Venice Housing Authority secretary fired over allegations of theft
The last of the holdover employees from Peter Lopez' failed regime is let go after being accused of stealing her own rent check and falsifying her rental records
-- John Patten, 05/08/07
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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Maritza Lago, Venice Housing Authoritiy's secretary and interim office manager by default, was fired on Monday by the housing authority's director, Tom Madsen. Madsen fired Lago after accusing her of falsifying her time card, falsifying her own residential paperwork and stealing back her own rent check.

In a letter sent out last night to the VHA board of directors, Madsen wrote:

"I began going through the rent checks Maritza had prepared to be deposited in our bank. I found 13 checks, totaling $2,256. I asked her to confirm the $2,256 number from the daily close reports she generated. She began searching for this report, and while she was looking, I asked her if she had paid her rent today. I reviewed the 13 checks and could not find her check. I asked her about this, and she said, "Oh, here it is," and pulled it out of her purse. I observed that this check was crumpled up and also had the Community Bank endorsement stamp used by the VHA stamped on the reverse side of this check. I asked Maritza if this check (her rent check) had been recorded in the system as being received today. Maritza was never able to locate the daily close report which would shown all of the checks received and recorded today."

Additionally, Madsen accused Lago of stealing from the VHA by falsely inflating her number of worked hours in order to giver herself a 40-hour-a-week paycheck while reporting in her residential file that she was only working 24 hours a week. In addition to working for the housing authority, Lago is a renter at the VHA, where rent is determined on an ability-to-pay basis for each resident.

"In addition to this attempted theft of her rent check, I reviewed the time slip Maritza submitted today. This recorded more hours than Maritza worked from April 26 on. Maritza has been drawing bi-weekly checks totaling 80 hours per week during the last several months. Her file shows her rent determination to be based on working 48 hours biweekly during this period. This had the effect of greatly reducing her rent. This determination was one of the main functions of the Resident Services Coordinator, and there can be no excuse for her failure to update her own file."

Reached by phone this morning, Madsen refused to state whether the VHA would seek prosecution. When asked simply if the police had been notified of the situation, Madsen again refused to comment.

Venice Florida! dot com contacted the Venice Police Department this morning to see if the agency had been called to investigate the allegations. Chief Julie Williams responded to our email by writing: "I had no knowledge of this prior to receiving your message [an email from Venice Florida! dot com] today. We have not been asked by the feds to assist them in this matter and have no present involvement in this."

Lago was hired by former VHA Director Peter Lopez. Lopez resigned early last year amidst controversy surrounding the planned demolition and reconstruction of the HUD housing complex. Shortly after Lopez' resignation, Venice Florida! dot com examined Lopez' office laptop and discovered large quantities of pornographic images and movies, some with paid subscription codes.

Venice Florida! dot com was never able to determine if Lopez used a VHA credit card to pay for the porn. VHA refused to honor public record requests for copies of their credit card bills at the time*, and no internal investigation was ever made by the VHA into the matter. Additionally, city hall never made any formal request for an investigation into the matter.

*Almost immediately after discovering the existence of the porn, Venice Florida! dot com was hit with a lawsuit for defamation by former city manager George Hunt. With resources stretched thin, it was decided to drop the VHA porn story and concentrate on providing our attorney with necessary background information and materials in order to begin a defense for the lawsuit. That lawsuit is still ongoing, and we never returned to the story about the discovered porn, nor did we ever confront the VHA over their refusal to provide the requested public records. We still have in our possession the electronic files that were gleaned from Lopez' VHA laptop computer from a forensic scrape that looked for deleted files. Included in the batch of deleted but recovered files are the pornographic images and movies as well as a number of VHA documents that had been deleted from the computer. To date, no other investigation has ever been made by anyone as to why the pornographic images and movies were on a government-owned computer and as to how some of the purchased pornographic content was paid for or as to why the public records documents that we recovered were deleted. We would gladly have turned over everything that we recovered (and still will) to any investigative agency, but so far, none have ever asked.

John Patten is the editor and publisher of Venice Florida! dot com and had previously worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.