Probe of sham Florida candidate reveals payments

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A young Republican political operative made an offer to a recent college graduate last September: He would pay her $1,500 to chair a political committee and in exchange, she would have to do nothing.

At the time, 25yearold Hailey DeFilippis, of Palm Harbor, Fla., had just found out she was pregnant and was “freaking out about money.”

So, she took up Alex Alvarado on the offer. And put her name down as chair of The Truth, a dark moneyfunded political committee that spent $180,000 on political mail advertisements promoting sham candidates in key 2020 state Senate elections — two in MiamiDade and one in central Florida. When reporters started calling her with questions about the committee, Alvarado paid her $2,500 more for her “inconvenience.”

“I was hired for $1,500. Like that was the deal. And then he was generous enough to give me more due to the stress it was causing me,” DeFilippis said in a sworn statement.

DeFilippis’ statements and other documents released late Friday provide new details into the breadth of the criminal investigation into former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles and his longtime acquaintance, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez.

Prosecutors say Rodriguez was recruited by Artiles and paid some $44,000 to change his party affiliation from Republican to no party to qualify on the ballot and attempt to sway the outcome of the MiamiDade Senate District 37 election. GOP candidate Illeana Garcia won the race by 32 votes. Rodriguez, who shared the same surname as the Democratic incumbent, received more than 6,000 votes.

The records released Friday show that Miami investigators are looking beyond Artiles and Rodriguez, who so far are the only ones facing criminal charges, to find the source of the money and understand the breadth of the alleged scheme.

Investigators are also searching for the source of more than half a million dollars spent on political mailers that bolstered the candidacy of three noparty candidates in the three Senate races, including Rodriguez.

A darkmoney group called Grow United spent $550,000 on what has been reported in campaign documents as political mailers, paid for by two political committees, The Truth and Our Florida. Both political committees were chaired by young women with no known political experience who were recruited by Alvarado.

The political mailers were sent to voters in October 2020 and talked up the noparty candidates, who had done no independent campaigning, as candidates with progressive ideals in an apparent attempt to appeal to Democratic voters.