ORLANDO, Fla. — On an April morning in 2019, federal agents walked into the Tax Collector’s Office in Lake Mary and handed an employee a grand jury subpoena that revealed for the first time that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating whether Joel Greenberg had used public money to benefit himself.
That initial request for records related to Greenberg’s spending and investments was revealed in a plea agreement Greenberg struck with prosecutors which resulted in him pleading guilty to six federal crimes this week and agreeing to cooperate against other potential targets.
The deal showed that federal investigators had been interested in Greenberg far earlier than had previously been confirmed. But perhaps more stunning is that it also showed Greenberg continued breaking the law for months after he first knew there was a federal investigation targeting him.
That investigation eventually led to an array of federal charges against him over the two years after the subpoena arrived, including for using his public office to create fake IDs, using public money to engage in sex trafficking with an underage girl and bribing a government official.
Greenberg’s lawyer, Fritz Scheller, declined to comment.
Attorney Richard Sierra — Greenberg’s former uncle and who was the in-house counsel for the Tax Collector’s Office at the time — recalled Thursday that he and other employees were surprised to learn of the federal investigation and warned Greenberg that it was serious.
“We were trying to figure what this was about and why the feds were investigating us,” Sierra said. “He [Greenberg] denied doing anything illegal. … I had many conversations with him, and he assured me that he had not done anything illegal… and I advised him it would be best not to do anything [illegal] moving forward.”
But Greenberg did not heed Sierra’s advice.
Bitcoin schemes continued
By December 2018, nearly two years after he entered public office, Greenberg had deposited more than $300,000 in public money from the Tax Collector’s Office into cryptocurrency investment accounts, which he used to buy digital currency for himself.
But soon after federal agents served their subpoena on April 23, 2019, Greenberg, realizing he was being investigated, asked a family member for $200,000 to make up for the shortage in the Tax Collector’s Office accounts. The same family member had already given him that sum once before, but Greenberg had spent it on cryptocurrency.
“Greenberg stated [to the family member] that he would go to jail if he did not pay the $200,000 back to the Tax Collector’s Office,” according to the plea agreement.
Greenberg reimbursed the office’s accounts and lied to the Tax Collector’s chief financial officer about how he had used the money.
As far as his office was concerned, “Greenberg’s lies worked,” prosecutors stated in the plea agreement. The Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, an independent audit conducted of the Tax Collector’s Office’s budget and expenditures, did not reveal any information about Greenberg using the money for personal gain.
Still, Greenberg was apparently not deterred by the federal investigation and continued to invest taxpayer money in cryptocurrencies, prosecutors said.
In July 2019, three months after he first learned that federal investigators were looking into his transactions, Greenberg set up Government Blockchain Systems LLC within the Tax Collector’s Office.
When an Orlando Sentinel reporter asked Greenberg about the business in September 2019, Greenberg quickly became angry that the reporter had looked him up in a state website that lists business records — demanding, “What are you doing poking around?”
Greenberg at various times claimed the business was a vehicle for his office to invest in Bitcoin or part of a plan to digitize and encrypt the identifying information of county residents.
“In fact, Greenberg’s true purpose in using Government Blockchain Systems was to purchase cryptocurrency for himself, mine cryptocurrency for himself and sell cryptocurrency machines for which he would keep the funds,” according to Greenberg’s plea agreement.
A month later, Greenberg revised the company’s structure and named Sierra as the new registered agent, separating it from the public office.
Sierra said he was not aware of the company until Greenberg asked him to make the change and added that it’s common for an attorney to be listed as the registered agent of a company. The company was dissolved in May 2020.
“We butted heads over Government Blockchain and over a lot of other things,” Sierra said. “My understanding is that all the money was returned [to the Tax Collector’s Office].”
Stalking case picked up by feds
In October 2019, Greenberg sent an anonymous letter to a private school in Seminole County that falsely accused teacher Brian Beute of sexual misconduct. Beute had recently filed to run against Greenberg in the Republican primary for Tax Collector.
Then a month later, Greenberg set up fake social media accounts using the teacher’s name and photograph, and then published several racist posts, including the false allegation the teacher was a white supremacist.
Investigators with the Seminole Sheriff’s Office found Greenberg’s DNA and fingerprints on the letters. They also traced the fake social media accounts to Greenberg’s home.
Sheriff officials said they were about to arrest Greenberg on state charges, but were asked to hold off by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which was already investigating the tax collector and wanted to lump all the cases together in federal court.
“We knew that Joel [Greenberg] was a suspect,” Sheriff Dennis Lemma recently said, recalling the events of late 2019. “I was going to take action on it, but they requested that they take the cases.”
Meanwhile, Greenberg was also stealing driver’s licenses that had been surrendered to his office for destruction by residents who came in to get new ID cards. Prosecutors say he used residents’ personal information to make fake IDs for himself.
According to a report by The Daily Beast, Greenberg also gave ID cards he’d stolen from his office, along with cash, to women he was having sex with. Greenberg’s “sugar daddy” relationships at one point included a 17-year-old girl, which led to the sex trafficking charge against him.
When federal agents raided Greenberg’s Heathrow home on June 23, they found two fake IDs in his wallet. Three stolen licenses, from Canada, Virginia and Florida, were found in a backpack on the front seat of his work vehicle. Prosecutors have said Greenberg continued stealing IDs “until his last day in office,” June 24, the day after his arrest on the stalking charge.
It wasn’t the only way in which his criminal activities persisted even after his arrest.
In fact, soon after his first arrest, Greenberg contacted the woman he’d paid for sex when she was 17 and pleaded with her to lie about their relationship “because he knew that his commercial sex acts were illegal,” his plea deal said.
And Greenberg on June 24 executed a fraudulent application for COVID-19 relief funds that he’d begun pursuing days earlier, with help from a friend and a government employee that he later bribed.
Greenberg received $432,700 in June and July from that fraudulent loan and two others submitted after his first indictment. And he shared a portion of the money with his conspirators, giving $16,000 to his friend and $3,000 to the SBA employee in June and July.
Greenberg landed back in jail in March — not because of the mounting federal case against him, but because he violated the terms of his pretrial release by leaving his home in Seminole County and driving to South Florida to look for his wife.
He went to the Jupiter condominium of his mother-in-law, who called police and asked for him to be removed, records show. Greenberg’s wife, Abby Greenberg, told officers she had left their home to “take a break from the stressful situation with Joel,” but he tracked her down using her Snapchat social media account.
An officer was initially unable to arrest Greenberg for breaking his release terms because he was unable to reach the former tax collector’s probation officer. He was later taken into custody by Seminole County deputy sheriffs after an hours-long standoff.
Greenberg has been in the Orange County Jail since then. He faces at least 12 years in prison on the federal charges he pled to this week, though his cooperation with federal authorities could lead to a reduced sentence.
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