South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
The Sheriff ’s Lies
To rise to the top, Gregory Tony hid the truth
Broward Sheriff Gregory Scott Tony overcame grim circumstances to rise from his youth in the crime-ridden Philadelphia Badlands neighborhood to one of Florida’s top law enforcement posts. But to get there, he didn’t tell the full truth.
Since the day he took office, Tony’s honesty has been in question. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has been investigating for months whether he lied on law enforcement applications. FDLE’s bar for law enforcement is high when it comes to telling the truth. Even pleading “no contest” to a misdemeanor charge of perjury or false statement makes a person ineligible to be a police officer in Florida.
Yet Tony’s biggest lie — hiding the fact that he shot a man dead when he was 14 — wasn’t his only one. From his football prospects to his drug use to his political achievements, Tony has stretched the truth time and again. The South Florida Sun Sentinel dug into public records, court proceedings, old newspaper clippings and social media postings to compare Tony’s claims with the available facts.
Presented with the Sun Sentinel’s findings, the sheriff declined to comment. In past interviews, Tony, 42, has questioned why he would be expected to disclose a “trauma” that he survived as a youth, and suggested that if he did so, he’d forever be seen as “a 14-year-old Black kid with a gun.”
Tony landed his first job as a police officer in 2005 with the Coral Springs Police Department. He was 26. The city job application asked many questions seeking to discover if he’d been in any trouble with the law, even as a juvenile. Tony answered that he’d never been a suspect in a criminal investigation, never been arrested, never been charged. They were all lies.
Facts: As a 14-year-old, Tony shot and killed an 18-year-old from his neighborhood, was the suspect in the murder investigation, and stood trial for the shooting. He argued it was self defense. A police report, which misspells his name, says prosecutors approved charges of murder and two gun charges: possession of an instrument of crime, and a firearms crime.
Tony turned himself in. The detective on the case, Leon Lubiejewski, reviewed the case recently and told the Sun Sentinel there was a warrant for Tony’s arrest at the time. “He was arrested and he was charged.”
The case was transferred to juvenile court, where offenses are not technically considered crimes. The police report says seven months after the shooting, Tony was “found not guilty of all charges.”
The 1993 homicide report, which was obtained and reported on first by the Florida Bulldog investigative news website, includes a timeline of the case from arrest through trial.
Despite those facts, Tony signed a notarized statement that he told the truth on his Coral Springs job application. In Florida, a cop can lose state certification for lying on a law enforcement application or some other false statement, which is considered a “moral character violation,” according to FDLE. “People’s lives depend on what you have to say,” said Lubiejewski, now retired. “If you’re not truthful, a lot of bad things can happen.”
The bad check case
The Philadelphia shooting wasn’t the only criminal case that Tony failed to disclose on his Coral Springs Police Department application.
Facts: Tony had been served a summons and charged in another case, a misdemeanor crime. He was charged with passing a worthless check when he was a student at Florida State University in Tallahassee in December
2001. The court docket shows that he was notified of the charge on Jan. 3,
2002. Prosecutors dropped the case three weeks later.
When they ran their background checks, Coral Springs police didn’t find the murder case against Tony in Philadelphia, but they did find the Tallahassee check case. Tony then wrote a letter of apology to Coral Springs for failing to disclose the bad check charge. ”I had no idea until today, August
1, 2005, that I had a criminal history due to this event.”
Tony claimed he had “no idea” he had a criminal history even though Tallahassee police had uncovered the same charge a year prior, when he applied there. Though Tony lied several times on his application to Coral Springs, his apology letter only addressed the lie he’d been caught in.
His employment history
Before hiring him, Coral Springs also wanted to know if he’d applied to any other police agency. Tony lied.
Facts: Tony had applied to and was rejected by the Tallahassee Police Department in 2004. He had appealed that decision and lost. Records show Tony ultimately told Coral Springs about a handful of agencies he’d applied to — but he omitted Tallahassee from his list. If he’d included it, other lies might have been discovered.
His drug use
Tony lied on the Coral Springs application when asked whether he had ever used or handled hallucinogens. He’d been honest about that with Tallahassee, and it cost him the job.
Facts: Tony had used
LSD. He admitted using it once in high school when he applied to the Tallahassee Police Department. Tallahassee police said “felony drug use” disqualified him, also noting that he “failed to mention” the bad check charge.
Coral Springs police were in the dark about much of Tony’s past when they took him at his word and hired him, accepting his apology for a fib about the bad check charge. His biggest secret would remain hidden until a combustible mix of tragedy and politics propelled him into the public spotlight.
Fooling the governor
The Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018 left 17 dead and cost Broward Sheriff Scott Israel his job. One of the most shocking revelations: that deputies heard the gunshots but didn’t rush in to save teachers and children. A year later, newly elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stripped Israel of his post and appointed Tony to the job.
Tony had spent 11 years as a police officer in Coral Springs, rising to sergeant and departing in 2015 to focus full-time on a company he’d started, specializing in active shooter/mass casualty training and response. He was a relative unknown with one important connection: to a Parkland father who lost his daughter in the shooting. Andrew Pollack and Tony worked out at the same gym, and Pollack stood by the governor’s side when he introduced Tony as Broward’s new sheriff.
The governor did minimal vetting. Tony did not divulge the Philadelphia killing to the governor or FDLE before he accepted the job as Broward’s top law enforcement officer. The only blemish that DeSantis was aware of, according to the appointment paperwork, was the bad check charge. A year later, when Tony filled out an FDLE form to maintain his certification as a police officer in January 2020, he still didn’t tell the truth. He said he’d never had “a criminal record sealed or expunged.”
Facts: The records were sealed. Just like any juvenile in Philadelphia at the time, Tony’s records would have been automatically sealed, the assistant district attorney who approved the charges in the shooting, Arlene Fisk, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Juvenile offenses are considered “delinquent acts” rather than crimes, so Tony might have rested his denial on the idea that his records about the fatal shooting weren’t “criminal.” An attorney seeking those records in a lawsuit asked Tony in January 2021 to release any sealed juvenile records in Philadelphia. Tony’s attorney said he wouldn’t.
Sticking to his story
Tony continues to tell half-truths about his past. In May 2020, he told a Sun Sentinel reporter he’d never been arrested or charged with a crime. And as recently as February 2021, he said in a sworn court statement that he’d never been a defendant in a criminal case, “to the best of my recollection.”
Facts: The records show Tony was indeed a defendant in two cases. The homicide record from the shooting lists him as the defendant facing charges of murder and weapons violations, and he was the defendant in the short-lived worthless check case years later in Tallahassee. The detective who handled his homicide case said he was indeed “arrested.”