As we reported in Part 1 and Part 2, Arthur “Duke” Sorey, the corrupt ex-North Miami Beach City Manager, filed a lawsuit against his former employer after he was fired for cause.  Although he had no one to blame but himself for his incompetence, that didn’t stop him from making an even bigger fool of himself by filing an Amended Complaint, ironically claiming to be a “whistleblower” against the very same people whose lives he destroyed during his two year reign of terror.

If Duke Sorey is a “whistleblower,” then this blogger is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

The latest incarnation of his frivolous lawsuit also includes Duke’s laughable allegations of defamation against the City of North Miami Beach and the four elected officials who voted to terminate him — Mayor Anthony DeFillipo and Commissioners Fortuna Smukler, Phyllis Smith, and Jay Chernoff — three of whom ran on the promise to clean house and take out the trash.

As expected, Duke was the first piece of garbage they tossed out.  He was immediately replaced by a qualified City Manager, who proceeded to dispose of Duke’s underqualified and overpaid Friends & Family misfits who never should have been added to the City’s payroll in the first place.

In Count VI of his Amended Complaint entitled, DEFAMATION PER SE, Duke alleged the following:

157. This claim is brought in the alternative to Count V. For purposes of this Count, Plaintiff alleges that the actions set forth below were taken by the Individual Defendants in the course and scope of their employment with the City, and in their official capacities as Mayor and Commissioners, respectively.

158. The Individual Defendants published false, libelous, and unprivileged statements that Sorey had stolen money from the City by allegedly improperly using “P Cards” issued by the City for personal gain.

159. Sorey never stole money from the City or improperly used the P Cards for personal gain. In fact, at all times, the City approved the manner in which Sorey used the P Cards.

160. The Individual Defendants’ false statements were published to third parties, including all of the public attendees present for the City Hall meetings and City Commission meetings, as well as to anyone with access to the online videos of such meetings (which continue to be publicly available for viewing).

161. DeFillipo’s, Chernoff’s, Smukler’s, and Smith’s false statements Defendants in the course and scope of their employment with the City, and in their official capacities as Mayor and Commissioners, respectively.

162. The false statements published by DeFillipo, Chernoff, Smukler, and Smith have the tendency to injure Sorey in his trade or profession and subject him to hatred, distrust, ridicule, contempt or disgrace.

163. DeFillipo, Chernoff, Smukler, and Smith also doubled down on their defamatory conduct by engaging Pizzi to prepare the Pizzi Report to justify Defendants’ prior misconduct.

164. As the Individual Defendants and the City all know, or should know, the Pizzi Report is false, at least with respect to its contentions against Sorey and baseless claims about his alleged misuse of the P Cards.

165. The Individual Defendants’ conduct constitutes defamation per se.

166. As a direct and proximate result of the Individual Defendants’ defamation per se, Sorey has suffered and will continue to suffer damages.

167. The Individual Defendants’ publication of false statements, taken in the course and scope of their employment, was committed with actual malice and with the intent to injure Sorey.

168. The Individual Defendants’ statements were false when made and they knew and the City knew that the statements were false at the time they were published, or the Individual Defendants made the statements with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity, and with reckless disregard for their adverse effect on Sorey’s reputation and business.

169. The City is liable for the actions of the Individual Defendants set forth above.

170. The Individual Defendants’ actions were intentional, willful, wanton, and malicious and performed with a reckless disregard for Sorey’s rights with the intent to injure Sorey. Accordingly, Sorey reserves the right to amend this Count to seek punitive damages against Defendants pursuant to Fla. Stat. § 768.72.

Anyone who knows about all the acts of corruption committed by Duke Sorey while mismanaging the City of North Miami Beach also knows that absolutely no “false statements” were ever made about him either by the four Defendants named in his lawsuit, the residents of North Miami Beach, or especially, this blogger.

In fact, it was Duke Sorey who constantly defamed everyone else, and especially, this blogger.

As we reported in Duke Sorey wants to date me!, at a taxpayer-funded campaign rally for ex-Criminal Commissioner Paule Villard, he publicly told a resident, “Stephanie Kienzle is a RACIST.”

WATCH!

We can only imagine how he defamed this blogger in private.

Not a single word that the elected officials or anyone else said about Duke’s pathetic stint as a “City Manager” was untrue.

In fact, Duke Sorey pillaged the General Fund of every last dime.  The only way he was able to present “balanced” budgets for Fiscal Year 2022 and Fiscal Year 2023 was due to the fortuitous timing of the federal pandemic relief CARES Act and ARPA funding.  When those millions upon millions of dollars weren’t enough to cover his outrageous expenses, Duke resorted to robbing the NMB Water utility — just like he did during his previous gig in North Miami!

As we reported in North Miami’s CAFR: A true story in snapshots, “North Miami ended Fiscal Year 2019 with a CUMULATIVE RUNNING DEFICIT OF $14,697,136,” even though Duke Sorey had “BORROWED $14,334,387 from the Water and Sewer Fund to plug his gaping budget hole.”

Even now, we are still uncovering the extent of the fiscal damage done by Duke Sorey during the regrettable two-years he ran North Miami Beach into the ground.  The truth is that he left the City in even more dire financial straits than anyone could have imagined.  Stay tuned for more details in future blog posts.

Meanwhile, in July and August of 2022, we began documenting and reporting on all the abusive spending by Duke, his staff, and the four Criminal Commissioners.  We wrote countless blogs exposing their theft of your tax dollars due to their fraudulent use of taxpayer-funded Purchasing Cards (P Cards).

Food orgy, anyone?

Duke’s contention that the Defendants engaged Michael A. Pizzi, Esq. “to prepare the Pizzi Report to justify [their] prior misconduct” is also a flat out lie.

Although he was initially terminated without cause at the March 21, 2023 Commission Meeting, the motion was rescinded on April 18, 2023 and replaced with a motion to “terminate with cause” for a wide variety of his acts of malfeasance, all of which we catalogued in The contemptible “legacy” of Arthur “Duke” Sorey (Part 1) and (Part 2).

However, Michael Pizzi’s Investigative Report was dated July 18, 2023, three months after Duke was already fired by the four Defendants, who had no need to justify their conduct or their decision to dump Duke for cause.

Duke Sorey knows damn well that none of the “Individual Defendants’s actions were intentional, willful, wanton, and malicious.”

He also knows very well that he’s describing himself to a tee.

Then again, deflection is the oldest trick in the book.

Duke Sorey also knows very well that he is no victim of defamation, nor has he been subjected to “hatred, distrust, ridicule, contempt or disgrace” — at least not by the Defendants named in his lawsuit.

This blogger pleads the fifth.

Furthermore, any “damages” to his “reputation and business” that Duke claims he has “suffered and will continue to suffer” are of his own making.

Duke’s criminal acts as City Manager went way beyond his abuse of his taxpayer-funded P Card, which was rather negligible compared to the millions and millions of tax dollars he misspent on unnecessary projects, overpaid employees, shady Friends & Family vendors, and pie-in-the-sky schemes that never came to fruition.

Here are but a few of the many egregious acts of Arthur “Duke” Sorey.

Within two months of his hiring in April of 2021, he appropriated $100,000 for one of his new bosses, ex-Criminal Commissioner Paule Villard, so she could kick off her taxpayer-funded re-election campaign by buying votes with Publix gift cards.

By August of that year, Duke had already spent nearly $100,000 on special events for his four Criminal Commissioner bosses, Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, Paule Villard, and Daniela Jean, increased the City’s payroll by more than $600,000 by hiring his North Miami Friends & Family cronies, and depleted the City’s fund balances by $1.75 million.  One year later in August of 2022, he had increased the payroll by a total of $2,145,381.39.

Before the year was over, and as we predicted, he destroyed the world-class North Miami Beach Police Department by micromanaging agency business, hiring more of his incompetent cronies from North Miami, including Adam “33” Burden, and forcing out Police Chief Richard Rand for refusing to go along with the program.

Also by the end of that same year, Duke pilfered more money to pay for another taxpayer-funded gift card campaign rally for Paule Villard, this time with no approval by the City Commission.

We had been documenting all the shady business that went on under Duke Sorey’s watch as City Manager, and by April of 2022 we noticed a $5,600 payment to AM Florida Builders Corp, allegedly for the “Construction, Sidewalk and Driveway (including pedestrian and handicap ramps) Door Replacement,” on a “surplus property” that McKenzie Fleurimond arranged to give away to the Haitian American Nurses Association (HANA) , an organization of which his own wife was a member (which he did not disclose).

In addition, there were two Home Depot receipts totaling $780.27 for alleged work done on this property.

When we made a public records request for the permit issued on this alleged construction work we were told, “There are no additional responsive documents to your request.”

When we emailed the City’s Building Department we received a response from the City’s Building Official, who “confirmed and verified no construction work was done or being done at the moment.” He conveyed the sidewalk is still broken and the door has not been changed. He explained there was no permit application on file for this property yet and will monitor any work done on the property.

Florida Statute 489.126 specifically states that a “contractor who receives, as initial payment, money totaling more than 10 percent of the contract price for repair, restoration, improvement, or construction to residential real property must:

1. Apply for permits necessary to do work within 30 days after the date payment is made, except where the work does not require a permit under the applicable codes and ordinances, and
2. Start the work within 90 days after the date all necessary permits for work, if any, are issued…”

However, this contractor received the entire $5,600 from Duke and never applied for a permit nor started the work he was paid to do.  We have been chasing this scandal since August of 2022, and still have received no answers!

In May of 2022, we began documenting the abusive Purchasing Card (P Card) spending by the four Criminal Commissioners, all of which was approved and blessed by Duke Sorey.  They charged insane amounts of your money on unnecessary travel, food, personal items, and the like, without any oversight or accountability whatsoever.

Also in August of that year, we revealed that Duke had colluded with McKenzie Fleurimond and a shady vendor of the Friends & Family persuasion to sell off the City’s public park to the highest bidding developer.

As we reported, without notifying the the Mayor and two Commissioners, Duke planned a “Pre-Solicitation Launch Event for the Dieffenbach Preserve on Thursday, August 25, 2022, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm at the Julius Littman Theater.”

He then secretly sent out a private invitation to “developers, financiers, and investors” to dine on fine cuisine, drink expensive wine, and tour the site where the City’s historic Arthur J. Snyder Tennis Center and its 10 acres of green space will be paved over, sold to the highest bidder, and developed into another monstrous high-rise in your back yard.

Duke originally planned to spend NINETY FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s (CRA) money on this gala, until the Community Redevelopment Agency Trustees, a/k/a Mayor and Commissioners, met on August 16, 2022 and directed him to keep the party under $10,000.  Michael Joseph ran interference and reminded Duke that he had the “discretion” to spend up to $50,000 of taxpayer money without the approval of the Commission.

As usual, Duke went over budget and blew a grand total of $67,942.52, or $7,942.52 more than he was permitted to spend without a Commission vote.

These are just the highlights of some of corrupt shenanigans that Duke pulled in the two short years he worked at North Miami Beach City Hall.  We shudder to think how much more damage he could have done if Paule Villard had won her seat back in November 2022 and Duke still had his four-criminal majority vote on the dais.  NMB residents dodged a bullet when she lost!

Meanwhile, Duke Sorey’s Amended Complaint, alleging his newly concocted claims of whistleblower status and defamation victimhood, are downright gut-busting.

We certainly hope you didn’t hurt yourself laughing.

Stephanie