Trial in Florida ‘ghost candidate’ case set to begin

A criminal case that opened a window to a plot to help Republicans win important 2020 Florida Senate races by propping up fake progressive Senate candidates with shadowy money is headed to trial, with a South Florida political operative fighting the charges. State prosecutors are expected to claim in court this week that former Miami state Sen. Frank Artiles, a Republican, masterminded a scheme to tilt the results of a tight race in Miami by recruiting and paying a straw candidate to siphon votes away from the Democratic incumbent. They’ll say Artiles puppeteered a machine parts salesman who never campaigned but still shaped the outcome of the race — garnering more than 6,000 votes as an independent thanks to anonymous financial support and his last name, which he shared with the incumbent. After a recount, Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez lost his seat to Republican Ileana Garcia by 32 votes.

Artiles has pleaded not guilty to felony campaign finance violations and to submitting and swearing to false voter information. The man accused of accepting a bribe from Artiles in exchange for putting his name on the ballot has been fined $20,000 and formally reprimanded by Gov. Ron DeSantis for violating campaign finance laws in a separate ethics case. Jury selection begins Monday. During expected opening statements, state prosecutors will lay out a timeline explaining how they say Artiles convinced Alexis Pedro Rodriguez to run for the legislative seat by promising him $50,000, most of which was secretly funneled to him in cash, gifts and purchases.

They’ll say the former Marine and state senator coached the candidate on how to file his paperwork and change his party affiliation, and even used a credit card to cover tuition costs for the candidate’s daughter and bought him machine parts at a Caterpillar store. But it was Artiles who was the stooge, his attorneys will argue. They intend to paint Alexis Rodriguez as the architect of a plot to bleed Artiles of tens of thousands of dollars and make the case that Rodriguez engineered a plan to profit from the sales of thousands of much-needed gloves and masks that Artiles managed to acquire when people were desperate during the early days of the pandemic. Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Tim VanderGiesen, who will prosecute the case, chose not to comment for this story. Artiles’ defense attorney Jose Quiñon also declined to comment.

Whatever Artiles’ fate, his long-awaited tribunal is sure to titillate political observers: The alleged scheme, backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars from political sources, has connections to Senate Republicans’ top campaign consultant and is one of several ongoing criminal cases involving so-called “ghost candidates” recruited to run in the 2020 election and sold to voters under false premises. Over the years, the public corruption investigation has roped prominent players in Florida politics into the spotlight as prosecutors at one point appeared to be targeting Republican and Democratic operati.