Controversial state Senate race was in 2020. ‘Ghost candidate’ trial is set for 2024

More than two years after former state Sen. Frank Artiles was arrested on campaign finance and other charges for his involvement in the “ghost candidate” scheme that interfered with the outcome of a state Senate race in the 2020 election, a Miami judge has set a Feb. 5 trial date.

Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Ariel Rodriguez on Monday scheduled the jury trial for two weeks next year, and imposed an Oct. 2 deadline for all discovery in the case. Rodriguez warned that if either party delays in producing the case documents needed in the case, he would set another hearing to keep the trial on schedule.

Artiles, 50, has pleaded not guilty to campaign finance charges alleging he paid his friend, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez, a Boca Raton auto parts dealer, to run as a no-party affiliated candidate in the Senate District 37 race against Miami-Dade Democratic Sen. José Javier Rodriguez, who was seeking a second term.

Although Alex Rodriguez did no campaigning, he was buoyed by a covert campaign that paid for mailers that made him look like a progressive Democrat. He received more than 6,000 votes in the race, giving Republican challenger Ileana Garcia, a former TV personality, a 34-vote victory.

Following the money

The two-year investigation by State Attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle uncovered an elaborate web of phony organizations designed to shield the source of the funds used to finance the so-called “ghost candidate” scheme and evidence showing that Artiles paid Alex Rodriguez more than $44,000.

Last year, Alexis Pedro Rodriguez took a plea deal in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors. He is expected to testify at Artiles’ trial. Investigators say Artiles was paid $90,000 by the Gainesville political consulting firm Data Targeting, a political consulting firm hired to help Republicans retain their majority in the state Senate.

READ MORE: No-party candidate in Miami election fraud case takes plea deal, apologizes to voters

Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, told the court on Monday that he will dispute the allegations and will be turning over “thousands and thousands of pages” of documents that challenge their conclusions, including information he said that had be “deleted from iPhones,” and a list of “15 to 20” witnesses that will include a deposition of Alexis Pedro Rodriguez’s former partner.

Quintero said in an interview that he will show that Alex Rodriguez “was a fraudster a con artist” who lied to Artiles and deleted phone messages after he became a cooperating witness for the state.

“Artiles is an absolute victim of this guy,’’ Quintero said.

If convicted, Artiles faces up to five years in prison for each of three felony counts.

Quintero said he would not answer why Artiles went to the effort of submitting Alex Rodriguez’s election paperwork to run as a no-party-affiliated candidate or why he was recruited to run in the race.

“I’m not going to get into that. That’s part of the case,’’ he said.

Defense attorney claims text messages deleted

He told the court that after conducting a forensic review of Artiles’ text messages he has evidence that Rodriguez deleted text messages from his phone after he became a cooperating witness for the state.

Assistant State Attorney Tim VanderGiesen, who has led the investigation, said he would be ready for trial as early as October and accused Artiles’ lawyers of delay.

“Your honor can see what’s going on,’’ he said. “They’re not giving me discovery and then saying that I need more time.”

He said that Artiles’ lawyers have had Artiles’ phone records “since the inception of the case. He’s their client. So now they’re telling the court, they need to turn something from his cloud to the state.

“Well, it’s been two and a half years into the case and they could have provided me that for two and a half years. They waited. Now they’re telling the court the state’s going to need more time. It’s based on their timeline. It’s not based on mine.”

Quintero told the Herald/Times that VanderGeisen was “absolutely wrong” about the timeline. He said Quintero downloaded the text messages from Artiles’ phone over a year ago but only after deposing Alex Rodriguez in June did they decide to conduct the forensic audit.

He said he is confident he will persuade a jury that Artiles was lied to by Alex Rodriguez and should not be found guilty.

“If this was a normal case, nine times out of 10, after reviewing this stuff, the state would dismiss the charges,’’ he said. “But this is not a normal case — because it’s political.”

Mary Ellen Klas can be reached meklas@miamiherald.com and @MaryEllen Klas