Article Courtesy of The
Miami Herald
By Devoun Cetoute
Published December 8, 2023
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More than a year after leaders of Florida’s largest homeowners association,
which is located in Kendall, were charged in a money-laundering scheme, another
arrest was announced Friday in the ongoing fraud saga.
Kevin Leonardo Alzate,
32, was charged with perjury by contradictory statements,
fabricating physical evidence and resisting an officer
without violence. He was booked into the Turner Guilford
Knight Correctional Center on Friday and still remains
there.
“I am thoroughly elated. This is what I would consider a
early holiday gift for the residents of the Hammocks who
have been tortured and brutalized for the last seven years,”
said Don Kearns, a 29-year resident who is president of the
Hammocks Community Association’s Advisory Board of
Directors.
According to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, Alzate
played an integral role in a plot to steal $2 million from
the Hammock’s HOA bank accounts over several years.
Alzate is the cousin of former HOA President Marglli Gallego,
who was one of the five people first arrested and charged in
November 2022 for several financial crimes victimizing the
HOA, the state attorney’s office said in a release Friday.
The other four charged
are former board president Monica Ghilardi, former board
member Myriam Rodgers, former board member Yoleidis Lopez
Garcia and Gallego’s husband, Jose Antonio Gonzalez. Trial
dates for those four and Gallego have yet to be set. |
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Miami-Dade County prosecutors arrested several
members and vendors of the Hammocks Community Association, accusing
them of engaging in a complicated $2 million fraud.
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“Not only did Mr. Alzate’s alleged activities allow our charged HOA Board
members to continue their thefts, but the actions were a deliberate slap in the
face to our Circuit Court Judges and our courts,” said State Attorney Katherine
Fernandez Rundle in the statement.
Kearns said he is still surprised at the “depth and complexity of this criminal
enterprise.”
“My holiday hope for the Hammocks is that this is the first of many arrests,” he
said.
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