Operation Defamation: The Smoking Pipe

Note from Aesop: I realize most of you don’t care enough about Vince Lago’s settled defamation suit against Actualidad Media Group to want to slog through one last lengthy dissertation on it. Which is why I’ve led with the excerpt above—it’s my hook, my De Niro getting blown up in his car in the opening scene of Casino, my way of telling you to stick with this story because once you learn the likely identity of the pipe wielding maniac described above and the position of public trust he currently holds, you’ll understand why this story matters.

And, yes, this post is lengthy because it has to be. So here’s an executive summary for those of you with TikTok brain:

• Karl Ross, the COE investigator whose botched work helped destroy the Díaz de la Portilla bribery case, sent a suspicious “High Importance” email requesting a MUIR number to “investigate” Lago by watching a public YouTube video—just 10 days before Actualidad’s broadcast.

• That internal COE email mysteriously ended up in Actualidad’s hands despite never being produced in response to Lago’s public records request to the COE itself.

• Evidence suggests Ross may have been one of Actualidad’s “confidential sources,” fitting the description of a government official without direct Coral Gables dealings but positioned to confirm (incorrectly) COE investigations.

• After a judge ordered Actualidad to reveal their confidential sources, the company suddenly and dramatically increased their settlement offer to Lago rather than risk disclosure.

• Karl Ross continues to draw a taxpayer-funded salary as a Miami-Dade ethics investigator despite this documented pattern of investigative failures and alleged misconduct.

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In Part One, I revealed how the rumor of a non-existent ethics investigation at the heart of Lago’s defamation suit was hardly sloppy journalism, but rather the centerpiece of a vicious and coordinated smear campaign involving, among others, Ariel Fernandez. Here in Part Two, we’ll explore just how vicious and coordinated that campaign was.

By way of recap: in February 2023, the hosts of Contacto Directo, an AM1040 talk-radio show owned by Actualidad Media Group, reported that Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago was under an active Commission on Ethics (COE) investigation for submitting a false affidavit regarding conflicts in Little Gables. Not only was this reporting inaccurate, it was demonstrably contrived. The hosts opened the segment with studied ambiguity, using language like “some are concerned” so as to suggest the story is mere scuttlebutt making the rounds, which conveniently justified bringing on then-commissioner candidate Ariel Fernandez, who they claim had been “following” the story, to provide background.

Yet they never disclosed to their audience that Ariel was running for office against a Lago-endorsed opponent. They offered no explanation for who Ariel was, why he possessed insider knowledge about an ethics matter, or why their audience should trust him. They never explained what Ariel said that caused the hosts to start throat-slashing at their producer and abruptly end the interview mid-segment—a reaction that betrayed the premise that this was fresh rumor the hosts had just stumbled upon.

But here’s where things truly get interesting. Nowhere in the segment did the hosts mention any confidential informants, any research, or any of the diligent corroboration they would later claim they’d performed before airing the story. Which leads one to ask: if they’d actually done their journalistic due diligence with multiple vetted sources, why present it as gossip they needed Ariel to decode? Why not set the proper tone and explain why the information they were about to reveal should be trusted?

Probably because the role of ‘innocent messenger’ is inherently less risky than ‘determined investigator.’ If you’re just reporting what you heard, if you’re ignorant of the details and unfamiliar with the particulars, you’re ostensibly insulated from liability. You’re merely facilitating a conversation, bringing in the real experts to explain things you yourself barely understand. It’s defensible logic, so long as no one bothers to look too closely.

But someone did look closely, namely Lago, in the form of a defamation suit that painted Actualidad into a legal corner by turning the innocent messenger posture into a potential liability. That’s because defamation liability can stem not just from actual malice but from negligence, from failing to exercise reasonable care in verifying information. Actualidad, therefore, was in a pickle. Sticking with the ‘fresh rumor we knew little about’ narrative would’ve created a viable negligence angle. In other words, ‘we didn’t know enough but reported it anyway’ is fertile soil for a defamation claim.

So they pivoted hard, first by claiming they based their reporting on existing coverage by none other than Elaine De Valle of Political Cortadito. But Lago’s team pointed out a small problem with that: the Political Cortadito post that Actualidad claimed it relied on was actually published on March 3rd, a week after the radio segment aired. Oopsie!

Hence the pivot on top of the pivot to something slightly more plausible, something that didn’t involve time travel, i.e. Actualidad’s claim that their host learned about the faux ethics investigation from not one but two “confidential sources” whom they’d carefully vetted in advance. We’ll call this the “diligence defense.”

This is all dauntingly convoluted, I know, but worth untangling nonetheless. Because thanks to discovery, we now have a much clearer picture of what Actualidad knew, when they knew it, and a significantly narrower range of suspects who might have fed it to them.

Confidence men

The most candid articulation of the diligence defense comes from co-defendant Roberto Rodriguez-Tejera’s deposition. Per Rodriguez-Tejera’s sworn testimony, he first learned of the alleged ethics investigation from a confidential source who had “direct dealings with the City of Coral Gables,” then corroborated this information with a second confidential source who did not have direct dealings with Coral Gables but was nonetheless “very well informed of things that transpired in the City.”

So we have two sources, supposedly. One who informs Rodriguez-Tejera of the alleged investigation and another who corroborates it. Lago’s team is 99.9% certain the first source is Coral Gables Fire Union president and close friend of Rodriguez-Tejera, David Perez.

It certainly tracks. Perez, who was once characterized by the Miami Herald as Alex Penelas’ “protégé,” is every bit the political animal, one known for participating in a string of anti-Lago hit jobs over the years. As a matter of fact, a high-profile political operative hired to assist the Lago recall campaign claims Perez played a prominent role in that effort. What’s more, the ethics investigation smear was tied to the Little Gables annexation initiative, a policy matter Perez actively and aggressively opposed. And as fire union president, Perez fits Rodriguez-Tejera’s description perfectly. He certainly has “direct dealings with the City of Coral Gables.”

However, it’s Rodriguez-Tejera’s characterization of the second source—the corroborator—that’s most interesting. He describes this source in the present tense as a government official, and when Lago’s attorney asks the witness to clarify whether this source was an active government official at the time the supposed corroboration occurred, Rodriguez-Tejera’s attorney jumps in and instructs his client not to answer.

But why? Well, probably because answering that question invariably narrows an already narrow list of subjects. There are only so many people in a position to corroborate, albeit incorrectly, the rumor of an ethics investigation. Even fewer have a large enough axe to grind against Lago to serve as a source for a partisan bomb thrower like Rodriguez-Tejera. And fewer still are “government officials.”

In fact, I can only think of two. One is Ariel Fernandez, who for well over a decade seemed to have the COE on speed dial. Some at the COE used to joke about Ariel “keeping them in business”—at least back when ethics complaints could be filed anonymously and on mere hearsay. Now that complaints require a real name and must be based on firsthand knowledge, the COE’s caseload has essentially evaporated. I believe they issued only one opinion for all of 2024. In any event, as a “citizen journalist” with contacts at the COE, one could easily see Ariel stepping up to corroborate the bogus rumor of an ethics investigation. And as a current government official, he fits one of Rodriguez-Tejera’s descriptions of the second source.

The problem is, he doesn’t fit the other description. Rodriguez-Tejera claims the second source does not have direct dealings with Coral Gables. If we assume he was being truthful about that detail, we have to rule Ariel out as the second source. My gut tells me this is correct, that Ariel wasn’t relied upon as a source at all but served merely as the public-facing cutout for the operation, the person brought on air to legitimize information he’d received from someone else.

So if not Ariel, then who? Who fits the description of a government official who doesn’t have direct dealings with the Gables but is nevertheless in a position to confirm or deny COE investigations?

Who’s the Ross?

The way I see it, there’s one person who fits the bill. A government official indeed—one whose investigative handiwork has lately drawn the kind of scrutiny that ends careers. An official accused in court filings of coordinating witness testimony, misrepresenting evidence, and admitting under oath to “limited familiarity with the very laws” he was charged with enforcing. An official whose casework collapsed so spectacularly that a Miami-Dade circuit judge remarked there was “more smoke, and possibly fire” to his misconduct than anyone had realized.

That official is Karl Ross, a former Miami Herald local government reporter who became an investigator for the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics.

Ross has become something of a local legend, but definitely the bad kind. His disastrous investigative work helped ruin the Alex Díaz de la Portilla bribery prosecution, a case that everyone, the Miami Herald included, once considered a slam-dunk.

According to court filings cited by the Herald, defense attorneys accused Ross of collaborating with a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent to synchronize their depositions in an attempt to fortify the corruption case. When questioned about the interaction, Ross claimed he had no recollection of discussing his deposition with the other investigator. Yet, that investigator later testified under oath that the two had in fact spoken about the case for an hour, prompting the judge to order Ross to cease communications with state witnesses and for prosecutors to turn over his electronic records.

Prosecutors ultimately acknowledged that “substantial follow-up investigation revealed the foundation of this entire case was misguided and buttressed by unverified information.” The charges collapsed, the community watched in disbelief, and Ross’s credibility went down the tubes. Here’s Assistant State Attorney Kayla Bramnick in her own words, via the State Attorney’s office’s close out memo of the Diaz De La Portilla matter:

At this point, you may be thinking: “All right, Aesop, this is all very damning—but what reason do we have to believe that an ethically compromised ethics investigator with a history of abusing his authority to go after local Republican officials would do something as unthinkable as abusing his authority to go after...another local Republican official? What makes you think Ross has anything to do with the false rumor of a Lago ethics investigation?”

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this:

Gee, let’s see how many red flags we can spot in this nasty little specimen of bureaucratic tradecraft that just so happened to end up in the hands of Actualidad Media.

First, there’s the opening line, which references a meeting with “concerned individuals.” Concerned about what, exactly? How many people do you suppose were even aware of this obscure conflict-of-interest affidavit—much less the fine-print definitions buried in it—back in early 2023, before the radio station ever launched the story? Who, apart from political hitmen like Ariel Fernandez and David Perez, would’ve had either the interest or the wherewithal to dig something like that up and hand-deliver it to the COE?

Second, consider the request itself. You have an ethics investigator sending an email marked “High Importance” to his superiors, asking for something called an MUIR number—short for “Matter Under Initial Review.” Ross explains that the number is necessary in order to “proceed.” But proceed with what, exactly?

Look closely at what he describes. He plans to “review the available evidence, watch the meeting video for the Aug. 22, 2022 commission meeting, and research which definition of immediate family was in effect.” In essence, he was asking for the bureaucratic equivalent of a case file number so that he could log onto YouTube, watch a publicly available video, and read a publicly available document. In other words, he sent an urgent email to his superiors requesting permission to do what most people do to kill time when in the restroom.

An artist’s representation of the patented Karl Ross investigative technique.

One could understand Ross requesting a MUIR number if he intended to subpoena witnesses or take sworn testimony. But to watch a YouTube video? To review a publicly available document that literally anyone could obtain? That’s the sort of thing any investigator worth his salt does before escalating a matter. The fact that Ross felt compelled to request an official MUIR number just to watch a public meeting recording screams manufactured paper trail; it was his way of creating the basis for what would later become the claim that Vince Lago was “under investigation” by the COE. And let’s face it, generating a document that could later be leaked to launch a news story is exactly the kind of stunt you’d expect from someone with a reporter’s instincts.

Finally, there’s the date of the request itself: February 17, 2023—barely ten days before Rodriguez-Tejera broke the story. Talk about an efficient leak. But more importantly, how does an entirely internal COE email even make its way into the hands of a confidential source, then a talk-radio host, all within a little more than a week? It couldn’t have been through a legitimate public-records request. The source would first have had to learn about the email, file a request, receive the records, leak the document to Rodriguez-Tejera, who would then need to corroborate it with a second source, schedule Ariel’s appearance, and finally air the segment…all in ten days.

Let me tell you from experience, agencies like the COE don’t fulfill public records requests in ten weeks much less in ten days. So, yeah, that didn’t happen.

No that email had to be deliberately leaked to Actualidad by someone with knowledge of it, i.e. one of the three people on that chain: Radia Turay, Jose Arrojo, or Karl Ross. Granted, Turay was quick to reply with both a MUIR number for Ross and a little friendly advice on how to gin up the potential charges. But who are we kidding? It shouldn’t be much of a mystery when the entire chain of events begins with an inexplicable, urgent request from a guy who’s infamous for allegedly playing fast and loose with evidence whenever there’s a Republican in his sights.

Oh, and one more interesting thing about that email: it was obtained by Lago’s legal team from Actualidad through the discovery process—not from the COE. (Discovery, for the uninitiated, is the part of litigation where both sides exchange evidence.) Why does that matter? Because long before requesting discovery from Actualidad, Lago’s team filed a public-records request with the COE for all documents related to the matter—a request to which the Ross email was clearly responsive.

Yet the COE never provided it. The very document that would have gutted Actualidad’s defense by proving the COE never initiated a formal investigation—and that its own rogue investigator was knee-deep in the whole affair—somehow got left out of the response to Lago’s public record request. Meanwhile, Actualidad was able to obtain the very same record directly from the COE.

Talk about violating Florida’s public-records law.

The inmate running the asylum

As I reported in Part One, Lago is said to have received a hefty payout from Actualidad through the settlement. It’s also said that this settlement represented a dramatic about-face by Actualidad, which had been lowballing Lago right up until the eleventh hour. That, of course, leads one to wonder: what exactly happened at the eleventh hour that convinced Actualidad to suddenly start singing a different tune?

Allow me to submit to you that it was this, something you likely missed if you’ve been foolishly relying on paid hacks like Elaine De Valle for your political news:

That’s a court order from the presiding judge commanding Actualidad to reveal the identities of its confidential sources. Granted, Actualidad had an appeal pending on the order, but their odds of success were far from stellar. If not for the steep cost of pursuing that appeal—juxtaposed with a massive increase in Actualidad’s settlement offer—I imagine (and certainly hope) Lago would have stayed the course just to force the disclosure of those sources.

I urge you to remember this the next time idiot bloggers insist that Lago accepted Actualidad’s sudden and massively increased settlement offer, made right after they got hit with this whopper of an order, because he was losing the case. Because 10X-ing your settlement offer is definitely what you do when you’re a defendant who is “about to win” a defamation lawsuit.

I mention this because, as you can see, things were getting interesting in the run-up to the settlement. But it wasn’t only Actualidad feeling the heat. It’s hard to imagine Rodriguez-Tejera’s confidential sources sleeping soundly knowing they were one appeal away from being outed. One can only imagine the mind-numbing stress they were under.

Which brings us back to where we began: the pipe-wielding psycho who ran Lago’s process server off a public sidewalk. Turns out, that process server was delivering a subpoena for a routine deposition to none other than Karl Ross. As you’ll see from the server’s complete, verified return of service below—a document containing statements made under penalty of perjury—the server doesn’t explicitly confirm that it was Ross who came after her. But really, who else could it have been? Why would anyone but Karl Ross come out of a car parked in his own driveway and threaten a process server delivering a subpoena issued to, um, Karl Ross?

Of course, the pipe-wielding was merely the culmination of an extremely unsettling encounter. Read the full account and you’ll see how that same man allegedly shadowed a female process server from a locked-gate property to a Publix parking lot, refused to identify himself, warned her that “something bad would happen” if she came back, circled her car while videotaping her, then reappeared behind his gate to hurl threats while brandishing what she described as a large hammer, pipe, or similar weapon—all of it captured in a sworn return of service under penalty of perjury.

Even in the highly unlikely event that the man from that encounter wasn’t Ross (but, come on—it has to be), this disturbing sequence of events nonetheless took place while a simple subpoena duces tecum was being delivered to his home.

Which leads me to ask what may be a stupid question: how the hell is this guy still employed by the COE? How is someone like this charged with upholding and enforcing, of all things, the rules of ethics? At best, he’s a walking catastrophe of an investigator; a man who managed to blunder away a high-profile bribery case through sheer malfeasance; a man whose reputation as a fire-breathing partisan precedes him; a man who seems to believe his duty is not to uphold the county’s ethics code, but to embark, with almost religious fervor, on a permanent crusade to eliminate those who espouse what he deems an unacceptable ideology.

At worst, he’s all of that—and irredeemably corrupt on top of it.

Life isn’t a movie

I genuinely believe one of the most under-appreciated challenges of modern life is the extent to which our understanding of the world is shaped, often entirely, by film and television. Most of us have never witnessed a gunfight, a plane crash, or the inside of a CIA interrogation room. Yet we all carry vivid mental images of each, because we’ve seen them, or stylized versions of them, hundreds of times on screen.

It’s why you’ll occasionally hear people insist, with a straight face, that a police officer should have simply “shot the suspect in the leg,” as if that were remotely plausible in a real-world confrontation. Their brains don’t recognize how fantastical that notion is, because they’ve watched TV cops pull it off hundreds of times.

It also affects how we judge people, through what I call “central casting brain.” We tend to ascribe to real people the characteristics of the fictional people they resemble. For example, if I ask you to picture in your mind the most elite and deadly special forces operator on the face of the earth, like the kind of guy the military sends in to carry out the toughest and most sensitive missions, most of you will picture someone like this:

This is movie star Cole Hauser, a very handsome actor.

When in reality, he looks like this:

This is Sergeant Major Mike Vining, one of the first members of Delta Force and one of the most lethal men who ever lived.

Central casting brain works to the distinct disadvantage of guys like Vince Lago. He’s a youngish Latino guy with tightly cropped hair, a tailored Canali suit, an expensive watch, an athletic build, and the self-assured demeanor of someone who’s actually earned his success. In other words, he looks like he just stepped off the set of a modern film about Wall Street corruption or mobbed-up city hall intrigue. To our media-addled brains, he looks like the guy who cheats and pilfers, the guy who has it all and must have stepped on people to get there.

But real life seldom mirrors the screen. Just as guys who look like Johnny Depp rarely turn out to be pirates, guys who look like Vince Lago rarely turn out to be corrupt public officials. In reality, it’s usually the goody-two-shoes types who are the real grifters—the nondescript pencil pushers in the cheap suits driving Ford Explorers, the ones cooking up fake investigations, fudging audit numbers, and leaking bogus stories to equally bogus “journalists.” More often than not, it’s the performative, middle-aged Bible thumper with the secret strip-club habit. It’s the portly Eddie Haskell-meets-Honest Abe politician with the big belly laugh who turns out to be the meanest, most dishonest, most ruthlessly Machiavellian and law-breaking son of a bitch in the room.

The great irony of the fake ethics-investigation story is that it did, in fact, expose profound corruption. Just not on the part of Vince Lago. The rot lies with those who cooked the whole thing up. That a moron like Ariel Fernandez (and probably David Perez) would be found at the center of yet another half-baked political hit job on Lago is as dog-bites-man as stories get. The real revelation here is how deep the corruption appears to run, how even the institutions we’re told are sacred and impartial can become instruments of political vengeance.

Think about what we’ve just walked through. It starts with a mysterious “meeting of concerned individuals,” where someone dredges up an obscure conflict-of-interest affidavit that no normal person would even know existed. Shortly thereafter, Karl Ross—an ethics investigator with a history of partisan zeal—fires off an urgent “High Importance” email to his superiors asking for a case number so he can “review evidence” that consists of nothing more than a public YouTube video. That email, a document that should have remained internal, somehow finds its way into the hands of Actualidad Media.

Then, as if by magic, Ariel Fernandez, who was running against a Lago-endorsed candidate, shows up on the air to lend the story a patina of legitimacy. The hosts claim they’re merely repeating rumors that “some are concerned,” as though they were ignorantly engaging with mere scuttlebutt. When that narrative starts to crumble, Actualidad pivots, insisting their story was based on blog posts by Elaine De Valle, posts that, inconveniently, were published a week after the broadcast aired. Caught in that temporal impossibility, they pivot again, this time claiming they relied on two confidential sources whose identities they refuse to reveal.

Meanwhile, the COE, an agency supposedly devoted to transparency, fails to produce the Ross email in response to a lawful public-records request, even though Actualidad somehow obtained it directly from them. And when Lago’s legal team finally serves Ross with a subpoena to explain himself, the process server reports being followed, threatened, and menaced with a metal pipe by a man who circumstances suggest is Ross, who despite all this, apparently continues drawing a taxpayer-funded paycheck.

Alas, life is not a movie. It’s much too absurd.

The great irony of Lago’s defamation suit is that it exposed the rot our increasingly toothless institutions seem reluctant to address. Not through some grand jury investigation or blue-ribbon panel, but through slow grinding legal mechanics, namely subpoenas, depositions, and document requests. Now the question is whether anyone with actual authority gives a damn. Because if Karl Ross can orchestrate a coordinated smear campaign using his government position, then threaten a process server with a metal pipe, and still show up to work the next day enforcing “ethics,” then the entire premise of institutional oversight in local politics is a sick joke. Someone up the food chain needs to act, and soon, before what little remains of the public’s trust vanishes for good.