Woman: Signature was used without permission
She’d been paid to front ‘ghost’ candidates
Sierra Marie Olive, an unemployed 23-year-old Palm Harbor resident who had recently graduated from Florida State University with degrees in studio art and media communications, told prosecutors she was at the dentist last September when a former roommate texted her with an enticing offer.
“Want to know if you want to be a chair for a political committee,” Alex Alvarado said. “You don’t do anything and make 2K.”
Olive called Alvarado, a Talla
hassee political consultant, after finishing her appointment. Soon, she was signing paperwork to become the face of “Our Florida,” a political committee that later sent mailers promoting so-called “ghost” candidates in South Florida state Senate races last year.
“My involvement was, basically, my friend reaching out to me, asking me if I wanted to make an easy $2,000,” Olive told Tim VanderGiesen, a public corruption prosecutor with the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, during a January sworn statement. “And I’m not really educated in politics … nothing like that.”
She said she soon learned that Alvarado had sent documents to a bank — including account origination paperwork and an Internal Revenue Service form — that bore her signature but which she didn’t sign. Meanwhile, the committee she agreed to front quickly began attracting scrutiny as part of a scandal that has rocked Florida politics.
Olive’s statement to prosecutors was released Thursday among other evidence gathered in the criminal case against ex-lawmaker Frank Artiles, who is accused of bribing a financially struggling friend, Alex Rodriguez, to run as an independent candidate in Florida Senate District 37 last year.
Prosecutors say Rodriguez’s candidacy was part of a scheme to siphon votes away from the Democratic incumbent in the race, who shared his last name. Our Florida paid for ads promoting Rodriguez and an independent in another South Florida race, Celso Alfonso.
Olive’s statement to prosecutors mirrors a previously released statement from another young woman who said Alvarado paid her to use her name in the creation of a political committee. That group sent ads boosting another independent candidate in a Central Florida state Senate race last year.
Both women said Alvarado told them not to worry about getting in trouble and, when the mysterious independents became the subject of intense media scrutiny, encouraged them not to talk to reporters. And both said Alvarado asked them for samples of their signatures, then apparently used them on paperwork without their explicit permission.
Alvarado has not been charged with any crime. An attorney representing him declined to comment.
On Thursday, hours before the latest evidence release, VanderGiesen revealed in a court hearing that Rodriguez plans to change his not-guilty plea next week and intends to testify for the state at Artiles’ trial.
Pitch: $2K for ‘literally nothing’
Olive said she met Alvarado around 2015 through his now-fiancée, who was Olive’s roommate early in college. She told VanderGiesen she interacted with Alvarado off and on through social media before he asked her about fronting the committee, something he said he’d done “with other friends as well.”
“I had just graduated. COVID hit, you know,” she added. “I don’t have a job yet, so maybe he just thought of me as like needing some extra cash. I’m not entirely sure.”
Asked what she asked Alvarado about the role, Olive responded: “Not enough questions.” Alvarado, she said, promised the job’s duties would amount to “literally nothing.”
“I asked him if I could get in trouble. … This was somebody I, obviously, I trusted,” she said. “And, I trusted a little bit too well. But, I didn’t know the magnitude of this whole situation, I guess you can say.”
Olive said she signed paperwork Alvarado mailed her to register as chair for Our Florida, but did not sign any financial documents. She did, however, send Alvarado a digital image of her signature. Later, she said, he added her to an email thread with a banker for Hancock Whitney Bank — which included account origination documents with her signature on them.
“Did you sign that document, either one of those documents?” VanderGiesen said.
“No,” she replied.
She said Alvarado also provided the bank a federal W-9 tax form with her signature on it that she did not sign.
Olive told prosecutors she didn’t give the consultant or anyone else permission to use her signature on bank or tax forms but didn’t tell him not to use it, either. Asked why he wouldn’t have had her sign the paperwork herself, she speculated it was because such a request might have dissuaded her from going along with fronting the committee.
“I don’t think I would have” signed the additional records, she said. “I think I would have started to get nervous about what was going on with my name and all of these things.”
Though the bank account was in her name, Olive told prosecutors she never knew how much money passed through it. But she was soon inundated with questions from media outlets. Alvarado made his expectations clear, she said.
“[I]f you get a call regarding the [political committee] you know what to do,” he said in an October text message, according to the deposition transcript. “[K] eep your mouth shut.”
‘Nobody gave us the cash’
Investigators also interviewed Maricela Cardenas, the wife of Alfonso, an 81-year-old retiree who ran as an independent in Senate District 39. Cardenas told them Artiles “guided” she and her husband through his campaign.
Cardenas, a 62-yearold spa owner who served as her husband’s campaign treasurer, told investigators Artiles was a regular customer, coming in weekly for services such as back waxes, eyebrow work and facials.
She said running for office had been a lifelong dream of her husband’s — and Artiles encouraged him to do it in District 39, an open swing seat covering part of Miami and the Florida Keys, where outgoing Democratic and Republican members of the state House were squaring off.
“One day, my husband told me, ‘Frank said I’m able to do this and I kind of want to do [it],’ ” Cardenas said, according to a transcript. “... It made him happy. I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”
Alfonso had been a Republican but switched his registration to independent for the campaign. Cardenas said Alfonso did so because he wanted to be sure his name appeared on the general election ballot.
Cardenas said Artiles told them what they needed to do to qualify, filed some of Alfonso’s campaign finance reports for him and personally delivered Alfonso’s $1,187.88 qualifying check to the state Division of Elections in Tallahassee.
“He’s the one that, you know, told us what to do. How to set up. Get forms,” Cardenas said. “... He’s the one that advised us.”
Both Rodriguez and Alfonso opened their campaign accounts with $2,000, which each described in campaign finance reports as personal loans. Rodriguez later told investigators Artiles had given him $2,000 in cash for his deposit in a parking lot outside the bank.
But Cardenas told investigators that she and her husband used their own money — writing a $1,500 check and using $500 they had in cash — and neither Frank nor anybody else reimbursed them.
“Nobody gave us the cash,” she said.
Alfonso, who was retired from a freight-forwarding company, had been driving for Uber to make extra money but stopped because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the interview, VanderGiesen noted that $2,000 was a substantial expense for Alfonso and Cardenas, who had modest savings.
“It is,” Cardenas replied. “But, my husband is 81 years old. He always had that dream. Like I said, wasn’t doing anything. He’s been depressed. He’s a proud man. He’s older folks. And if that made him happy, that wasn’t going to kill us. You know what I mean?”
After her husband’s candidacy began to draw scrutiny, Cardenas said she spoke to Artiles and he assured them that they would be okay.
“He said, listen. You guys didn’t do anything wrong,” Cardenas said. “It’s just that’s the way it is. Welcome to my world. Something like that.”
Lobbyist also interviewed
Prosecutors also spoke to Macy Harper, a 25-year-old who said she’s “really good friends” with Alvarado. She said he asked her about starting a political committee in her name, but she did not want “to be connected in any way to a political committee.”
“But, I said, I might know somebody that would be,” Harper told investigators, according to a transcript of her January sworn interview released Thursday.
She connected Alvarado with one of her high school friends, Hailey DeFilippis, who told investigators in her own January statement that she accepted because she was pregnant and needed money, according to records released by the State Attorney’s Office last month.
DeFilippis, who was 25 at the time, said Harper told her she could make money as the chairperson of a committee and that “you don’t have to do anything,” in the role.
DeFilippis quickly agreed to put her name on “The Truth,” the political committee that sent out ads promoting Jestine Iannotti, the independent candidate who filed to run in Central Florida’s Senate District 9 race. Alvarado eventually paid her $4,000, twice as much as Olive received, records show.
Harper told investigators she was not offered any money in exchange for referring DeFilippis to Alvarado.
Harper told investigators during the Jan. 6 interview that she was a self-employed lobbyist. Three days earlier, a publication called “Influence” published an article about Harper that said she worked with a firm called PAC Financial Management, run by Noreen Fenner, whose name appears on dozens of political committees.
Harper told investigators she didn’t know Olive and had never heard of Proclivity, the dark-money organization whose name was originally listed as the sole source of funding for The Truth and Our Florida, before seeing news stories about the committees.