Ex-Seminole Tax Collector Joel Greenberg was stealing customer IDs ‘until his last day in office,' feds say

When federal agents raided the Lake Mary home of then-Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg in late June, they said they found in his wallet a pair of fake driver’s licenses he’d manufactured using the personal information of customers who’d surrendered old IDs to his office.

But evidence that Greenberg was habitually exploiting his public office to create bogus identification cards didn’t stop there, prosecutors say.

Inside Greenberg’s work vehicle, agents found his backpack, which held three more licenses from Canada, Virginia and Florida, belonging to Seminole County residents who’d recently obtained new Florida licenses.

Meanwhile, employees of the Tax Collector’s office told agents they’d seen Greenberg taking surrendered licenses from the agency’s “shred basket” prior to their destruction. When asked what he was doing, Greenberg gave fishy explanations — which federal authorities now say were lies.

Greenberg also is suspected of using Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database “to conduct inappropriate and unauthorized searches of various individuals using his account and another employee’s account.”

Those details and others — which prosecutors say prove Greenberg was working to make more-believable fake IDs — emerged in a Monday court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, which is prosecuting him on identity theft and fraud charges.

Greenberg “had a common scheme and plan to use his position as the Seminole County Tax Collector to steal surrendered licenses that he would use to produce fake driver’s licenses for himself....And plan to pretend to be people other than himself and to assume their identities,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg in the court filing.

It remains unclear, however, for what specific purpose Greenberg was allegedly creating the falsified ID cards.

According to the document, Greenberg’s “thefts of surrendered driver’s licenses continued until his last day in office,” June 24, the day after the first federal indictment against him was unsealed. That day, an employee reported to agents having seen surrendered licenses in Greenberg’s office.

“The employee asked Greenberg why he had those surrendered licenses,” Handberg wrote. “Greenberg responded that the collection of licenses was a ‘lost and found,' which was another lie.”

When he had been caught taking licenses on an earlier occasion, Greenberg had given a worker “an excuse that had something to do with ‘demographics’” — also a lie, Handberg wrote.

Also found in Greenberg’s office during the search: A copy of a printout from the DAVID system — a database of driver information typically used for law- and traffic-enforcement purposes — with the personal information of a Seminole resident who had gotten a new driver’s license Dec. 12.

“The date that the document from DAVID was printed was December 13, 2019, which is consistent with Greenberg researching another potential identity theft victim,” Handberg wrote.

Greenberg also had pieces of card stock for concealed weapons permits in his office, federal authorities say.

That and other evidence “prove[s] that Greenberg was practicing at producing identifications using concealed weapons permit cardstock and that he was experimenting in using the security stripe for concealed weapons permits in an effort to make the identifications that he was producing appear to be legitimate,” Handberg wrote.

The raids of Greenberg’s home and office came after a federal grand jury indicted him for stalking a political rival, Brian Beute, a fine arts teacher at Trinity Preparatory School who is running to replace Greenberg in the Aug. 18 Republican primary.

According to Handberg’s latest filing, letters that Greenberg caused to be sent to Trinity Prep, written as though they came from a “concerned student,” accused Beute of the “rape of a male student who came to [Beute] to seek counsel on the student’s sexuality.”

Beute, the letters claimed, had videotaped one of the encounters.

Local authorities found no evidence that Beute had engaged in any criminal activity against a child. Greenberg also created an impostor Twitter account for Beute which falsely indicated he was a segregationist and white supremacist, according to federal authorities.

This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.

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