The Mendacity of Melissa Castro: Part 1

On the shoddiest shell game ever played.

A few weeks ago, I hinted, albeit heavy-handedly, at a forthcoming revelation regarding Dr. Castro’s business interests—one sure to prove even more shameful and incriminating than her Cheney-Halliburton-like ties to a major Live Local Developer.

It all stems from one brazen claim, deployed repeatedly by Dr. Castro over the course of two years, always with that same combination of vehemence, insistence, and over-the-top indignation that is the hallmark of a pathological liar. The claim? That Dr. Castro voluntarily terminated her permit-expediting activities in Coral Gables and that she has absolutely nothing to do with a company bearing her business's name, that’s registered to one of her "former" employees, and that’s currently running an impressive volume of permits through City Hall. Happily enough, the two most explicit iterations of this claim happen to be the two most recent (both clips are slightly different from the ones featured previously):

If looks could kill, that one she gives Lago at the end could sustain an entire genocide. That was in December, by the way. This was in January:

So what, precisely, makes this claim brazen as opposed to merely untrue like just about every other acrid clump of rotten word salad that’s come spewing out of the doctor’s mouth since she Tarzan-swung off of Ariel’s coattails and landed in public office?

Well, it’s a combination of things, namely the preposterousness of the claim itself and the gravity of what it’s designed to conceal.

Absurdity²

Let's start with the preposterousness of the claim itself, which we can illustrate on both a priori and empirical levels. On the a priori level, we have the absolutely laughable notion that Dr. Castro suddenly bequeathed (she's careful never to use the word "sold") to one of her employees a book of business potentially worth millions. Unless the doctor is some kind of undercover philanthropist, I would imagine she would require something in return for what is, by her own admission, her largest client portfolio by far.

But there’s never any mention of a sale, no talk of a windfall. This tracks, though, because where exactly does the employee of a permit-expediting firm come up with the capital to acquire the crown jewel of her boss’ business? Are we to believe she had millions lying around? And why would Dr. Castro accept whatever this employee could scrape together when the Gables operation would have commanded serious interest from established players in the industry—firms that have, in the past, actively pursued acquisitions of exactly this kind? There was no bidding war. No competitive offers. No broker. Just a tidy internal transfer that somehow escaped the notice of everyone who would have gladly paid for it. It all makes precisely zero sense.

Now let’s move to the empirical. If what Dr. Castro says is true—that she has no direct or indirect financial interest in this spinoff company, that there’s no cold equity sitting in reserve waiting to be claimed the moment she leaves office, that it is truly and fully independent as she insists—then perhaps she can explain why M.E.D. Expeditors of Coral Gables uses the same email address as her company, M.E.D. Expediters. Why it used the same phone number, the same Zoom account, the same office. Why it has no website, no IG account, no independent online presence whatsoever.

How, exactly, does a client off the street reach this allegedly independent company? They call the original M.E.D’s number. They send an email using the original M.E.D email address. They walk into its office. Every single point of contact with the outside world is set up to run through the infrastructure of Dr. Castro’s existing operation.

You’d think an independent company would want to demonstrate a modicum of…you know…independence. You might also expect it to strive for even the most basic level of compliance. So you can imagine my surprise (not really) when after reviewing municipal public records, I discovered that this allegedly independent company has failed to obtain a certificate of use and local business tax receipt from the City, both of which are required by law. Note that the original M.E.D Expediters Inc. has both a certificate of use and a business tax receipt:

But M.E.D of Coral Gables? Zip. Zilch. Nada. Which means that M.E.D of Coral Gables, a firm located and doing business in the City since May 2024, has been operating illegally since its inception. And while ignorance of the law is never a valid defense, it's an especially absurd one for a permit-expediting company that lists "licenses" among its areas of expertise:

So how does a company that specializes in helping clients obtain the various licenses they need fail to obtain one of the most basic licenses it needs itself? Are we to believe that the seasoned Ms. Perez, who has made a career out of knowing this stuff better than anyone, really didn’t know she needed a certificate of use and business tax receipt for her new company? Unlikely. What’s far more likely is that this failure to achieve local compliance stemmed from a kind of Freudian understanding that M.E.D of Coral Gables is just a shell company for her boss, the functional equivalent of a D.B.A. She didn’t get a separate license because she didn’t think of it as a separate company.

Nobody did.

But wait, it gets better

While it feels much too generous to characterize the foregoing evidence as circumstantial, technically that’s what it is. But what I’m about to show you now is practically as direct as direct evidence gets. In fact, to be any more direct, I’d need surveillance footage of Dr. Castro literally walking into the building department with an M.E.D hardhat on her head, set of plans under her arm, and a brown paper bag stuffed with cash peeking out the top of her purse.

Late last year, a certain curious resident requested a copy of the recent activity log for the City’s online permitting system, EnerGov. For those unfamiliar, EnerGov is the software platform—built by Tyler Technologies and used by Coral Gables and hundreds of other municipalities—through which contractors, permit expeditors, and property owners submit applications, upload documents, pay fees, and track the status of their permits. To use the system, you must create an individual account with a unique username and password tied to your personal email address. Every action you take—every application submitted, every document uploaded, every status check—is logged and attributed to your specific user account. There is no ambiguity here: when the system records that “Melissa Castro” performed an action, it means that someone logged in with Dr. Castro’s credentials and performed that action. Either Dr. Castro herself, or someone to whom she gave her username and password—which, for the record, would violate standard acceptable use practices and raise its own set of questions about why an elected official is sharing system credentials with third parties.

So what did the activity logs reveal?

Between May 2024 (the month M.E.D. of Coral Gables suddenly materialized to take over Dr. Castro’s Coral Gables permitting business) and September 2025, the user profile belonging to Dr. Castro logged over 500 actions in Energov. Madeline Perez, for her part, logged nearly 3000 entries in the same period. Note that in total, the logs for this period contain over 12 million entries, so my numbers here could be slightly off. Nevertheless, they are most definitely accurate with a rough order of magnitude.

Note, also, that of Dr. Castro’s 500 activity entries, roughly half are what one might consider substantive. By “substantive,” I mean actions that actively move a permit forward, e.g. uploading plans and documents for staff review, changing file statuses to advance permits through the workflow, creating review tasks assigned to City employees, and initiating new permit records. In other words, these are not the digital equivalent of cleaning out one’s desk, but rather the core functions of permit expediting. The very work Dr. Castro swore she had abandoned. I’ve included a table of these substantive entries at the end of this post for those who wish to see for themselves.

So what’s the innocent explanation for this? The short answer is there isn’t one. This can’t be hand-waved away as mere housekeeping or some kind of ridiculously drawn out withdrawal (1.5 years and counting) from the system. Most of Dr. Castro’s actions increase rather than decrease her entanglement with permit workflows.

The best she can do is claim that none of the entries were actually her, and that this is evidence of someone else using her system credentials to access the system under her name. But this defense, such as it is, collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

First, consider who that “someone else” would have to be. Madeline Perez? She has her own EnerGov account, as evidenced by the nearly 3,000 entries logged under her own name during this same period. She doesn’t need to borrow anyone’s credentials. And creating a new user profile in EnerGov is trivially easy; it’s a self-service registration that takes minutes. Any permit expeditor working in the system is expected to have their own account, not just for convenience, but for basic security, accountability, and audit trail integrity. The whole point of individual user accounts is to ensure that actions can be attributed to the person who performed them.

Second, consider the security implications. Dr. Castro is a sitting elected official. If she is sharing her login credentials with third parties and allowing others to perform official actions in municipal systems under her identity, that is a serious breach of standard acceptable use practices. It creates obvious liability exposure, undermines system integrity, and raises immediate questions about who else has access to her credentials and what else they might be doing with them.

Third, consider the sheer illogic of it all. Dr. Castro’s entire defense rests on the premise that she has completely disassociated herself from Coral Gables permitting. She claims M.E.D. of Coral Gables is an independent company with no connection to her. And yet we’re supposed to believe that this independent company—run by her “former” employee—is conducting business using Dr. Castro’s personal account credentials? If the goal was separation, why would anyone involved choose the one method guaranteed to create a documented trail linking every action back to Dr. Castro personally? It’s like staging your own disappearance but continuing to use your own credit card.

Also, what kind of firewall allows two separate and independent companies to work on the same exact permit?

And so, once again, we find ourselves facing a familiar dilemma when trying to make sense of Dr. Castro's conduct. We must choose between two unflattering explanations, to wit: that she is irredeemably dishonest, or irredeemably incompetent. Either she has been lying with such brazenness that she deserves to be run out of office for the contempt, or she is so staggeringly incompetent that she deserves to be run out of office for the stupidity. Either way, she should be run out of office.

As I often say, pick your poison.

By the way, in my experience, when someone appears to be both dishonest and incompetent, it’s usually because that’s exactly what they are—both. The dishonesty creates the need for a cover story; the incompetence ensures it’s a bad one.

Those teeth though

Obviously, this is a massive political problem for Dr. Castro. And some of you, particularly those who have been following this story over the years, are likely to think that’s all it is: a political problem. I say that because you probably recall how Dr. Castro, shortly after getting elected, sought an advisory opinion from the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust (COE) regarding her permit-expediting business—specifically, whether she could continue doing business in Coral Gables while serving as an elected official with material power and influence over the very building department with which her company regularly interfaces. And you probably recall that after a year of dithering and flip-flopping, the COE ultimately opined that Dr. Castro and her employees could continue to expedite permits in the Gables so long as they didn’t actually expedite permits.

Fine, I paraphrased that last part. But in practical effect, that’s precisely what the COE’s guidance amounted to. Here is the key passage from the opinion:

[A]n official and his or her private company employees may represent clients engaging with the official’s city, as long as the contacts or representation are limited to ministerial matters or simple informational requests. If the contacts or representation involve advocacy on the part of the official or the employees and requires responsive decision-making or discretionary action by a city official, board member, or employee, then a prohibited conflict of interest may be found.

Strictly speaking, the COE’s opinion allowed Dr. Castro to have her cake and eat it too. She could remain the owner and CEO of M.E.D. Expediters, Inc., continue operating her permit-expediting business in Coral Gables, and serve as a City Commissioner all at the same time. She simply had to ensure that her company’s Coral Gables work stayed on the ministerial side of the line, however impractical that may be.

Which raises an obvious question: if divesting from her Coral Gables operations was never actually required, why did Dr. Castro do it? Why create M.E.D. of Coral Gables, LLC and hand it off to a “former” employee? Why go through the trouble of establishing a nominally independent company to handle the Gables work?

The answer, ostensibly, was optics. A Caesar’s-wife gesture. By publicly severing ties with Coral Gables permitting altogether—rather than merely tiptoeing around the discretionary line—Dr. Castro could present herself as going above and beyond what ethics required. She could show that she wasn't just compliant, but unimpeachable; that there were no conflicts, real or perceived. No questions, no ambiguity, no lingering doubts.

Except, of course, that none of it was true. The separation, it would seem, was a complete fiction. And the gesture designed to eliminate the appearance of impropriety has instead produced a record of sustained, documented, and now undeniable impropriety. In other words, this scandal has teeth, and several rows of them at that.

How so? That’s a question we’ll explore in part 2…