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Miami Police Ex-chief Denied Pension
By Luiya Yanez, The Miami Herald
September 16, 2004
Former Miami Police Chief Donald Warshaw is not entitled to his six-figure annual police pension, forfeited when he was convicted of diverting $70,000 from a charity for his personal use, a state appellate court ruled Wednesday.
In a 2-1 decision, a Third District Court of Appeal panel of judges backed last year's decision by Miami's Firefighters & Police Officers Retirement Trust to stop paying Warshaw's pension of about $128,800 a year.
Attorney Ivy Ginsberg, representing Warshaw, said the matter is far from settled.
''We're planning to move for a rehearing by the entire court,'' she said, encouraged by the strong dissent of Judge Gerald B. Cope, who claimed the wrong legal standard was applied.
In a 15-page opinion, Judges Alan Schwartz and John Fletcher, who made up the majority, described as ''thoroughly disingenuous'' Warshaw's reasoning.
They also rejected the core of Warshaw's appeal -- that the funds he was convicted of embezzling were not really public money but the private funds of Do The Right Thing, a nonprofit headed by the chief and meant to reward teens for good civic deeds.
Warshaw, who retired as police chief to become city manager in 1998, avoided a conviction for using public office to steal public money as part of his plea deal with the U.S. attorney's office. Such a conviction would automatically have forfeited his pension, according to Florida statues.
Instead, he pleaded guilty to one charge of federal mail fraud in 2001 and served a year in federal prison. Warshaw, 61, was released in 2002.
''Warshaw points out that his federal conviction was for mail fraud not for defrauding Do The Right Thing,'' Judge Schwartz wrote.
``In simple parlance, Warshaw argues, no city public funds were embezzled or stolen by him, just Do The Right Thing's private funds. We reject this thoroughly disingenuous argument.''
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