6 Miami-Dade cops fired or suspended for loafing

A Miami-Dade police sergeant and two officers have been fired, and three others have been suspended, capping a two-year investigation into accusations that they ignored emergency calls, filed false police reports and lied about calls they handled, Miami-Dade police spokeswoman Nancy Perez said Tuesday.

The Miami-Dade Internal Affairs Bureau launched the investigation into the Kendall District police squad in 2010. The discharged officers are fighting to get their jobs back.

The officers — who worked the 2-to-10 p.m. shift — were followed, captured on video and tracked with GPS devices. More than 130 violations of department policy were documented.

Fired were Sgt. Jennifer Gonzalez and officers Dario Socarras and Jose Huerta. The other three — officers Jeffrey Price, Fabian Owens and Ivan Tomas — were suspended without pay in September and are back on the job.

Gonzalez was caught shopping, loading purchases into her patrol car and visiting her parents — all while on duty — according to CBS 4’s Jim Defede, who first reported the investigation and its outcome. Socarras ignored emergency calls, including a robbery, instead having a romantic rendezvous with his girlfriend at the Dadeland Mall.

A video captures him making out with the woman while in uniform. He also ignored a call involving a 5-year-old boy who was unconscious and locked inside a car, telling dispatchers he was on his way when, in fact, he was having a cup of coffee with Gonzalez and Huerta, who also ignored the emergency call.

The child was tended to by paramedics.

Price, Owens and Tomas were given suspensions of from five to 20 hours without pay. They, too, ignored a number of emergency calls.

Although police internal affairs investigations of individual officers are not uncommon in an agency as large as the Miami-Dade Police Department, a probe of an entire squad is unusual.

The boundaries of the Kendall District are Bird Road to the north, Coral Reef Drive to the south, Biscayne Bay on the east and Florida’s Turnpike on the west.

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Jessica Chastain Reveals Her Oscars Date Will Be Her Grandmother

Who will arrive arm-in-arm with Jessica Chastain on Oscar Sunday?

The 35-year-old beauty, who is nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work in Zero Dark Thirty, tells ET she plans to bring a very special date to Hollywood's biggest night!

"I'm going to take my grandmother to the Oscars," beamed Jessica at The Hollywood Reporter's award season bash at Spago in Los Angeles on Monday. "We did that last year and it was one of my favorite days of my life."

Pics: Fierce Fashions at the Oscar Luncheon

The star, along with many of her fellow nominees that morning, came straight to the festivities after attending the Academy's annual Oscar luncheon.

Amy Adams, who is no stranger to attending the star-studded class photo, opened up to ET about the experience which she still feels is a bit surreal.

"Just to be on the bleachers with everybody and to hear everyone's name called, it's always overwhelming to realize the company you're in," said Amy.

Like Jessica, The Master star is mixing it up, as far as her dates go, during the award show hoopla.

Related: Five Things You Don't Know About Jessica Chastain

"I'm bringing my friends," disclosed Amy. "My fiance's been taking some time off-- he's working on an art show he's doing-- so it's fun to infuse some new energy into it."

For more with this year's Oscar nominees, click the video above!

Visit ETonline for complete Oscar coverage Sunday, February 24 as the 85th Annual Academy Awards, hosted by Seth MacFarlane, airs live from the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Los Angeles.

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Car swiped in Bronx -- with baby in back seat

A car left idling outside a cell-phone store in The Bronx was swiped tonight — with an 8-month-old baby in the back seat, cops said.

The silver Jeep was found a little over an hour later with the little girl inside unharmed, police said.

The perp is still in the wind.

The child’s dad told cops that he had hopped out of the 2005 Grand Cherokee — leaving it running with the mom and his baby daughter still inside — after pulling up to the store at Morris Avenue and East Knightsbridge Road around 6:18 p.m., authorities said.

The mom then got out for just a minute — and the thief hopped in.

The crook then sped off. It's unclear if he knew there was a child inside.

The car — with the baby inside — was later found abandoned at 7:40 p.m. at Goble and Jerome avenues in Inwood.

The baby was taken to Montefiore Hospital to be checked out.

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Report calls Florida business incentives “corporate welfare’’

TALLAHASSEE --
A government watchdog group and a conservative advocacy group blasted Florida’s government Tuesday for the hundreds of millions of dollars it gives to corporations, blaming the state’s public-private jobs agency for “pay-to-play” cronyism and “corporate welfare.”

A new report by Integrity Florida and Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity highlights several problems with the state’s economic incentives program, which gives tax breaks to companies that set up shop in Florida.

“We’re concerned about the appearance of pay-to-play,” said Dan Krassner, director of Integrity Florida, outlining a number of tax breaks that have gone to politically connected companies and other deals that have failed.

Enterprise Florida Inc. and Gov. Rick Scott, its chairman, immediately hit back, claiming that the organization has been instrumental in bringing high-paying jobs to the state. Enterprise Florida CEO Gray Swoope slammed the report as tainted because it was funded by Americans for Prosperity.

“Integrity Florida has claimed to be a non-partisan, non-profit organization with no policy agenda,” Swoope wrote. “However, a report on economic incentives for job creation funded by a group that so publicly opposes these incentives is deeply troubling.”

Martin Dyckman, a former St. Petersburg Times associate editor and a board member at Integrity Florida, resigned after finding out that the report was funded by Americans for Prosperity. He also said it was “deeply troubling” that AFP sponsored the report, stating that it created “the perception that a well-researched report is an attack by Americans for Prosperity.”

Integrity Florida brushed aside concerns about the funding of its report, saying all of its funders are publicly listed. On Tuesday, the good-governance group focused on the findings of the report during a news conference.

Among the findings:

• Enterprise Florida has failed to meet its job-creation objectives, with companies creating only 103,544 jobs after receiving tax breaks, far short of the 200,000 envisioned by the Legislature in 1992 when EFI was created.

• Enterprise Florida has failed to get 50 percent funding from the private sector, instead relying on 85 percent taxpayer funding to support the public-private partnership

• Enterprise Florida has “the appearance of pay-to-play,” since it receives an average of $50,000 from some of its corporate board members. Those board members also get private contracts to do work on EFI’s behalf as well as tax-break deals processed by EFI.

Slade O’Brien, Florida director of Americans for Prosperity, said Florida’s practice of doling out economic incentives amounts to government manipulation of the free marketplace.

“What’s wrong here is the policy that’s in place,” he said. “Too often, we create winners and losers.”

Several bills in the Florida House and Senate seek to demand more transparency from Enterprise Florida and the economic incentives program. A bill voted out of committee Thursday morning would make Enterprise Florida submit to a slew of new performance reviews moving forward.

Enterprise Florida responded to what it called “troubling accusations” in the report by sending legislative leaders a lengthy letter about the virtues of its operation.

“Through the legislation that you supported two short years ago, Florida now has a seamless economic development team focused on creating jobs for Florida families, increasing capital investment in our communities and providing a significant return on the investment made by the state’s taxpayers,” reads a letter signed by the company’s board.

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Member of Miami-Dade marijuana growhouse ring pleads guilty

An operative in the Santiesteban family’s alleged marijuana growhouse ring pleaded guilty Monday to conspiring to kidnap a rival gang member, admitting he witnessed the man’s murder after the target stole 50 pounds of pot from the Miami-Dade clan.

Juan Felipe Castaneda’s plea agreement signaled a major development in the federal government’s crackdown on one of South Florida’s largest suspected growhouse operations. The ring is accused of running a distribution network stretching to New York.

Castaneda admitted he collaborated with alleged ringleader Derrick Santiesteban, accused shooter Norge Manduley and other members of the syndicate in June 2009, when they kidnapped Fidel Ruz Moreno after carjacking his Chevy van.

While en route to one of the Santiesteban’s grow houses in southwest Miami-Dade, Castaneda said in a court statement that he witnessed Manduley struggle with Ruz in the back of the van and then shoot him with a revolver.

After Ruz’s body was tossed out into the street, Castaneda said he saw Manduley “approach [the] prone body and repeatedly strike [Ruz] about the head with the butt of revolver that Manduley was wielding,” according to a statement filed with the plea agreement in Miami federal court.

Castaneda, a growhouse caretaker who fled the area last June when FBI agents arrested most of the 16 Santiesteban-syndicate members, is the first defendant to plead guilty to the main charge of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 1,000 marijuana plants. He also pleaded guilty to the kidnapping conspiracy.

In April, he faces a minimum-mandatory sentence of 10 years for the drug charge and up to life in prison for the kidnapping. His cooperation with prosecutors William Athas and Pat Sullivan could help them put pressure on other defendants to cut plea deals, according to the plea agreement.

The Ruz kidnapping and slaying — along with the possibility of a second, unrelated homicide, as well as suspicions that a Miami-Dade police officer was working with the Santiesteban clan — elevated the case beyond a routine pot-trafficking investigation.

At a detention hearing, Athas and Sullivan described Derrick Santiesteban, the lead defendant in the case, as the “mastermind behind the [Ruz] kidnapping.”

Investigators are zeroing in on a Miami-Dade officer who is suspected of playing a role in the family’s alleged drug syndicate. The officer, Roderick Silva, worked patrol in the Hammocks area of West Kendall. He was suspended with pay in June 2009, records show. He is the brother of another of the Santiestebans’ accused growhouse caretakers, David Silva.

Homicide detectives are also trying to determine whether an unsolved April 2006 slaying of a teenager in West Kendall is linked to an alleged Santiesteban growhouse in the area.

After going to visit a girlfriend near Southwest 172nd Terrace and 153rd Place, Angelo Lopera, 17, was attacked and shot multiple times. Investigators believe Lopera may have been killed because he was mistakenly suspected of visiting the neighborhood to steal harvested marijuana plants from the Santiestebans’ house at 17231 SW 153rd Pl., according to sources familiar with the probe.

The Santiesteban indictment was built around a dozen cooperating witnesses, most of whom were involved in the family’s alleged drug organization and have or will be separately charged, court records show.

The case was spearheaded by Miami-Dade police homicide detective Rich Raphael and FBI agent Michael Gualtieiri, working as part of a federal drug task force. Court records show the task force cultivated the witnesses, including two who were present during the Ruz kidnapping and eventually identified Manduley as the shooter.

Last July, Manduley was sentenced to 10 years in state prison after pleading guilty to weapons charges involving a domestic dispute with his ex-girlfriend in 2010. Manduley shot a .357 revolver twice into the air while threatening the ex-girlfriend and three other people.

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Facebook After Death: Who Owns Your Pages When You Die?

Most people can’t live without Facebook — but what happens to your Facebook page when you are no longer living? New Hampshire and other states are trying to figure that out.

State Rep. Peter Sullivan has introduced legislation to allow the executor of an estate control over the social networking pages of the dead. Last week, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted 222-128 to give Sullivan more time to write an amendment that begins a study of the issue.

The bill proposed by Sullivan, a Democrat from Manchester, would allow control of someone’s Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts such as Gmail to be passed to the executor of their estate after death.

According to Sullivan, passage of his bill would bridge a gap in policies of social media sites regarding posthumous users. He said his bill would protect residents who have suffered loss.

“This would give the families a sense of closure, a sense of peace. It would help prevent this form of bullying that continues even after someone dies and nobody is really harmed by it.”

In an interview with WMUR, Sullivan tells the story of a young Canadian girl who committed suicide because of bullying. After she died the taunting continued on her Facebook page.

Read More About Teens Bullied On Facebook

“The family wasn’t able to do anything; they didn’t have access to her account.” Sullivan said. “They couldn’t go in and delete those comments, and they couldn’t take the page down completely.”

Five other states, including Oklahoma, Idaho, Rhode Island, Indiana and Connecticut, have established legislation regulating one’s digital presence after death. Rhode Island and Connecticut were first, but their bills were limited in scope to email accounts, excluding social networking sites.

According to opponents of Sullivan’s bill, contracts and provisions between the social media user and the site already lay out what happens to the page once the user passes. Opponents say Sullivan’s bill is unenforceable and incomplete. Some also say the issue would be better suited for federal law.

Ryan Kiesel, then a state legislator from Oklahoma, sponsored a similar bill in 2010 called the Digital Property Management After Death law. Though he supports states’ efforts to bring light to this issue, saying that it is a good way to get the conversation started, he also believes that this is a case that should eventually taken up by the federal government.

“Facebook and other online providers have changed their privacy policies to keep up with the times, but we still see a lot of flux within different sites like Facebook , Flickr, or Google, for example.” Keisel told ABC News. “The federal government should pass uniform laws to govern all digital assets because it is quite difficult for an estate to have to navigate endless numbers of digital policies postmortem.”

Kiesel, who now works as a civil rights activist, compared one’s digital legacy to the distribution of someone’s tangible assets after death.

Get more pure politics at ABCNews.com/Politics

“In Oklahoma, if you are administrator of the estate of a deceased person’s house and you find a box under their bed, you are well within your right to see what’s inside that box and if property is worth distributing, you should distribute it accordingly.” Kiesel told ABC News that the same idea goes for digital legacy.

Today marks the ninth Anniversary of the launch of Facebook, which currently has over 1 billion active users. That number, which has grown from just a million users in 2004, suggests there must be an enormous number of Facebook pages that must currently be occupied by deceased people.

Facebook has not completely ignored the growing number of deceased users. The site has created a function allowing Facebook pages to become memorials after they have died.

“Please use this form to request the memorialization of a deceased person’s account,” the site reads. “We extend our condolences and appreciate your patience and understanding throughout this process.”

Memorialization of a Facebook page, however, can only be done via online request. And the terms of service for Facebook’s say that it will not issue login and password information to family members of the deceased. The requestor must contact Facebook and request that the profile is taken down or memorialized.

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Carpet Countdown: Directors Turn Fans at DGAs

Filmmakers like Ben Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow and Tom Hooper have provided inspiration for young up-and-comers, who hope to reach their level of greatness, but who do the Oscar-nominated directors look up to? Click the video to find out.

RELATED: Hot Looks of the Oscar Luncheon

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Woman in yoga pose awoken by man masturbating next to her, lawsuit claims

She was finishing her workout; he was just starting his.

An Upper West Side woman in post yoga, meditative bliss was allegedly rudely awoken by a maintenance worker masturbating next to her mat, a new lawsuit claims.

Keiko Herskovitz, a regular yogi at Equinox's Pure Yoga on W. 77th Street, was in the corpse pose called shavasana, laying down with her eyes closed on Jan. 26, when she "heard someone walk into the room."

At first Herskovitz, 55, ignored the noise until "she felt that there was a person next to her, and she opened her eyes to find a Pure Yoga employee, a maintenance associate, about two feet away, masturbating," the suit alleges.

Herskovitz "confronted the maintenance employee and asked, 'what are you doing?!'" she recalls in the court papers. The man, described as a 19-year-old, "quickly covered himself with a yoga blanket and ran out of the room," the documents allege.

Herskovitz immediately told a manager about the encounter. The supervisor allegedly dismissed the accusation and said that the man "was a good employee," court papers state.

The yogi, who'd been stretching at the studio weekly for three years, reported the incident to the police. She later received an email from the studio noting the seriousness of the incident, but management "has not reported the offender to the police or has taken any action against the offender," Herskovitz claims in the suit.

Her attorney, Eric Creizman, is hiring a private investigator to determine if the maintenance worker “has been involved in additional incidents.”

Herskovitz is suing Related Companies, which owns Equinox, for unspecified damages.

Neither the yoga studio nor Related returned calls for comment.

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VIP storage service for clothes comes to South Florida

There’s hardly any woman alive who doesn’t complain about a lack of closet space.

Now space-challenged South Floridians who want to store clothes in a climate-controlled atmosphere can turn to the same service used by celebrities and designers.

Garde Robe believes it has the answer. The New York-based company expanded into South Florida this month, aiming to serve savvy fashionistas, multiple home owners and globetrotters. Think of Garde Robe as both relief for closet crowding and a personal valet service that delivers your clothes anywhere in the world.

“The same way you have art storage and wine storage, we’re the only company dedicated to protecting and preserving the works of art that stay behind your closet doors,” said Doug Greenberg, vice president of sales and marketing for Garde Robe.

“You can’t just store clothing by wrapping them up and then bringing them back when you need them. It’s museum-quality storage.”

But that comes with a price. Garde Robe’s minimum calls for a one-year contract at $350 per month, which includes storage for 50 items, 10 shoe boxes and a box of accessories.

This service includes one local delivery per month in the area of the Garde Robe facility; customers pay for shipping to other cities.

“It’s very labor intensive to properly care for textiles, and you can’t do it on the cheap,” Greenberg said. “We know that prices some people out of the market. It’s not a mass-market service.”

Garde Robe’s customers include socialite Ivanka Trump and supermodel Iman. The company also provides storage for the collections of top-name fashion designers such as Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera.

The concept was started in New York in 2001 by Kim Akhtar, then Dan Rather’s publicist and a Flamenco dancer. Akhtar needed extra closet space and figured others in New York had the same problem.

But it wasn’t until 2008, when Garde Robe expanded beyond New York. The company now has facilities in Southern California and Tokyo, with plans for London as well.

The South Florida expansion largely was driven by requests from existing clientele in other markets who have second homes here or are regular visitors. Locally, Garde Robe partnered with Rey’s Cleaner’s, a Miami company that specializes in the cleaning and care of luxury goods and specialty items. Rey’s is a licensee of Garde Robe and owns 70 percent of the South Florida business.

The company will provide pick-up and delivery to serve customers from Key West to North Palm Beach County and west to Naples and Tampa. All clothes will be stored at Rey’s facility northeast of Miami International Airport.

For the Garde Robe loft, Rey’s created a separate room that is climate- and humidity-controlled by an air purification system. Temperature remains a constant 70 degrees.

Clothes are all wrapped in acid-free tissue paper and placed in separate protective white bags.

While Rey’s and other dry cleaners have stored clothes for customers before, this takes it to another level, said Angel Suarez, Rey’s owner.

“This serves as a complement to what we are already doing,” Suarez said.

Linda Haugland has been a Garde Robe customer since 2007 in New York and still pays $1,300 a month for the storage service there. But she recently moved to Coral Gables and is eager to give Garde Robe some additional black-tie dresses and her husband’s extra suits to store for her in South Florida.

“It makes life so much easier not clogging my closet with stuff I don’t need every day,” Haugland said. “It’s definitely become part of my life.”

Every customer who stores clothes with Garde Robe gets their own cyber closet.

A few mouse clicks, and the customer can view pictures and descriptions of every item in storage so they can easily select the clothes they need for that special event or vacation.

If the Garde Robe member is in the same city, clothes can be delivered in 24 hours or less. Garde Robe will also pack and ship a member’s items anywhere in the world.

That ease of service appeals to customers like Margaret Luce. When she divested of her New York apartment two years ago and moved to Jupiter full-time, she put her winter clothes and some of her formal clothes in Garde Robe’s New York facility. Now whenever Luce travels to New York or Los Angeles, she doesn’t have to worry about packing luggage. She simply goes into her virtual closet, picks out the items she wants and has them delivered directly to her hotel room.

“Being a model, I travel a lot and this is so effortless,” Luce said. “They’ll send it to you wherever you are in the world. Everything arrives nice and clean and pressed. It’s almost like shopping all over again because everything seems brand new.”

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Engineers: South Florida bridges rated ‘deficient’ remain safe to use

Of the hundreds of bridges both big and small in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, only a handful are rated as “structurally deficient” — and engineers say none is in danger of collapsing or being shut down.

But the cost of maintaining, repairing and replacing aging local bridges over the next decade and a half will easily mount into many hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when the state, county and local government agencies responsible for their upkeep face the prospect of tight or shrinking capital funding.

Piecing together the money for even the most crucial repairs is already a constant scramble, highway and public-works engineers say. Their agencies often make millions of dollars worth of repairs to old and obsolete bridges to eke out several more years of use from them, pushing the dreaded date of even costlier full replacement into an uncertain future.

The good news, they say, is that regular bridge inspections carried out by the Florida Department of Transportation mean government engineers have a good handle on maintenance and repair needs, and that surprises like the Rickenbacker Causeway’s Bear Cut Bridge, which had to be partly closed last month after an analysis found unusually rapid structural deterioration, are likely to remain infrequent.

“We’re very proactive to make sure our investment in infrastructure is maintained,” said Gus Pego, FDOT district secretary in Miami.

Still, some of the already-known needs are daunting.

For instance, Miami-Dade public works engineers say they expect to have to replace all 12 bridges, including two drawbridges, on the historic Venetian Causeway, built in the 1920s. The rough cost projection is $110 million, although they are about to embark on a study with FDOT to determine the precise scope and timing of work. Most of the cost, they hope, will be covered by federal grant money.

And that’s after the county spent about $9 million in 2011 to repair spalling and reinforce the concrete pilings supporting some of the Venetian’s bridges.

Dade: $450 million

Miami-Dade, which owns and maintains 206 bridges, roughly projects the cost of rehabilitating or replacing them over the next 10 to 20 years at more than $450 million, though the its engineers caution that the estimate also includes a “wish list” of noncritical work.

Those figures, which include the Venetian, encompass only a portion of the bridges across the county, many of which are owned and maintained by FDOT or municipalities.

Aside from the westbound half of the Bear Cut Bridge, 10 bridges in Miami-Dade are rated by FDOT as structurally deficient, a label that covers a range of issues, including structural deterioration but also some purely functional elements like narrow lanes or inadequate sidewalks.

Bridges on the list include the Miami River drawbridges at Southwest First Street and at Miami Avenue, and the Broad Causeway bridge at that road’s eastern end.

13 Broward spans

In Broward, 13 bridges have the same rating, including the Sunrise Boulevard bridge over the Middle River in Fort Lauderdale.

The details that earn the structurally deficient classification are unavailable because, to protect security, inspection reports are exempt from review under the state’s public-records law.

Each bridge receives a “sufficiency rating” that specifies its overall condition. A sufficiency rating below a certain level means a bridge must be repaired within six years or, in the case of bridges determined to be dangerous, shut down or weight-restricted. None of the Miami-Dade or Broward bridges besides Bear Cut scores at those lowest levels.

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