Two Miami-Dade secretaries suspended over phone sex allegations
Malificynt
5/16/98
Two Miami-Dade secretaries suspended over phone sex allegations
MIAMI (AP) - One of three secretaries in the Miami-Dade state attorney's office
suspended over allegations they had phone sex with an alleged cocaine ring
hitman has been cleared of any wrongdoing and offered her old job back.
Sherry Rossbach will decide by June 1 whether she will go back to her job in
the state prosecutor's office, said her attorney, Robert Rosenblatt.
``We've always been confident she would be exonerated,'' said Rosenblatt.
But he said it was not immediately clear whether Ms. Rossbach, a secretary in
the office for 19 years, would return even though she was being offered all
back pay and the full restoration of her benefits.
``The embarrassment and shame were overwhelming,'' Rosenblatt said Friday.
In February, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle suspended Ms.
Rossbach and two other secretaries - Raquel Navarro and Barbara Abad - over
allegations they had taken part in phone sex with federal prisoner and
convicted killer Jorge Ayala.
Ayala, a former cocaine cartel hit man, is a key prosecution witness in the
government's drug and murder case against Griselda ``The Godmother'' Blanco.
Since Ayala is a witness in the case, and the secretaries had access to
prosecutors' files, investigators became concerned the prosecution could be
compromised.
A fourth secretary in the state attorney's office, Olga Cabrera, was also
suspended after reports she was also involved.
Ms. Abad was suspended for three days and has been back at work since then. The
other two secretaries are still suspended without pay, awaiting the final
outcome of the investigation.
The Collier County State Attorney's Office is conducting the investigation to
avoid a conflict of interest in Rundle's office.
Ayala gave Rosenblatt a two-page sworn statement saying Ms. Rossbach never
engaged in sexually explicit phone conversations with him.
The other secretaries made up the story about Ms. Rossbach after she overheard
their conversations and threatened to tell on them, Rosenblatt said.
Officials at Ms. Rossbach's former office expressed hope she would return to
work.
``We were delighted to be able to do this,'' said office spokesman Don Nelson.
``We'd like to see her reinstated as quickly as possible.''
Police have connected Ms. Blanco to at least 40 homicides as matriarch of a
ring run by her three eldest sons. Ayala, now 40, was accused of being one of
her most loyal soldiers when she ran one of the biggest and deadliest cocaine
rings of the 1980s.
In the current case, Ms. Blanco is charged in three Miami contract slayings in
1982. In 1993, after pleading guilty to being one of the shooters in the triple
murder 11 years earlier, Ayala was sentenced to life in prison and agreed to
cooperate with prosecutors.
That case was to have gone to trial this spring. But the phone sex allegations
forced Miami-Dade prosecutors to hand the case to a new prosecutor from
Orlando. A trial date has not yet been set.