dayoub and Raul Fernandez were charged in federal court. Ex-officer Guillermo Ravelo was also ultimately charged.

Martinez said he first learned about the scandal by reading about it in the Miami Herald.

“I immediately looked at our database: How far and deep did this go?”

Pretty damn deep, as it turned out.

False Claims & Shattered Lives

The indictment identified one victim as “T.D.” – who was 16 years old and living with his mother in Biscayne Park. He was charged in 2013 with four burglaries despite the lack of any evidence that he had committed them. The victim later revealed his name, Timothe Dolcine, in a lawsuit that charged the village and the cops with conduct that was “racially motivated, and was repeatedly and intentionally directed towards people of African descent due to the policy of the Village.”

Another case involved Erasmus Banmah, who Ravelo claimed had led him to five locations where he supposedly confessed to breaking into cars.

Dolcine and Banmah were not convicted. The corrupt cops often lost interest in their cases after making their arrests and didn’t show up to testify at court proceedings.

Clarens Desrouleaux met a different fate. He was arrested in 2013 after officers claimed he had confessed to breaking into several houses. The Haitian-born Desrouleaux had permanent resident status, but he had several previous convictions on his record relating to drugs and nonviolent crimes. If convicted, he could have been sentenced to decades in jail as a habitual felon, and so he agreed in a plea deal to a five-year sentence. He served four and then was deported to Haiti in 2017 – before Martinez became aware of the case.

All four Biscayne Park officers ended up pleading guilty. Atesiano received the longest sentence – three years. That was two years less than the falsely charged Desrouleaux was given.

Righting the Wrongs

In trying to clean up the records, Dunn said the easiest cases to resolve were those that depended on the statements of the convicted officers.

Prosecutors reviewed 48 cases raised by the public defender’s office. One case was withdrawn by mutual consent where there was strong evidence of the person’s guilt. Of the 47 remaining, prosecutors agreed to vacate the charges in 36 of those cases.

Dunn said prosecutors have already looked at 14 misdemeanor cases and vacated six.

“A lot of those we did not vacate were because they didn’t involve one of the four federally convicted officers,” he said.

There were another 26 cases involving bench warrants – meaning the charged person didn’t show up in court for trial – and Fernandez Rundle’s office has vacated quite a few of those.

Going forward, one point of contention is likely to be that Martinez’ staff research has shown that it wasn’t just the convicted cops who were making bad arrests, especially on the misdemeanors.

Martinez believes that all the charges of trespassing on the rail tracks should have never happened: There are few through-streets in the track area and people were simply taking short cuts to save themselves long walks.

For the misdemeanors, many of those charged didn’t hire attorneys. That was often the case when officers stopped men in pickups with, say, a bucket of paint in the back.

“These dirty cops were stopping them for having no signage on their vehicle,” said Martinez.

A county ordinance requires companies to put signs on their vehicles with their names and phone numbers. But that law was not intended to penalize workers going to and from jobs.

“Actually, they violated no law,” said Martinez, but most “were too poor” to hire an attorney, who could have easily gotten the charge dropped.

As it was, many drivers went to court, and the judge often offered to nolle pross – drop the charge – on condition the driver placed signage on their vehicle. That often cost $200 to $250, as well as a second trip to court to prove compliance.

“These people were harmed with the arrest, which they still have by the way,” says Martinez, “but they also had to spend money.”

A Rehabilitated Police Department

Fernandez Rundle says many of these cases may not be correctable. In a lot of the files, there is representation by counsel noted. In some cases, the files are old and have likely been destroyed.

“The way we left it with Carlos is that he will get that list [of cases] together and he will then forward it,” said Fernandez Rundle. Her staff will then figure out “the most efficient and effective way to handle it.”

At least in two cases, victims appear to have gotten financial compensation for their suffering. Attorneys for Dolcine and Desrouleaux filed lawsuits against the cops and the village. Court records indicate that, after negotiations, the victims dropped the lawsuits, which is usually an indication that a settlement was reached.

Meanwhile, Biscayne Park is still trying to overcome the aftermath of its dirty cops.

In 2018, the village hired Luis Cabrera as police chief. Cabrera, a City of Miami veteran who had risen to deputy chief during his 30 years there, was astounded at the village’s past under Atesiano. Crime statistics showed that in 2013 alone, village officers had made 808 arrests – about one for every four village residents. That was five times the overall rate in the county.

“When I looked at it, it made me sick to my stomach,” Cabrera said.

In 2019, the first full year under Cabrera, village officers made 47 arrests – about 5% the rate of the now convicted Atesiano.

“We split the village in half,” said Cabrera, with officers patrolling two zones, doubling the street presence. “We’re now a lot safer without making those ridiculous numbers of arrests.”