"I need four votes here. I don't want any deferrals. I want it done today," Díaz de la Portilla allegedly said when a resolution to approve the project came to the city commission's table last year.
Díaz de la Portilla later summoned senior city staff to discuss delays in completing a deal that would allow the Centners to build out the recreational center. He allegedly directed city officials to work with Miami-area lobbyist and attorney William Riley Jr. until the late-night hours one evening in November 2022 to finalize the project.
Arthur Noriega, Miami's city manager, would go on to tell investigators that his staff felt they were not free to leave that night until the deal was done, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).
Investigators claim Díaz de la Portilla had ample incentive to push the deal through for the Centners. They say the controversial Miami power couple bankrolled the commissioner's high-priced stay at the luxury East Hotel in Miami and funneled tens of thousands of dollars to him and his political committees while the sports complex was under consideration by the City of Miami. The funds were routed through Riley, a lobbyist working on behalf of the Centners, investigators say.
Two days before a commission vote on the project, Riley's company wrote a $50,000 check to Díaz de la Portilla's political committee, according to FDLE.Two days before a commission vote on the project, the Centners' lobbyist wrote a $50,000 check to Díaz de la Portilla's political committee, FDLE says.
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The claims are laid out in a 26-page affidavit charging Díaz de la Portilla with multiple felony counts related to alleged acts of bribery and corruption. Charges of illegal campaign funding are also included in connection with Díaz de la Portilla's funding of his brother Renier's run for a county judgeship.
Neither Renier nor the Centners have been charged in the case.
Alex Díaz de la Portilla, who once served as the Republican majority leader in the Florida Senate, was arrested September 14 shortly after he attended a public meeting at city hall. Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended him from office the following day.
Díaz de la Portilla's attorney, Benedict Kuehne, characterized the charges as a politically motivated farce.
"This action has been timed and executed for shock and awe purposes, to create the maximum damage to Commissioner Díaz de la Portilla's campaign and his family," Kuehne said in a statement provided to New Times. "This is nothing more than prosecutorial abuse of our court system, abuse of process, and the unfortunate weaponization of law enforcement targeting an effective and conservative Republican lawmaker by a Democrat state attorney for political purposes and career advancement.""This action has been timed and executed for shock and awe purposes."
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FDLE alleges Díaz de la Portilla was less than a year into his term as Miami city commissioner when he began receiving illegal compensation and gifts from Riley, a lobbyist who was earning a $500,000 salary on the Centners' payroll.
Riley allegedly paid for an election-night "watch party" at the East Hotel during Renier's failed run for a Miami-Dade County Commission seat in 2020, amounting to $6,700 in room charges that included the decked-out penthouse suite. The lobbyist told investigators he had volunteered to foot the bill and believed the contributions would be reported by political committees controlled by Alex Díaz de la Portilla, according to the affidavit.
Investigators claim they later determined the Centners paid back Riley for the high-priced hotel party.
"Contrary to his statement to investigators, Riley was reimbursed for the payments at the East Hotel by the Centners, who at the time were seeking to gain the influence and support of Alex Díaz de la Portilla in furtherance of at least one of their objectives — the right to build an indoor recreational facility on city-owned land at Biscayne Park," FDLE claims.
According to his professional profile, David Centner grew up in the Miami area before heading off to Wharton Business School in Philadelphia. He made his fortune through early ventures in internet advertising and the sale of his toll-processing company, Highway Toll Administration LLC.
In 2019, Centner and his wife Leila opened the Centner Academy, a high-end private school that currently teaches pre-Kindergarten through high school, with elementary-grade tuition at more than $27,000 a year. The school would make global headlines in 2021 by way of a radical anti-vaccine policy under which teachers were barred from classrooms if they had received a COVID-19 shot.
Centner said in a statement that he is refraining from commenting on the criminal case at the request of prosecutors.
"With that being said, we wish to assure everybody that we are not being accused of any wrongful acts nor have we done anything wrong," Centner said.
David and Leila Centner attend Haute 100 Dinner Brickell City Centre on November 7, 2019 in Miami, Florida.
Photo by Romain Maurice/GettyImages
State investigators claim that between June 2020 and August 2022, money from the Centners was funneled to Díaz de la Portilla's two political committees via a Delaware company set up by Riley: Pristine DE LLC. The political committees received $245,000 in contributions from Riley's company and the Centners, according to the affidavit.
Most of the contributions cited by investigators were allegedly directed to the political committees in the months leading up to a 2020 vote on the Biscayne Park sports complex, including the $50,000 check payable to one of Díaz de la Portilla's committees two days before the vote.
On October 22, 2020, the Miami city commission adopted the resolution authorizing the city manager to negotiate with the David and Leila Centner Family Foundation to build out the recreational facility, according to the affidavit.
Final approval of the Centners' proposed facility did not come until April 2022, when the commission waived a competitive bidding requirement and gave the project a green light at a city meeting attended by Riley.
FDLE says that Díaz de la Portilla failed to file a public notice of his conflict of interest for both the October 2020 and April 2022 votes.
Riley was booked alongside Díaz de la Portilla at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami. He faces counts of criminal conspiracy, failure to disclose lobbying expenses, and supplying unlawful compensation.
Riley's attorney, Kendall Coffey, maintained that Riley's lobbying activities were legal. The lawyer said in a statement to the Real Deal that the arrest affidavit is "fraught with error" and that they would prove as much in court.
Díaz de la Portilla, a longtime Florida state senator and fixture in Miami politics, is charged with money laundering, bribery, criminal conspiracy, official misconduct, unlawful compensation, and failure to report gifts.FDLE says Díaz de la Portilla failed to file a public notice of his conflict of interest
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He's also facing a charge stemming from his political committees' allegedly illegal funding of his brother Renier's 2022 campaign for a county judge seat. The committees funded "tens of thousands of mailers featuring 'attack ads'" against Renier's opponent, Miami-Dade County Judge Fred Seraphin, FDLE alleges. The mailers demanded the release of the judge's "arrest record," an apparent reference to a decades-old never-prosecuted case against Seraphin while he was pursuing a law degree in the 1980s.
The mailers led to a bar complaint against Renier, who maintained at the time that Alex was the one behind the ads.
FDLE says one of Díaz de la Portilla's committees paid a printing company $72,000 on behalf of Renier's campaign in "an illegal subsidy" to produce attack ads against Seraphin.
If the contribution had been deemed an "independent expenditure," the committee would be in the clear, according to the court documents. But investigators claim Alex coordinated directly with Renier's campaign, meaning there was a $1,000 statutory cap on expenditures under Florida law.
Kuehne claimed that his client Díaz de la Portilla "has done nothing wrong."
"Rest assured, Commissioner Díaz de la Portilla will win this battle and continue his fight on behalf of the citizens of Miami," the attorney told New Times on the heels of the arrest.
