People cared so little about the job John La Fave was doing as Milwaukee County Register of Deeds that he ran the last four times unopposed in both the primary and general elections.
But now the 70-year-old Democrat is ending his career with the sort of attention no politician wants — before a judge in a federal courtroom.
Records filed Thursday show La Fave is planning to plead guilty to one felony count of wire fraud for engineering an elaborate false invoice scheme worth more than $2.3 million with a county contractor.
According to the federal filings, La Fave had a county contractor, identified as Business A, submit false invoices for work it didn't do but for which the county would pay it.
Business A then set aside those county funds and used them at La Fave's direction to pay third-party vendors for the work that Business A was supposed to have done. Those third-party vendors were not authorized to be paid by the county, and some were even employees of the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds Office.
In all, the company submitted false invoices for more than $2.3 million between 2011 and 2017, according to the charging documents.
La Fave, in short, has agreed to plead to orchestrating a scheme to set up a personal slush fund so he could pay vendors of his choosing without having to abide by county rules. It does not appear that he pocketed any of these funds.
The charging document puts it this way: "At La Fave's direction, Business A held much of this money on account for La Fave to use outside of the county budgeting and procurement processes."
In his deal with prosecutors, La Fave has agreed to admit that he "obtained and attempted to obtain at least $89,000" through the scheme. That sum amounts to a special fee, similar to a bonus, that Business A was paid for its role in managing the invoices for third-party vendors.
The documents do not identify the contractor, but it must be Superior Support Resources Inc., a Brookfield company that processed documents for his office. An affidavit for a federal search warrant last year said La Fave asked Superior Support for false invoices over several years.
Under the 12-page plea agreement, which La Fave signed last week, prosecutors will recommend that he be sentenced from 10 to 16 months behind bars and pay restitution of $89,000. A date for the court hearing has not yet been set.
“My office will not hesitate to prosecute public officials who abuse their positions of trust,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew Krueger when contacted Friday morning.
An attorney for La Fave declined to comment on the plea deal.
"Until this matter is concluded, it would be premature to make a statement," said Michael Maistelman, who is handling the case with criminal defense lawyer Michael Chernin.
Register of Deeds Israel Ramón, who replaced La Fave, said he was unaware of the developments in the case: "It's a shame for Mr. La Fave and for Milwaukee County."
The plea deal comes a little less than a 1 1/2 years after agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office raided La Fave's office, seizing a number of computers and documents related to various county contractors.
The raid was a surprise to nearly everyone at the Milwaukee County Courthouse given La Fave's low-key manner and his agency's second-tier status in county government. The agency is responsible for keeping real estate documents and certified copies of birth, death and marriage records.
La Fave, who is probably best known for his advocacy of transcendental meditation, was the county's register of deeds for 16 years.
Before that, La Fave served a decade in the state Legislature beginning in 1993.
In 2001, La Fave spent a week at the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa meditating with 1,700 other people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He said at the time that he was open to the idea that meditation could have a wider societal impact.
Two months after the raid on his office, La Fave abruptly announced that he would be retiring and moving to Florida. He said that was always his plan.
"It has always been my intention to retire before my 70th birthday," he said in April 2019, three months before his birthday. "And as that date approaches, I feel a great deal of satisfaction that our goals for the improvement in the Register of Deeds department have been accomplished."
According to the charging documents, La Fave had Superior Support execute "a scheme to evade the County budgeting and procurement rules and processes" from April 2011 to December 2017.
La Fave would contact an individual at Superior Support and have that person submit an invoice for work it had not done.
For instance, on April 3, 2014, La Fave told the Superior Support employee to file an invoice for $135,661.60 for redaction services and indexing, even though the company had not performed these services. A month later, Milwaukee County paid Superior Support this amount, and Superior Support set the money aside for use at La Fave's direction.
By October 2014, Superior Support was sitting on $700,000 in funds for La Fave.
The federal charging documents say La Fave used those funds to pay third-party vendors that "were not authorized through the county procurement process to provide services to the county or to receive county funds." These vendors were told to go to Superior Support to get their payments or Superior Support would "repackage" the invoices with the ones it submitted to the county.
"The third-party vendors paid under this scheme included employees of the (Register of Deeds Office) who did redacting work outside of (Register of Deeds) business hours," the charging document says.
Any time that Superior Support would submit invoices for third-party vendors, it would add a "project technician fee" that would come to about 5% of the overall bill.
"Under the false invoice scheme, Business A obtained at total of at least $89,000 in 'project technician fees' that it was not authorized to receive under its contract with the county," the charging document says.
This is the sum that La Fave must pay in restitution under his plea agreement.
Superior Support is one of two companies that federal investigators looked at as part of their probe. They also subpoenaed documents from Fidlar Technologies, a Davenport, Iowa, firm that runs the online services for searching county property records.
An investigator wrote in an affidavit last year that he believed La Fave "carried on a similar scheme with Fidlar," as with Superior Support, by directing the company to set aside money generated from the county contract as credits for his use. La Fave accepted $1,364 in freebies, mostly baseball tickets, from Fidlar officials.
It is not known if investigators are continuing to investigate Superior Support and Fidlar Technologies' dealings with the county.
Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 224-2135 or dbice@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.
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Bice: Former Register of Deeds John La Fave to plead guilty to felony wire-fraud count, faces prison time - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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