Former Florida lawmaker accused in ‘ghost’ candidate scheme to go to trial in February

ORLANDO, Fla. — Frank Artiles, the former lawmaker accused of paying a friend to run for a South Florida state Senate seat in 2020, is set to go to trial next February, nearly three years after his arrest.

Artiles faces four felony charges and a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said Monday during a hearing to set the date of the trial, which is scheduled to start Feb. 5 and expected to last up to two weeks.

Artiles, a political consultant who resigned from the Florida Senate in 2017 after going on a racist tirade against Black colleagues in a Tallahassee bar, was arrested in March 2021 after a months-long investigation. He has pleaded not guilty.

Alex Rodriguez, the friend Artiles is accused of giving nearly $45,000 to run in Senate District 37 in 2020, pleaded guilty in August 2021 and is expected to testify against Artiles at trial.

Prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen on Monday urged Judge Ariel Rodriguez and Artiles’ defense to set a trial date and stick with it.

“I’m telling the court, I’m ready,” VanderGiesen said.

Text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez are expected to be a key part of the state’s case. Artiles, now 50, approached Rodriguez in 2020 and offered him $50,000 to file to run as an independent, or no party affiliate, candidate in the Miami-area Senate race, according to charging documents from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

The scheme was intended to confuse voters and siphon votes away from the Democratic incumbent, José Javier Rodríguez, and help Republican Ileana Garcia, who won by 32 votes.

But Artiles’ attorney, Frank Quintero, said Rodriguez deleted some of his text messages after the investigation was underway. A data expert helped uncover those old messages, he said.

Alex Rodriguez was one of three independent “ghost” candidates who filed to run in competitive Senate races in 2020 and did not campaign but were promoted in a series of ads, arranged by GOP operatives, that portrayed them as progressives.

A pair of political committees that paid for the ads received their funding from a dark-money nonprofit run by political operatives with the Alabama-based consulting firm Matrix LLC, who worked closely during the 2020 election cycle with executives for Florida Power & Light.

FPL has denied any involvement in the scheme. But the now-former Matrix operatives behind the “ghost” candidate ad blitz had also worked to undermine critics of the utility including José Javier Rodríguez.

Jestine Iannotti, who ran as an independent in Central Florida’s Senate District 9 in 2020, is also still awaiting trial on campaign finance charges, as is political consultant Eric Foglesong, who helped launch her campaign. Both have hearings scheduled later this month.

A third person arrested in connection with Iannotti’s campaign, former Longwood mayor and Seminole County GOP chair Ben Paris, was convicted of a misdemeanor at trial in September. He is currently appealing his conviction.

In the Miami case, prosecutors have indicated their investigation goes beyond Artiles and Alex Rodriguez, though no one else has been charged.

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