A Miami politician whose downfall seemed inevitable | Steve Bousquet

It’s surely the second most popular mug shot in South Florida.

Alex Diaz de la Portilla is dressed in a red prison jumpsuit, a color reserved for high-profile inmates, as he stares blankly at the camera. With his jowly appearance, he bears a passing resemblance to the late actor Paul Sorvino, who played a likeable bad guy in “Goodfellas” and other mob movies.

This 58-year-old career politician, long known by the shorthand moniker of DLP, is, at the moment, a Miami city commissioner and former Republican state legislator who’s in very serious trouble, even by the lax standards of Miami politics.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested him Thursday and charged him with 11 crimes, including money laundering, bribery, unlawful compensation, criminal conspiracy and official misconduct. FDLE even charged him with one count of accepting a campaign contribution in excess of legal limits, an unheard-of violation in Florida.

DLP is obviously innocent until proven guilty, but if he’s convicted, this laundry list of felonies is enough to send him away for a long time.

A Miami attorney and political associate, William Riley Jr., 48, also was charged.

They are accused of accepting more than $15,000 in unreported payments for DLP’s brother Renier’s unsuccessful campaign for a Miami-Dade judgeship in 2022. The Miami blog Political Cortadito unraveled other elements of the case, describing a pay-to-play deal in which the commissioner voted “to basically give Biscayne Park away to a private school whose lobbyist paid for the commissioner’s accommodations and a vacation, among other things.”

There’s much more to know here. The arrest warrant has not been released because the investigation is ongoing, prosecutors said.

The case is noteworthy because it delves into the slimy subterranean world of Florida political committees, which have received far too little attention from law enforcement — and the news media, for that matter. We have repeatedly written about the grotesque excesses of PCs with their unrestricted donations and lack of spending controls that allow money-grubbing politicians to use them as personal slush funds.

As an FDLE press release noted, “Further investigation determined Diaz de la Portilla also operated and controlled two political committees used not only to support his brother’s campaign, but also for personal expenditures.”

If that’s a crime, then a lot more legislators are in trouble.

Diaz de la Portilla controlled two political money machines that together raised more than $3 million from special interests, mostly in Miami. Based on what went down Thursday, the names of the committees are perversely ironic: Proven Leadership for Miami-Dade and Local Leadership for Miami-Dade County.

As DLP left jail after bonding out, he insisted: “I’m honest.” He claimed to be a victim of a partisan witch hunt and lashed out at Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor, who has been assigned to prosecute him.

“This is a work of fiction by a Democratic state attorney targeting a Republican city commissioner,” Diaz de la Portilla said.

Pryor, a Democrat, has the case, but that’s a decision Gov. Ron DeSantis made at the request of Miami-Dade prosecutor Kathy Fernandez Rundle, who said she and defendant Riley’s family have a “long-standing personal and professional relationship.”

Two of Pryor’s assistant state attorneys, Catherine Maus and Janine Rice, will prosecute the case, FDLE said.

For anyone who has followed Diaz de la Portilla’s career, the question for authorities is, what took you so long?

This wily political character is a shrewd survivor of Miami’s notoriously brutal politics who flourished in Tallahassee’s pay-to-play culture for 16 years.

But as years of stories in The Miami Herald and elsewhere documented, he stiffed creditors, skipped legislative votes and flouted state campaign finance laws so recklessly that he was once fined a record $311,000 — a sum whittled down to almost zero by an appeals court.

I once wrote how three of his Democratic Senate colleagues covered for him by pushing his button dozens of times, recording him as voting in Tallahassee when he was actually in Miami, a blatant violation of Senate rules that went unpunished.

Diaz de la Portilla is up for re-election in November and the candidate qualifying period closes next Saturday. He’s certain to be suspended from office by DeSantis, and the Florida Democratic Party demanded he resign immediately.

But as of Friday, his smiling face was still on the city of Miami website as District 1 commissioner, where his biography describes him as a champion of “infrastructure, parks and cleanliness.”

Yes, cleanliness. Because Miami.

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.