As Joel Greenberg’s star rose in Florida, Matt Gaetz became a vocal ally
ORLANDO — Joel Greenberg’s political career looked promising just over a year ago: He was set to run for reelection as Seminole County’s tax collector — pledging nearly half a million dollars of his Bitcoin investments to his campaign — and was even contemplating a run for Congress against U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy.
Having won elected office at just 31 years old in 2016, he
had since expressed boredom with the job but seemed to relish his connections
with people of wealth and influence, including developer and former state
legislator Chris Dorworth.
But few were as visible a friend or as vocal an advocate for
Greenberg — over four years of rolling controversies that earned him
distinction as an iconoclast on the political right, but infamy among many on
the left and center — as his friend from the Panhandle with a similar
reputation, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.
During an interview on WFLA News Radio in June 2017, Gaetz
said Greenberg should run for Congress against Murphy. By then, both Greenberg
and Murphy had been in office for just six months.
“Joel Greenberg has gone into the Seminole County Tax
Collector’s Office. He’s taken it by storm,” Gaetz said. “And he’s been a
disruptor … And if you look at what people want in the country right now, they
want that disruptor. And they want someone who is not going to adhere to the
dogma that has strangled progress in Washington, D.C., for a generation.”
Over the years that followed, Greenberg and Gaetz, a fellow
Republican who represents Fort Walton Beach, were often spotted having dinner
and drinks together at Seminole restaurants and bars. Former employees of the
tax collector’s office said Greenberg often bragged how Gaetz visited him at
his Heathrow home.
Greenberg also brought Gaetz into the tax collector’s
administrative office in Lake Mary in late 2017 or early 2018, showing him
around and introducing him to various employees, according to Alan Byrd, a
spokesman for the office.
When Greenberg launched his reelection bid, Gaetz was the
first person to donate, chipping in the personal maximum of $1,000 on June 9.
Two weeks later, Greenberg stood shackled in a federal
courtroom in downtown Orlando, accused of stalking an election rival and
identity theft. The federal case against Greenberg, who resigned from office
the day after his initial arrest, has since ballooned.
And this week, that case, too, linked Greenberg to Gaetz,
when The New York Times reported that the Panhandle congressman was being
investigated for potential sex trafficking offenses — a probe that branched off
from the Greenberg investigation.
Gaetz has not been charged with a crime and has denied all
wrongdoing, claiming that the existence of the investigation into him was
leaked to derail a separate investigation into a blackmail scheme targeting his
family, with which they had been cooperating.
Today, Greenberg sits in the Orange County Jail facing 33
federal charges, including stalking, identity theft, wire fraud, bribery, theft
of government property, conspiracy to bribe a public official, creating fake
IDs and sex trafficking of a minor.
Talking to an Orlando Sentinel reporter last fall, by then
already facing charges that could cost his freedom, he lamented the loss of his
friends.
“No one wants to talk to me anymore,” he said, with his
voice breaking. “You have no idea what I’ve been through, and what I’m going
through now.”
Greenberg was elected in 2016 as a newcomer to Seminole
County’s political scene after defeating longtime incumbent tax collector Ray
Valdes in the Republican primary then beating a write-in opponent in the
general.
Largely unknown at the time, but capable of self-funding his
campaign as the scion of a dental empire owned by his father, Greenberg railed
against Valdes for buying and selling tax-delinquent properties that are
handled by the tax collector’s office.
Soon after taking office in January 2017, Greenberg
redesigned and modernized the tax collector’s website and opened a new branch
office in Winter Springs for rural residents in east Seminole.
But his term was quickly marred by controversies, including
anti-Muslim social media posts, proposing to sell off tax collector properties,
allowing his employees to openly carry guns, using his tax collector badge to
pull over a speeder, using his position to try to get out of a ticket, giving
lucrative contracts and positions to close friends and using his office to set
up blockchain business.
Amid all that, within a couple of years of taking office,
Greenberg told a Sentinel reporter that he was bored with the office because it
involved too much redundancy and offered little opportunity to be creative or
break out into new business ventures. State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando
Democrat, also recalled Greenberg telling her he was bored with the job.
Greenberg then became active in Seminole politics.
In December 2017, he joined a group of Seminole residents
pushing for a referendum to elect a countywide mayor, similar to the system in
Orange County. The group also wanted county commission races to be nonpartisan,
represent individual districts rather than countywide, and be limited to
two-year terms. The plan eventually fizzled out.
Greenberg often mentioned to local leaders how his family
was wealthy and powerful. His father, Andrew Greenberg, started Greenberg
Dental in the 1980s, which now has 92 offices across Florida. However, there is
no record of his family ever being involved in local politics.
According to state financial disclosure forms required from
all elected officials, Joel Greenberg listed his worth at the of end of 2019 at
nearly $5.9 million. That included $5.5 million worth of stock in his family’s
business AWG Inc., $85,500 in jewelry and $276,000 in bank accounts.
Greenberg also soon began hob-knobbing with well-connected
people — often with Gaetz at his side.
An image he posted on Twitter on July 8, 2017, showed
Greenberg and Gaetz standing next to Roger Stone, the infamous Trump and Nixon
associate and provocateur.
A video posted on Facebook in January 2019, shot at a
get-together at Dorworth’s Heathrow home, shows Greenberg alongside Gaetz and
John Morgan, the wealthy attorney and medical marijuana advocate, as they
celebrated Gov. Ron DeSantis’ directive to end a ban on smokable marijuana.
That June, Greenberg’s wife, Abby Greenberg, posted a slew
of photos on Facebook featuring her husband, Dorworth, his wife and Gaetz at
various locations in Washington, D.C., including with the first couple at the
White House and touring the Capitol Dome.
In one photo, Gaetz beamed in sunglasses as he posed in
front of Donald and Melania Trump, holding Greenberg’s daughter in his arms.
In a text message to a Sentinel reporter last July, Dorworth
declined to discuss his relationship with Greenberg, saying only, “Joel is a
friend of mine.” Dorworth, a partner with the lobbying firm Ballard Partners,
did not respond to a text message this week asking if he is still friends with
Greenberg.
Eskamani, the state representative who had previously feuded
with Greenberg over his anti-Muslim social media comments, recalled receiving a
voice mail from Greenberg on July 4, 2019. In the recording, Greenberg said:
“Hi, Anna” and then handed off the phone to Gaetz, who told her that she is the
“future of the Democratic Party,” Eskamani recalled.
“It was super weird,” she said, adding that most
Trump-aligned officials that day were attending Trump’s “Salute to America”
celebration at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., while Gaetz was hanging
out with Greenberg in Florida.
In the latest and fourth indictment filed by the U.S.
attorney’s office this week, prosecutors say that Greenberg — just days after
he was arrested on the initial stalking charges, which was quickly followed by
his resignation from public office — restarted two of his former companies and
used them to obtain more than $432,000 in fraudulent loans meant to help small
businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.
Greenberg also is accused of diverting more than $400,000 in
public money from the tax collector’s office into a private bank account and
into a business he set up to buy and sell cryptocurrencies and machines used to
mine cryptocurrencies. An arraignment is scheduled for April 9.
Greenberg also faces charges from three previous grand jury
indictments that he stalked a political opponent, illegally used a state
database and old driver’s licenses to create fake IDs and sex trafficked of a
minor. He has pleaded not guilty to those 14 previous charges.
His trial is scheduled for mid-June in federal court in
downtown Orlando. However, that could be delayed. If convicted on all counts,
he could likely face decades in federal prison.
How the investigation of Greenberg led federal authorities
to also take aim at Gaetz is unclear. The New York Times report on the probe
said it centered on allegations that Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a
17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him.
Greenberg is charged by the U.S. attorney’s office of using
a confidential state database to produce false identification that facilitated
his sex trafficking of a girl between the ages of 14 and 17.
No charges have been brought against Gaetz, and it’s unknown
if the allegations are connected.
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