The day he was indicted for stalking a political rival, Joel Greenberg had several stolen IDs in his work vehicle, a pair of fakes in his wallet and materials for making more in his office — evidence he was regularly abusing his position to steal unwitting constituents’ identities, according to federal authorities.
Inside the former elected Seminole tax collector’s work vehicle, agents found Greenberg’s backpack, which held three licenses from Canada, Virginia and Florida, belonging to Seminole County residents who’d recently obtained new Florida licenses.
Meanwhile, employees of the Tax Collector’s office told agents they’d seen Greenberg taking surrendered licenses from the agency’s “shred basket” prior to their destruction. When asked what he was doing, Greenberg gave fishy explanations — which federal authorities now say were lies.
Greenberg, who resigned from office and dropped his bid for a second term after he was arrested last month, also is suspected of using Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database “to conduct inappropriate and unauthorized searches of various individuals using his account and another employee’s account.”
Those details and others — which prosecutors say prove Greenberg was working to make more-believable fake IDs — emerged in a Monday court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, which is prosecuting him on identity theft and fraud charges.
Vincent Citro, a white collar criminal defense attorney who is representing Greenberg, declined to comment.
Greenberg “had a common scheme and plan to use his position as the Seminole County Tax Collector to steal surrendered licenses that he would use to produce fake driver’s licenses for himself….And plan to pretend to be people other than himself and to assume their identities,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg in the court filing.
It remains unclear, however, for what specific purpose Greenberg was allegedly creating the falsified ID cards.
According to the document, Greenberg’s “thefts of surrendered driver’s licenses continued until his last day in office,” June 24, the day after the first federal indictment against him was unsealed. That day, an employee reported to agents having seen surrendered licenses in Greenberg’s office.
“The employee asked Greenberg why he had those surrendered licenses,” Handberg wrote. “Greenberg responded that the collection of licenses was a ‘lost and found,’ which was another lie.”
When he had been caught taking licenses on an earlier occasion, Greenberg had given a worker “an excuse that had something to do with ‘demographics'” — also a lie, Handberg wrote.
Also found in Greenberg’s office during the search: A copy of a printout from the DAVID system — a database of driver information typically used for law- and traffic-enforcement purposes — with the personal information of a Seminole resident who had gotten a new driver’s license Dec. 12.
“The date that the document from DAVID was printed was December 13, 2019, which is consistent with Greenberg researching another potential identity theft victim,” Handberg wrote.
Greenberg also had pieces of card stock for concealed weapons permits in his office, federal authorities say.
That and other evidence “prove[s] that Greenberg was practicing at producing identifications using concealed weapons permit cardstock and that he was experimenting in using the security stripe for concealed weapons permits in an effort to make the identifications that he was producing appear to be legitimate,” Handberg wrote.
During the time the Tax Collector’s Office was closed this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Greenberg “called one of his employees to help him fix a problem with a printer that produces concealed weapons permits. Given that the concealed weapons permits portion of the office was closed, there was no need for Greenberg to be using that printer,” according to the filing.
Another employees also reported that they saw Greenberg “messing” with the computer equipment that is used to print concealed weapons permits.
The raids of Greenberg’s home in the Heathrow gated community and Lake Mary office came on June 23. That’s the same day that a federal grand jury was unsealed that indicted Greenberg for stalking a political rival, Brian Beute, a fine arts teacher at Trinity Preparatory School. Beute is running to replace Greenberg in the Aug. 18 Republican primary.
In that raid at his home on the morning Greenberg was arrested, agents took his and wife’s cell phones, an electronic device used by his 3-year-old, birth certificates, Social Security cards and other documents belonging to Greenberg and his family.
According to Handberg’s latest filing, letters that Greenberg caused to be sent to Trinity Prep, written as though they came from a “concerned student,” falsely accused Beute of the “rape of a male student who came to [Beute] to seek counsel on the student’s sexuality.”
The letters also falsely claimed that Beute had videotaped one of the encounters.
Local authorities found no evidence that Beute had engaged in any criminal activity against a child. Greenberg also created an impostor Twitter account for Beute which falsely indicated he was a segregationist and white supremacist, according to federal authorities.
Greenberg, 35, was elected in 2016 as a political newcomer. And since he took office, his term was marred by one controversy after another — including posting anti-Muslim rants on social media, handing out lucrative contracts to close friends with Tax Collector funds, setting up a Blockchain business within his government office, allowing his employees to openly carry firearms, and stopping a woman for speeding while wearing his Tax Collector’s badge.
In August 2017, just eight months after he took office, Greenberg was the focus of a Florida Department of Law Enforcement Investigation. State agents looked into allegations from an employee that Greenberg asked him to hack into Seminole government computers, along with the purchase of a former bank building in Winter Springs that is now a branch office. But state authorities never charged Greenberg with any crime, saying the charges couldn’t be “independently substantiated or developed at this time.”
Greenberg has dropped his bid for re-election.
A trial date for the federal charges against Greenberg will likely be set after Sept. 30, according to court records.
jeweiner@orlandosentinel.com or mcomas@orlandosentinel.com
