South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
A charmer or a bully?
Marlon Bolton carving his path with charisma and confrontation
TAMARAC — Whatever you say about Marlon Bolton, there’s no denying he’s determined.
Whether sparring with political opponents or facing criticism of his church or navigating his rocky personal life, the Tamarac city commissioner — so far — has always come out on top.
Young and confident, he was the first Black person ever elected to the Tamarac City Commission, and voters returned him to office overwhelmingly despite a bruising campaign rife with falsehoods and racial allegations.
But now Bolton, 36, might face his biggest challenge yet. He is under state investigation after allegations that his evangelical church improperly obtained federal loans meant for COVID-19 relief. He’s also part of a Broward County ethics investigation into the spending practices of the Tamarac commission, where he angled for outlandish financial benefits for commissioners — until the South Florida Sun Sentinel cast a light on the effort.
A look at Bolton’s history reveals a string of questionable episodes, including a sealed
arrest, bullied city employees, political posturing and financial mismanagement.
And yet, many of Bolton’s supporters, both politicians and voters, remain unwavering. He is proof that an engaging style and a persuasive voice can overcome many political setbacks.
Bolton came to the United States from Jamaica in 2007, according to an interview he gave to The Reporter, the student newspaper at Miami Dade College, where he was a student. He married a Brooklyn-born woman in Miami-Dade County that year and filed for divorce in Broward County in June
2013, court records show. He remarried five months after his divorce.
Bolton had run a model casting agency in his 20s in Jamaica, he told the news site Jamaicans.com. He remained in the modeling industry after arriving in South Florida, joining Front Management in Miami Beach.
Bolton next wound up at No. 23 Model Management on South Beach, an agency focused on fashion shoots, where he worked for nine months beginning in June
2009 as agency director, the only person in a management role, according to his former boss, Steve Benzrihem.
Benzrihem said Bolton asked him for money in 2009 because he had financial troubles. His roommate had moved out and he couldn’t afford his rent, Benzrihem said.
Trouble soon arose. Benzrihem alleges that Bolton was arrested and charged with forging his name on a bank withdrawal slip in February 2010 when he was
24 years old. Benzrihem provided the South Florida Sun Sentinel a copy of the original police report, which identifies Bolton by name, as well as a jail mug shot.
But Bolton’s name and birthdate don’t appear on the official police report because the arrest has been sealed or expunged. The suspect was identified only as a man who worked in the agency’s management and deposited checks into his own account for a business called Square One Entertainment and Media Group.
According to Florida corporate records, Bolton filed paperwork to create that company in 2008. He is the only person on record with Square One. Records show no paperwork filed after 2009.
“That’s him,” said Raul Busquet, the now-retired Miami Beach police detective who handled the case, when he saw Bolton’s mugshot on Benzrihem’s paperwork. He said he doesn’t remember much about the case because Bolton immediately asked for a lawyer and didn’t answer questions.
Busquet said the banks did not pursue the case. At the time, he said, they had a
$10,000 threshold for prosecution because smaller amounts weren’t worth sending attorneys to court.
According to the official police report, the employee forged Benzrihem’s name on a bank withdrawal slip to take out $4,120. The man also was accused of collecting $8,100 through three fraudulent contracts for photo shoots that never happened, the report says.
The report alleges that the employee collected money from Benzrihem’s agency to pay a model for work with Bloomingdale’s, but a Bloomingdale’s representative told authorities she had never heard of the modeling agency.
Becoming a citizen
Three years later, Bolton became a naturalized American citizen, according to his interview with the Miami Dade student newspaper. According to records, he registered to vote in May that year and divorced the following month.
Court filings shown that, while married to an American woman, Bolton lived with a Jamaican-born model in Miami Beach. Their landlord evicted them in summer 2010, and they were ordered to pay $6,294 in damages, according to court records.
Bolton left the world of modeling a short time later and entered the bruising world of politics, which he attacked with vigor.
His first campaign for Tamarac City Commission was tinged with allegations of racism and exaggerated qualifications. Bolton told voters he had two college degrees that he didn’t.
On his election website and in an email blast in 2016, he told voters that he had an associate degree in communications and a bachelor’s in applied science from Miami Dade College, as well as a bachelor’s in organizational leadership from St. Thomas University. After questions from the Sun Sentinel, he said he would correct his resume to reflect that he had only one degree.
Bolton also claimed his opponent, incumbent Pam Bushnell, had handed a banana to a Black campaign volunteer in public at a polling site, an act that is considered a racist slur.
Bushnell, who is white, said it never happened. She said she gave out candy and chocolate at the polling site.
After Bolton’s claim was posted on an online news site, Bushnell found two bananas on her front lawn, and “I lost it. I couldn’t believe people would believe something like that about me,” she said.
She stopped sleeping at her home for several days, temporarily moving in with another commissioner who lived on the other side of the city. “I was terrified,” she said.
Bolton has never made the name of the witness public. “As victims of racism, we do not wish to relive the dramatic experience,” Bolton recently told the Sun Sentinel. “We have moved on and have forgiven Ms. Bushnell.”
But after he was elected — with nearly 59% of the vote — Bolton admitted saying things about Bushnell to help get himself to City Hall.
“We’re all politicians,”
Bolton told city staff and fellow commissioners at a meeting in January 2017. “I’m sitting at this table, not because, at least in my head, my predecessor was a bad lady. I don’t think that. I don’t think that she was horrible . ... But you know what I did? I told people she was not doing a good job.”
‘Prophet Fire’
When Bolton is not representing the city as a part-time officeholder, he’s talking into the microphone to an enthusiastic crowd as “Prophet Fire,” a self-described prophet at Praise Experience World Outreach Church, based in a strip shopping center on State Road 7 in North Lauderdale.
He has told his flock that he prophesized Kobe Bryant’s death. On Jan. 26,
2020, the day Bryant died, Bolton posted on his website that he had predicted it a month before. He included audio in which he is heard saying: “There’s going to be more deaths of celebrities that you’ve ever seen in your lifetime . ... The Lord says ‘I am doing it.’ ... There is a basketballer that is dying, I see a basketballer dying. I see somebody in sports having a tragic death.”
In a video posted on YouTube by a critic, Bolton is seen telling his congregants that “we prophesized in this church from last year, December 22, about the coronavirus and the disease that would be unleashed in
2020. We prophesized about the stock market crashing, We even prophesized about the shortage of food in this season. Very accurate.”
His church sells merchandise online at prices well above retail. Items include an “I Love Bolton” T-shirt
($25) and a 7-ounce bar of Dead Sea mud soap ($46). “Prophet Fire suggests using this soap for a winning outcome in a court case, debt cancellation, favor and prophetic clarity,” he writes on his website.
Bolton sells a ¼ ounce of Abba brand “Covenant appointing oil” for $55, writing in part on his website, “Prophet Fire suggests this oil be used when going for Job Interviews, Promotion Interviews, Immigration Interviews, legal appointments.”
Walmart sells the mud soap at $23.27 for a threepack. Amazon sells the same oil in a 2-ounce bottle for $22.
A brash style
Once Bolton arrived at City Hall, he continued his battering ways.
In 2017, Bolton worried that a news article that detailed his frequent flights and hotel stays would bring him negative publicity, said Elise Boston, the city’s public information officer at the time.
He criticized her for fulfilling a public records request that showed the money he had spent on travel that year.
He accused Boston of releasing “the wrong numbers” to embarrass him, she recalls. She wound up leaving her job over conflicts with Bolton, she said.
Others targeted by Bolton left too. City Attorney Sam Goren, after serving more than 15 years, left the city in December after Bolton publicly berated him at a commission meeting and called for his termination. Goren quit the next day. The city took the extraordinary step of investigating Bolton after 10 city employees, firefighters and residents accused him of bullying and creating a hostile workplace. The accusations included his angrily asking an employee, “Why do I need you?” and calling her “obsolete.”
Boston told an investigator she “felt Commissioner Bolton’s behavior was needless, unconscionable, and abusive,” according to a report of the investigation.
Three of the 10 workers ultimately withdrew their complaints, with officials saying they feared retribution from Bolton. Attorney and investigator Levi Williams wrote in his 99-page report in December 2019 that “although Commissioner Bolton proffered explanations for the allegations levied against him, this investigator found them to be wanting and self-serving and without merit.”
No action was ever taken against Bolton after the report’s findings, which Bolton decried as a “witchhunt.”
Bolton’s many supporters
Through it all, Bolton has maintained a base of political supporters who say his approach is misunderstood. They see him as an energetic, committed city leader who does whatever he can to help the community.
One of his early supporters was Elvin Villalobos, now the city’s vice mayor.
While on the campaign trail, Bolton left a door hangar at Villalobos’ door. Villalobos had just moved to the city the year before.
Villalobos said he had always thought about going into politics. He liked what he saw in Bolton’s campaign. So he offered to help Bolton win his first election, and the Nicaraguan-born Villalobos became an instant activist, helping urge Spanish speakers to go to the polls to vote for Bolton, he said.
A friendship blossomed. Villalobos said he found Bolton “pretty smart and very charismatic.”
The favor was soon returned. When Villalobos entered his first election for the mayoral seat in 2018, Bolton guided him how to file paperwork at City Hall and how to carry himself in public appearances. “He was like a mentor almost,” Villalobos said.
Villalobos would ask Bolton, ‘How does this look? How does this sound?”
“You don’t learn this stuff in school,” Villalobos said. “When you are by yourself, you take the help.”
But the alliance has started to buckle, with Bolton’s chief ally, Commissioner Mike Gelin, even recently publicly calling Villalobos a “puppet.”
Villalobos has recently called into question Bolton’s behavior.
“Decisions were being made that were turning me off,” he said. “I don’t roll like this.”
Others remain in Bolton’s corner, however.
U.S. congressional candidate and County Commissioner Dale Holness is a strong ally. Holness went to Bolton’s church to praise his last campaign victory and declared Nov. 9 as “Marlon and Carla Bolton Day” in Broward County for him and his wife. In a video posted on YouTube from that service, Holness called Bolton “my very good friend.”
Holness endorsed Bolton’s re-election, according to Bolton’s campaign website.
In a video posted on the Tamarac City Hall website, Bolton called Holness “a blessing” and credited him with his first win in 2016, four years after the two had met.
Holness declined to comment for this story.
Bolton’s message still resonates with voters as well. He won his second and most election in November with 74% of the vote.
Bolton’s challenger in that race, political newcomer Michelle Jones, said she got involved to oust Bolton because she knew him personally. She had given him a room in her North Lauderdale house to stay at the request of a friend because he had nowhere to go, she said. Although he was married while his immigration status was pending, he stayed with Jones for more than a year after his 2010 eviction in MiamiDade, she said.
“I knew he was not the right person to represent the city of Tamarac,” Jones said. She would not elaborate and declined to say why she eventually told him to leave her house.
Bolton did not respond to an email request about his relationship with Jones.
Wild expenses
How voters will react to Bolton’s latest controversy remains to be seen.
In recent months, Bolton has emerged as a central figure in an effort requesting job perks and benefits for himself and other city leaders at Tamarac City Hall — a pattern of free spending that has drawn a public outcry.
Bolton began pushing for increasing commission benefits after his first election.
At a commission retreat on Jan. 10, 2017, just two months after he first took office, Bolton asked for tuition reimbursements for the city leaders.
Then-Mayor Harry Dressler warned him the public would see it as another way that officials will “juice their salaries.”
Still, Bolton kept making requests. In 2017, he spoke in favor of raising the spending limit on a personal account for commissioners, from $1,500 to $5,000. His proposal wasn’t approved at the time, but this past September the commission increased the amount to $25,000 for each elected official.
This past spring, Bolton was part of the commission majority that voted for a new $15,000 local travel budget that doesn’t require receipts for reimbursement.
And records later showed Bolton had asked the city manager for a slew of new perks, which included extending full health benefits to the families of commissioners, raising their salaries or reducing the mayor’s salary, and making their recently approved local travel allowance retroactive to last October.
A new round of benefits, including full health benefits, more retirement perks and education and technology stipends, were crafted in a March memo and officials planned to have the commission approve it. But the memo was given to the Sun Sentinel before that could happen.
Government scrutiny
After weeks of outrage from residents, city leaders began to scale back their plans.
Still, Tamarac and its spending sprees have landed on the desk of Broward’s inspector general, the county’s top government watchdog.
And Bolton is personally under scrutiny from the state of Florida. John O’Brien, press secretary for the Florida Department of Financial Services, said a review has been launched about questions that have surfaced regarding Bolton’s church, where he is the president and pastor.
The Sun Sentinel first reported in April that Bolton’s church received a
$25,300 loan on May 1, 2020, and another $11,000 on March 3, 2021, as part of the
COVID-19 stimulus package, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, which tracks loan data from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, also known as PPP. For each loan, 12 employees were reported.
Under Florida law, employers must provide workers’ compensation insurance for their employees, but the state says the church provided no record of having the employees or any record of Bolton’s asking for an exemption.
Bolton has declined to comment about the discrepancy with state workers’ compensation records to be eligible for the federal loans.