Founders profited from their nonprofit

Ex-deputy, vet allegedly pilfered from Children of Wounded Warriors

The charity advertises itself as a helping hand for children of fallen military men and women, cops and firefighters.

But former Palm Beach County sheriff ’s deputy and Navy veteran Robert “Bobby” Simeone — who founded and ran Children of Wounded Warriors — used the organization to stuff his own pockets for years, authorities say.

And they allege Simeone brazenly did it after being charged in 2017 with numerous felonies in a separate case, in which he’s accused of paying kickbacks to lure patients into his drug treatment center in West Palm Beach.

Simeone, 49, appeared Friday before Circuit Judge Ted Booras, a day after his arrest on charges of organized scheme to defraud, money laundering and grand theft.

While he was granted $230,000 bond on the six new charges, Booras revoked his bond on 26 counts of patient brokering. So for now, Simeone will remain in custody at Palm Beach County Jail.

Simeone, who left the Sheriff’s Office five years ago, was among the first group of individuals accused of wrongdoing by State Attorney Dave Aronberg’s Sober Homes Task Force.

It’s an ongoing effort to crack down on abuses in the area’s drugrecovery industry. There have

pleaded no contest.

McDonald has been recently named in a federal lawsuit that asks a judge to force Pompano Beach to stop making the panhandling arrests that have been on the books since 2003. Lawyers say more than 100 people were arrested or cited in Pompano Beach within the last two years alone.

Pompano Beach spokeswoman Sandra King said the city would not comment on pending litigation.

The law is part of a larger trend to impose unconstitutional restrictions on a politically powerless group of people, some lawyers say. Kirsten Anderson, the litigation director for the Southern Legal Counsel, has issued similar challenges to city panhandling ordinances in the past in Florida.

According to Anderson, a 2015 Supreme Court ruling helped clarify the constitutional protection of speech in instances like these.

The ruling stemmed from a dispute in Gilbert, Arizona, which imposed a sign ordinance regulating how signs could be displayed in public. The ordinance imposed stricter limits on certain signs rather than others and resulted in a lawsuit that made it way up to the Supreme Court.

Anderson said the 2015 ruling in Reed v. Town of Gilbert has paved the way for 25 federally challenged ordinances since then to be declared unconstitutional. “Ordinances are being struck down all around the country.”

She said that although these ordinances tend to have a lot of language around traffic safety or fostering tourism, what they really concern is speech. A helpful way to think of them, she said, is to substitute speech in place of panhandling. “Tell me if you come away thinking that would be an appropriate ordinance.”

Jacqueline Azis, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida, said it is important that more ordinances are challenged and believes doing so will help those who support them understand how they infringe on speech rights endowed to all people.

“It’s really upsetting to see how many cities are still violating the Constitution,” she said. “We should all be alarmed when cities start to criminalize certain types of speech.”

In Broward, other cities have panhandling laws as well.

In Oakland Park, beggars and panhandlers are outlawed from soliciting “from any operator or occupant of a vehicle that is in traffic on a public street,” according to its ordinance. A person can’t stand in a “traffic median, bicycle path, public street, or right of way to beg, panhandle, solicit or sale items when in use by vehicular traffic.”

“Aggressive” panhandling is prohibited in Fort Lauderdale, and there are restrictions for where anyone can panhandle. It is not allowed at city parks or private property, for example.

In Coral Springs, city law prevents panhandling at 15 locations — which includes intersections along all of the city’s main roadways. Hollywood also has a list of prohibited panhandling at a half-dozen of its high-traffic areas, which includes State Road 7, Federal Highway, and Ocean Drive.

Cities need to put safety first, some advocates say. One risk from panhandling is a distracted driver could hit and kill a panhandler, said Robin Martin, who serves on the county’s Homeless Continuum of Care Board, a county division that funds homeless services.

“That’s not good for anyone, the person who hits them or the person who wants to survive on the streets,” Martin said. “The ordinances are there to ensure everyone is safe, including people who are homeless.”

“Asking people for charity is a time-honored protection of speech, the same way I could ask [you] to vote for me if I’m a political figure.”

Ray Taseff,

an attorney with the Florida Justice Institute