Oscar Rivero Screws The Poor

Oscar Rivero, charged onto Miami's affordable-housing scene four years ago with spectacular promises to build houses for poor families who have languished for years in crumbling and unsafe homes. He amassed an elaborate web of properties, pledging 24 units on the banks of a canal north of Miami; 54 in a midrise in Little Havana; 42 on a tree-lined corner of South Miami.

With his lofty plans and key connections to County Hall power brokers, Rivero quickly became a favored developer of local housing agencies, collecting nearly $3 million in public money. As an aide to Mayor Alex Penelas, Rivero hobnobbed with political elites and snared coveted spots on public boards.

But with the public funds that Oscar Rivero got for building houses for the poor, he is building an 11,000-square-foot Coral Gables estate that includes a wine cellar, library, billiard room, elevator, pool, spa and fountain -- plus a grand foyer, three stories high, fixed with Mediterranean columns and a spiral staircase. It is Oscar Rivero's dream house; and the only thing that he has built in the past four years.

The land where Rivero promised dozens of homes for the poor is still vacant, cordoned off by fences; eyesores in already distressed neighborhoods. Rivero hasn't delivered a single house even though he's held on to millions of dollars in public money -- while buying personal properties and an office for more than $4.9 million.

Rivero and his wife purchased five houses in the past two years in South Miami, plus the estate. One of Rivero's companies also bought a $1.2 million office building in Coral Gables where he would oversee his growing enterprises. Rivero is at the center of a scandal rocking county government and a community desperately in need of decent housing for the working poor. Miami-Dade prosecutors are poring over his financial records to track how he spent the public dollars. Rivero is scrambling to come up with cash -- he's put up three houses for sale and is borrowing from banks and family members, records and interviews show.

So far, Rivero has returned $1.5 million, about half of what he owes. But State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle says the return of money does not absolve Rivero and other developers if public funds were used fraudulently.

Community leaders and housing advocates are incensed. At rallies organized after The Miami Herald's recent investigation revealed a cadre of developers have not repaid the Housing Agency for houses never built, protesters have held up pictures of Rivero as emblematic of all that's gone wrong in public housing. ''The harm is so deep,'' said lawyer Jorge Luis Lopez, who was chief of staff to Penelas when Rivero was an aide in the office. "Sometimes people believe they are above the law. They're not -- and they need to be held accountable.''

During his college years, Rivero landed a $550-a-week job as a junior aide to Penelas, then a county commissioner -- a connection that would serve him for years and introduce him to the key County Hall figures now involved with Rivero in the unfolding housing scandal. Penelas declined to comment.

In 2000, Rivero himself landed in public office, becoming a board member at the Miami Parking Authority, run by longtime friend Art Noriega. The job for the first time gave Rivero the power to approve multimillion-dollar government contracts. As chairman, he would vote for contracts for business partner Alben Duffie's development company and a security firm that employs County Commission Chairman Joe Martinez as executive director, The Miami Herald found.

Gov. Jeb Bush selected Rivero to join then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in the back of the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana to dine with a small group that included legislators, lobbyists and activists to hash out issues affecting the Cuban community. He even was appointed to Miami's prestigious Orange Bowl Committee. He also landed a spot on the county's Housing Finance Authority, which provides tax-exempt bonds for affordable housing. His sponsor: newly elected County Commissioner Rebeca Sosa. ''They told me he was an attorney, a respected person,'' said Sosa, who said she cannot recall who recommended Rivero.

He began pushing to fund Ward Towers, an elderly housing complex being developed by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency and the nonprofit MDHA Development Corp., created a year earlier by county commissioners.
At the time, Housing Finance Authority Executive Director Patricia Braynon said she was puzzled at Rivero's insistence to release the cash. What she didn't know at the time was that two of Rivero's associates were on the receiving end of the deal, Braynon said. One was Rene Rodriguez, who had been appointed to lead the Housing Agency in 1996 under Penelas, then the county's influential mayor and Rivero's former boss. Rodriguez was not only the director of the Housing Agency, but president of the county-funded Development Corp. Rivero's other tie to the deal: Duffie, a longtime county employee and board member of the Development Corp. A year after he joined the Housing Finance Authority, Rivero left to become a member of the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority, appointed by Jeb Bush.

With Rodriguez at the helm of the Housing Agency, Rivero quickly became a player at a department brimming with tens of millions of dollars from Miami-Dade's affordable housing construction fund. In 2002, Rivero created a company called Riverside Homes of South Florida and promised to build 24 houses along a canal in a poor neighborhood in the shadow of Interstate 95. He told the Housing Agency in his application for the money, "Riverside Homes is ready to proceed NOW!''

The first check: $500,000, dated Sept. 25, 2002. Records show Rodriguez ordered the payment even though the move violated Housing Agency policy, which prohibits advances to developers who have not started construction. At least two Housing Agency administrators say they objected, but Rodriguez wouldn't budge. Rodriguez and Rivero had been golfing buddies.

''The circles are very tight there, in government,'' said Lopez, Penelas' former chief of staff. "There's a line that often gets crossed.''
Money continued to flow to Riverside Homes, with the Housing Agency sending three more payments for a total of $360,000, including the most recent allotment of $96,000 in December. That money came just months after a Housing Agency staffer warned that no work had begun on Riverside Homes -- three years after the first $500,000 was paid. ''The project has not started,'' the Housing Agency's Alberto Diaz wrote.

Despite the setbacks with Riverside, another one of Rivero's companies -- this one called Rivers Development Group -- received $816,000 from the Housing Agency for the proposed 54-unit Las Rosas Apartments in Little Havana. Again, the money was paid before construction started. Again, the project never materialized.

In Rivero's four-year run with the Housing Agency, which continued even after Rodriguez resigned in mid-2004, he pitched at least five more projects and was approved for $4.9 million, records show. But the projects went nowhere.

While Rivero was wheeling and dealing, he was living in a Brickell Avenue condo, attending political bashes and teeing off at charity golf tournaments. In 2003, he met Yvette Aleman, from a prominent Cuban-American family. They married a year later and bought the land for their 11,000-square-foot estate.

At the same time, Rivero was turning to three new agencies for affordable housing money. One of them was the city of Miami, which paid $530,000 in 2005 for the Las Rosas project.

''It was a promising, feasible project,'' said Barbara Gomez-Rodriguez, who runs Miami's Department of Community Development. She is married to Rene Rodriguez from the county Housing Agency. Rivero also tapped the county's Office of Community and Economic Development and was awarded a total of $750,000 in 2003 and 2004 for Riverside Homes.

Finally, Rivero turned to the MDHA Development Corp., founded by Rene Rodriguez, with Duffie as a longtime board member. Rivero and Duffie had worked and invested together in earlier ventures, partnering in at least two development projects at Metrorail stations, The Miami Herald found.

Rivero convinced the Development Corp. to contribute $750,000 for a 46-unit project called Sunset Pointe Apartments in South Miami. As the dollars poured in for his affordable housing ventures, Rivero and his wife bought six houses between 2004 and 2006, including the estate property, records show.

The Housing Agency began demanding its money back. So did the city of Miami, which learned four months after Rivero received the $530,000 that he no longer could build the elderly rental complex because of rising construction costs. Finally, his failed projects were detailed in July by The Miami Herald, sparking a public outcry. Prosecutors subpoenaed Rivero's bank and land records to trace the money. (excerpt from Miami Herald)

Commentary: So another scumbag robs the taxpayers of Miami and gets away with it. Even if he returns all the money, he has been using that money without paying any interest on it for the past four years. Not to mention that all the poor people that were promised houses got screwed. This is the legacy of the prominent Cuban families. The same corruption and abuses that brought communism to Cuba. These corrupt abusers of the public trust belong in prison.

Update: Oscar Rivero was arrested a few days after this post. Now the question is whether he gets convicted and sent to prison for several years (like the shitbag deserves) or whether the fix is in and his expensive lawyers get him some bullshit probation deal. Fuck him and hopefully he will do hard time. The houses he promised to build for the poor never got built (not a single one). The only house that got built was the luxury home he paid for with the 4.9 million taxpayer dollars that he got from various government agencies.