Fed probe targets Gaetz and Greenberg

As former Seminole tax collector’s star rose, US rep. became a vocal ally

Joel Greenberg’s political career looked promising just over a year ago: He was set to run for re-election as Seminole County’s tax collector — pledging nearly a half-million dollars of his Bitcoin investments to his campaign — and was even contemplating a run for Congress against U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy.

Having won elected office at just 31 years of age in 2016, he had since expressed boredom with the job but seemed to relish his connections with people of wealth and influence, including developer and

former state legislator Chris Dorworth.

But few were as visible a friend or as vocal an advocate for Greenberg — over four years of rolling controversies that earned him distinction as an iconoclast on the political right, but infamy among many on the left and center — as his friend from the Panhandle with a similar reputation, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.

During an interview on WFLA News Radio in June 2017, Gaetz said Greenberg should run for Congress against Murphy. By then, both Greenberg and Murphy had been in office for just six months.

“Joel Greenberg has gone into the Seminole County Tax Collector’s Office. He’s taken it by storm,” Gaetz said. “And he’s been a disruptor, … And if you look at what people want in the country right now, they want that disruptor. And they want someone who is not going to adhere to the dogma that has strangled progress in Washington DC for a generation.”

Over the years that followed, Greenberg and Gaetz, a fellow Republican who represents Fort Walton Beach, were often spotted having dinner and drinks together at Seminole restaurants and bars. Former employees of the Tax Collector’s Office said Greenberg often bragged how Gaetz visited him at his Heathrow home.

Greenberg also brought Gaetz into the Tax Collector’s administrative office in Lake Mary in late 2017 or early 2018, showing him around and introducing him to various employees, according to Alan Byrd, a spokesman for the office.

When Greenberg launched his re-election bid, Gaetz was the first person to donate, chipping in the personal maximum of $1,000 on June 9.

Two weeks later, Greenberg stood shackled in a federal courtroom in downtown Orlando, accused of stalking an election rival and identity theft. The federal case against Greenberg, who resigned from office the day after his initial arrest, has since ballooned.

And this week, that case too linked Greenberg to Gaetz, when the New York Times reported that the Panhandle congressman was being investigated for potential sex trafficking offenses — a probe that branched off from the Greenberg investigation.

Gaetz has not been charged with a crime and has denied all wrongdoing, claiming that the existence of the investigation into him was leaked to derail a separate investigation into a blackmail scheme targeting his family, with which they had been cooperating.

Today, Greenberg sits in the Orange County Jail facing 33 federal charges, including stalking, identity theft, wire fraud, bribery, theft of government property, conspiracy to bribe a public official, creating fake IDs and sex trafficking of a minor.

Talking to an Orlando Sentinel reporter last fall, by then already facing charges that could cost his freedom, he lamented the loss of his friends.

“No one wants to talk to me anymore,” he said, with his voice breaking. “You have no idea what I’ve been through and what I’m going through now.”