By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Broward Sheriff “Dr.” Gregory Tony’s legal troubles with the State of Florida are finally behind him. The Commission on Ethics decided Friday by a 3-2 vote to accept a settlement deal that ends the case without a public trial that could prove embarrassing to Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In exchange, Tony agreed to accept a public censure and reprimand that will be imparted by … Gov. DeSantis.
“I am unshakable. Unbreakable. Unconquerable,” Tony declared on Facebook after the vote.
The settlement was sealed after the commission’s conflicted “advocate” – read prosecutor – Melody Hadley shoveled a steaming pile of misinformation intended to convince the five (of eight) commissioners who showed up to approve the deal she negotiated with Tony’s lawyer. (DeSantis has yet to fill a ninth empty seat). None was a member when the commission voted 8-1 in September 2022 to find probable cause to believe that Tony had committed several ethical breaches.
The most serious of those violations: providing false information about himself to Gov. DeSantis before the governor appointed him sheriff in January 2019. Tony allegedly did so by omitting mention of his “drug use and an arrest for homicide.”
Hadley’s conflict was rooted in her involvement in 2022 when she oversaw the ethics commission’s “preliminary” investigation of Tony, which was in fact a follow-up to a more thorough probe made by Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) agents on DeSantis’s May 8, 2020 order after Florida Bulldog reported Tony’s arrest for murder in Philadelphia in 1993 at age 14. Hadley had recommended the commission find no probable cause to believe Tony had done anything wrong – a position the commission emphatically rejected.
At the outset of Friday’s discussion, Ethics Commission Chairman Luis Fuste, a Coral Gables attorney, asked his fellow members if anyone needed to disclose a conflict of interest. None did. But the commission’s rules apparently don’t require commission advocates like Hadley, an assistant attorney general, to disclose or to recuse if they are conflicted.
CONFLICTED HADLEY MISLEADS ETHICS COMMISSION
Thus, Hadley went on to describe the ethics commission’s case, claiming wrongly that it boiled down to “only one count” – the same violation of lying under oath to obtain a Florida driver’s license that was sustained by the Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission in February. The CJSTC oversees law-enforcement certification and did not consider the failure to disclose issue.
The standards commission’s penalty was a “letter of counseling,” a reprimand.
Hadley successfully sought to package the ethics commission’s case and the police standards commission’s case as essentially duplicative, and deserving of similar penalties.
“Sheriff Tony has stipulated to receiving a public censure and reprimand to resolve this allegation, which is consistent with what occurred in the same matter but with the standards commission,” Hadley told commissioners.
To get there, however, Hadley breezed by the ethics commission’s other allegations, including Tony’s lack of honesty with the governor before his appointment. “There was no evidence the respondent [Tony] lied on the application regarding his appointment for sheriff because there was no application,” she told commissioners in describing what their predecessors determined three years earlier.
But that’s not what the 2022 commission alleged. As explained in the report of the preliminary investigation, undertaken when commissioners authorized it after hearing evidence in a closed executive session, the allegation was: “During the appointment process for service as Broward County Sheriff, the Respondent provided false information and/or did not disclose information concerning his drug use history and an arrest for murder.”
The report said the only documentation Tony provided to the governor’s office was a one-page biography that contained no mention of his prior drug use or his murder arrest in Philadelphia. Also, the governor’s office did not ask the FDLE to conduct a background check until the day before DeSantis appointed Tony sheriff. That brief check uncovered no arrests.
(On May 3, 1993, when Tony was 14 and living in a rough urban Philadelphia neighborhood, he shot and killed 18-year-old Hector “Chino” Rodriguez. Tony was charged with murder and briefly jailed. He claimed he shot in self-defense and was later acquitted at trial in juvenile court. All court records are sealed or have been expunged. Philadelphia police records obtained by the FDLE included witness statements that told a different story. They said Rodriguez was unarmed. Sources have said those witnesses failed to appear at Tony’s trial. An autopsy showed Rodriguez was shot six times, including a pair of slugs to the back of the head execution-style.)
Tony told an ethics commission investigator “he was contacted and met with the Governor and someone else from the Governor’s staff on the day prior to being appointed Sheriff. He said he never was asked to complete an application by the Governor’s office prior to or after being appointed,” the report says.
The governor’s director of appointments, Chelsea Aaron, told the ethics investigator, “She researched office records and determined that, like many appointments made early in the governor’s tenure, before changes were made to the process, no application or further information was sought from the Respondent prior to his appointment,” the report says.
That’s a less than reassuring insider’s statement about Gov. DeSantis’s on-the-job training.
A MISLEADING CHARACTERIZATION
Only Chairman Fuste seemed bothered by Hadley’s unstated conflict of interest. He asked, “I understand that your recommendation was prior no probable cause.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the commission found probable cause.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So given that step, you think that the settlement is in the best interest of the state?”
“When the [2022 ethics] commission found probable cause, that was just probable cause to believe there was a violation [regarding Tony’s driver’s license fraud] and that was only based on a preliminary investigation. Subsequent to that, there’s been a hearing on some of the same matters that have been resolved at the same place, Division of Administrative Hearings [DOAH], where this case would go [if the settlement is rejected]. So I do believe that it would be in the best interest in that it’s consistent with what has already occurred after a full hearing.”
But Hadley’s characterization was misleading. Her statement suggests the DOAH judge who presided over the CJSTC’s case against Tony actually considered the allegation that he was dishonest with the governor before his appointment as sheriff. He did not. The CJSTC’s complaint to DOAH alleged only that Tony had committed fraud while obtaining a Florida driver’s license.
TONY WAS A VICTIM?
Commissioners also heard from Tony’s Tallahassee attorney, Stephen Webster, who complained that Tony was, in fact, a victim who’d been treated unfairly.
“As soon as Sheriff Tony was appointed by Gov. DeSantis, his detractors have been coming after him nonstop, relentlessly. The state has literally wasted thousands and thousands of dollars investigating every aspect of his life going all the way back to when he was a juvenile for a matter he was exonerated of,” Webster said. “Enough is enough.”
Based on the investigative report they commissioned, the 2022 ethics commission found probable cause to believe that Tony did not disclose his murder arrest or drug use. The 2025 commission’s Friday vote made that probable cause finding go away without any public airing of the facts at a hearing or trial.
Commissioners Ashley Lukis, James Bush III and Linda Stewart voted to adopt the settlement. Fuste and Freddie Figgers, a Fort Lauderdale businessman, voted to reject it.
Stewart, Fuste and Figgers were appointed to the commission by Gov. DeSantis. Bush was appointed by the speaker of the House, Stewart by the president of the Senate.
Vice chair Tina Descovich and commissioners Paul Bain and Laird Lile were absent from the commission’s Friday vote.
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