Former Internal Affairs director says chief pressured him to fire controversial cop
The man appointed to run Internal Affairs during former Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo’s tumultuous six-month term claims he was reassigned after the new chief ordered him to back the firing of the city’s most controversial cop.
In a letter sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Juan Antonio Gonzalez and Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Commander Brandon Lanier said he conducted two investigations of Capt. Javier Ortiz, a former police union president with a long history of controversies — but cleared him, mainly because in both instances the statute of limitations had expired.
Lanier claims Miami Police Chief Manuel Morales had told him “heads will roll in IA” if the department recommended anything less than termination for Ortiz. Lanier, who now commands the Overtown district, called the chief’s orders “illegal, unethical and corrupt.”
Lanier claims the chief first ordered him to recommend suspending Ortiz in October, just as Morales became chief — but long before two investigations into Ortiz were concluded. He complied with the order. Ortiz, who remains suspended, was leading traffic enforcement at the time.
In January, Morales moved Lanier and also ordered a new Internal Affairs investigation into how Lanier himself handled controversial investigations during Acevedo’s tenure. Several of those probes paved the way for the firing of the highest ranking couple in the department and the demotion of several majors, the chief said.
“This is the most unethical thing I’ve ever experienced,” Lanier wrote in the four-page memo, which was also sent to City Attorney Victoria Méndez and City Manager Art Noriega.
Morales disputed Lanier’s claim that he ordered Ortiz fired, saying he’s had witnesses each time he’s addressed the commander and that since being named chief, he has never met with him one-on-one.
“I absolutely did not make that statement,” Morales told the Herald. “But I take any allegations seriously, especially ones against me.”
Morales also denied Lanier’s request for a hearing on the new investigation of his tenure at IA, a decision that Lanier complained violated his rights as an officer.
One of the investigations led by Lanier and questioned by Morales led to the firing of Ron and Nerly Papier, the highest-ranking couple in the Miami Police Department. Nerly Papier crashed her city-issued
SUV into a curb and blew out two tires on the way to work one morning. Ron Papier was the city’s acting chief at the time. Nerly Papier commanded the Little Havana district. Acevedo said he fired them for not following the proper chain of command and misleading investigators during a probe into the accident.
In November, less than two months before Lanier was reassigned, Ron Papier sent a 16-page complaint to the city’s Civilian Investigative Panel, criticizing Lanier’s move to have him terminated. In the memo to the civilian panel that investigates police complaints, Ron Papier said Lanier, Acevedo and IA investigator Wanda JeanBaptiste knowingly made false and misleading statements in the investigation that led to the couple’s dismissal. It also accused the trio of committing perjury and official misconduct.
“The so-called ‘conclusions’ reached by ‘investigators’ in their case are at best, suspect and at worst, seemingly fabricated to facilitate a termination, regardless of what the truth is,” Papier wrote.
In December, Morales reappointed the Papiers and the other officers who had been demoted by Acevedo.
Acevedo, who was fired last October after failed reform measures and a pair of contentious commission chamber hearings, sued the city in January in federal court, claiming his First Amendment rights had been violated for blowing the whistle on corruption and wrongdoing at City Hall.
The incidents that led to Lanier’s reassignment actually began three days before Acevedo was sworn in as police chief and while he was addressing many of his troops for the first time. Nerly crashed the SUV on April 2, 2021, and the couple were suspended without explanation only two days later. Ron Papier had run IA for more than a decade. It was a department Acevedo expressed a desire to take over long before his swearing-in.
Once the Papiers were out of the picture, Acevedo was expected to deal with one of the department’s biggest headaches: Capt. Ortiz, a veteran and former police union president who had come under fire for a string of racist outbursts and for findings from an FDLE report in which he stood accused of several incidents of excessive force against minorities over the years.
But instead of removing or even suspending Ortiz, Acevedo seemed to embrace him. When Morales took over in October, he promptly suspended Ortiz and moved forward on investigations into the captain’s conduct. That’s when, Lanier said, the chief overstepped his authority.
“I ask that you have all Internal Affairs investigators interviewed on how they were directed to handle their findings on all cases, especially on myself, Wanda Jean-Baptiste and Captain Ortiz,” Lanier concluded in his memo, asking investigators outside of South Florida to please intervene “due to the turbulent Miami political leadership interfering or attempting to influence investigations.”
He went on: “I am in fear that since I’m upholding the law as I swore in my oath as a law enforcement officer, I will be disciplined with either a demotion or termination of employment.”