FBI Graft Inquiry in Tallahassee Clouds Mayor’s Bid for Governor

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Three men with grand redevelopment plans descended on Tallahassee sometime in 2015, eager to schedule work meetings and social gatherings with the most well-connected denizens of City Hall who could help their projects become reality.

One lobbyist in particular drew their attention: Adam Corey, a businessman whose friendship with the mayor dated back to their college days, when both served in student government. Through Corey, the out-of-town businessmen would eventually get so cozy with local leaders that they partied with a city commissioner in Las Vegas and toured New York Harbor with the Tallahassee mayor.

The businessmen, however, were really undercover FBI agents engaged in a two-year operation to root out corruption in city government. The mayor was Andrew Gillum, a rising star in Democratic politics with his sights set on higher office.

On Tuesday, Gillum shocked the state’s political establishment and won the Democratic nomination for Florida governor. Now, the federal investigation into the goings-on in Florida’s sleepy capital city has been thrust unexpectedly into the national political spotlight, with questions about how it will affect the most closely watched governor’s race in the country.

“I don’t think anybody expected Mayor Gillum to be the nominee, but now he is, and all of this stuff is going to come under really close scrutiny,” said Ben Wilcox, research director for Integrity Florida, a watchdog group. “And it’s not going to look good for our city.”

Gillum said he had been told he is not a target in the investigation. The issue received little notice outside of Tallahassee during the primary campaign because Gillum largely trailed in polls and did not draw attacks from his Democratic opponents. In the few days since securing the nomination, however, Republicans have already made the lingering corruption questions a central issue.

“This guy can’t even run the city of Tallahassee,” Rep. Ron DeSantis, his Republican opponent, said this week on Fox News. “There is no way Florida voters can entrust him with our entire state.”

Gillum has been mayor since 2014 but has held office in the city since 2003, when he became the youngest person ever to win a seat on the Tallahassee City Commission, at 23.

He said he met with FBI investigators in his home last year and was assured that their interest was in other targets. He did not have a lawyer present but was authorized by the agents to describe their conversation, Gillum said. The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Florida declined to comment.

From the beginning, Gillum has insisted that a corruption inquiry in which he said he played no direct role should not be an impediment to his campaign for governor. But he acknowledged that the investigation has rocked city government in Tallahassee since federal authorities delivered their first subpoenas in the case last summer.

“What kept me going even through that difficult time was my knowledge that I would never do anything to compromise my morals, my values, my family, my children, my vote,” Gillum said in an interview this week. “I was very clear in that, which is why I was not afraid to keep going on the trail, keep answering questions, continue to take it on the chin.”

At issue is a vote in June 2016 to expand a city redevelopment district to include properties that the undercover agents posing as developers said they wanted to invest in if the properties became eligible for public dollars. It would have been unlawful for public officials to accept money or other consideration from the purported developers in exchange for favorable votes.

Gillum was not present for the vote that approved the boundary change. But the investigation revealed that he had spent time socializing with Corey, the lobbyist, and the undercover agents in New York, including taking a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty and seeing a Broadway performance of the hit musical “Hamilton.”

Gillum and Corey met in college, when they were involved in student government at Florida A&M University and at Florida Gulf Coast University, respectively. They remained friends — Corey served as Gillum’s volunteer campaign treasurer in his 2014 run for mayor — until the investigation; Gillum told The Tallahassee Democrat that he has severed ties with Corey.

The trip to New York in August 2016 raised questions of why the mayor was spending personal time with developers who had potential business before the city. Similar questions resulted from another trip that Gillum took with his wife and several lobbyist friends — including Corey — to Costa Rica in May 2016.

Gillum’s campaign said in response to written questions on Friday that the “Hamilton” tickets and the mayor’s hotel stay at the Millennium Hilton hotel in Manhattan were paid for by his younger brother, Marcus Gillum, who was on the New York trip. The brothers attended the musical along with Corey and one of the undercover agents. The ticket Marcus Gillum gave his brother was in exchange for a Jay-Z concert ticket Marcus Gillum gave Corey, Andrew Gillum later learned. Marcus Gillum could not be reached for comment. Before Friday, Andrew Gillum had for a year declined to confirm to local reporters that he had even attended the musical.

The Gillum brothers were joined on the New York Harbor trip by Corey and two of the undercover agents, according to The Tallahassee Democrat’s report.

Andrew Gillum has said he would provide receipts proving he paid for the balance of his travel to New York, but he has not done so yet. His campaign said it would release the documentation “in the near future.”

During the Costa Rica trip, Corey emailed Gillum a calendar invitation scheduling tapas and drinks with two of the undercover agents upon their return to Tallahassee. The invitation suggested that Gillum and Corey had engaged in city business on the trip, though Gillum’s campaign denied that.

Corey is also a city vendor: He received $2.1 million in public funds to turn an old power plant in the community redevelopment district into a high-end restaurant named Edison, where the tapas-and-drinks meeting would later take place. Gillum voted for Corey to receive those funds in 2013, after city lawyers deemed it would not be a conflict of interest.

“It was a trip amongst a large group of friends from Tallahassee, as lots of people take,” Geoff Burgan, a spokesman for Gillum’s campaign, said of the Costa Rica trip. As for New York, he said, Gillum had planned to travel there on business for his former employer, the People for the American Way Foundation, and extended his stay to see people he thought were friends. “The trip appears in a different light now than it did then,” Burgan said.

Corey’s lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, said on Friday that his client was not a target of the investigation, in which no one has been charged so far. He declined to say if Corey has cooperated with federal agents or testified before any grand jury.

Of Gillum’s victory on Tuesday, Kise said: “It’s the best thing that ever happened to him, and I give him great credit that he won his nomination. But it’s probably the worst thing that happened to him, too, because of the scrutiny this is going to bring to the investigation. Nobody cared before. Everybody cares now.” The trips to New York and Costa Rica are the subject of a pending state ethics complaint filed against the mayor by Erwin Jackson, a Tallahassee businessman and longtime City Hall critic.

“I spent the past eight years trying to expose corruption in Tallahassee, and nobody was interested,” Jackson said. Gillum’s victory in the primary, he said, is “probably the best thing that has happened to call attention to this.”

The existence of the federal investigation became public in June 2017, two months after Gillum began his election campaign, when The Tallahassee Democrat reported that the city and its community redevelopment agency had been served far-reaching subpoenas seeking tens of thousands of government records. The Democrat then provided a detailed reconstruction of the extensive courting of city officials by the phony businessmen, who went by the names Mike Miller, Brian Butler and Mike Sweets, and who disappeared shortly before the subpoenas landed.

More subpoenas arrived in September 2017 and in May of this year. Tallahassee has provided more than 197,000 documents in response to the subpoenas, a city spokesman said on Friday.

Central to the investigation are City Commissioner Scott Maddox, his former business associates and several developers, according to the subpoenas and a search warrant accidentally posted online by the federal government in February. Maddox has maintained his innocence.

“This investigation has involved dozens of Tallahassee citizens and public officials,” his lawyer, Stephen S. Dobson III, said in a statement on Friday. “Misleading or incorrect information has been improperly leaked alleging misconduct that never occurred. Scott Maddox has served his community with distinction and honor and is known as an honest public servant. To allege otherwise is just plain wrong.”

At the time the subpoenas were delivered, the investigation had already cost half a million dollars and involved a team of 20 people, three covert vehicles and a private plane, according to Joshua E. Doyle, an FBI agent who in an application to work as the executive director of the Florida Bar revealed details about running the investigation.

After he was hired, Doyle was interviewed by a Florida Bar newspaper that published a story including details of the investigation , which were later removed. But The Tallahassee Democrat reported on the original story, and The New York Times obtained a copy of it from the Florida Bar on Friday.

How long the investigation might continue is not known. David W. Moyé, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Tallahassee, said Friday that the U.S. attorney will now have to consider whether any action should be taken before the November election. Prosecutors could be accused of influencing an election if they file charges beforehand. They could also be criticized for allowing it to drag on.

“In the Justice Department, I’m sure they’ve been burning some midnight oil up there, because now they do have a viable candidate and they have an investigation,” Moyé said.

Steven J. Vancore, a Tallahassee-based Democratic pollster, said Republicans will use the investigation as a potent attack against Gillum regardless of whether he is implicated.

“They will certainly weaponize those headlines and those inquiries against Mayor Gillum, irrespective of any outcome,” he said. “Mayor Gillum has to show that not only has he been cooperative with the FBI, that he’s been helping root out any corruption. If he can make that case, then the public will go, ‘OK, asked and answered.'”

And if any charges are filed before November?

“If they came out tomorrow and indict just a few people that are not him, does that benefit him? Sure,” Vancore said. “He can say, ‘They spent a year investigating, and I was not named.'”