In Part 1 of this miniseries about North Miami Beach mayor Michael Joseph’s attempts to deflect from his own alleged criminal activity, we told you about his latest attempt to remove the City Manager.  This Devil on the Dais is no stranger to double-dealing by any stretch, and he will plumb the depths of skulduggery to get what he wants.

Michael Joseph has been fuming ever since Darvin Williams was hired by a 6-1 vote of the City Commission in February.  We’re told he has refused to meet or even communicate with the City Manager simply because his colleagues had the audacity to outvote him.

In fact, if you check out the city’s official Facebook page, Michael does not appear in any of the event photos since a January 30, 2026 post depicting the presentation of a Key to the City to The Honorable Jeanette M. Nuñez on Thursday, January 15, 2026.  There is not one photo of the so-called mayor on that page in the last four months!

But, we digress.

In our previous column we told you that Opa-locka Commissioner Natasha Ervin filed a lawsuit against Darvin Williams, claiming that “he defamed her when he accused her of embezzlement and misappropriating public funds when he was Opa-locka’s city manager to cover up ‘his own improper conduct that resulted in his termination of employment,'” according to a May 27, 2026 Miami Times article.

We also told you that Mr. Williams disputed all of her allegations, and further told the Miami Times that “he never spoke about Ervin publicly and the only allegations he ever made were outlined in a whistleblower complaint filed with the governor’s office in August 2024 when she was vice mayor of Opa-locka.”

The article further reported, “That complaint accused Ervin of nepotism, creating a hostile work environment, interfering with investigations and embezzlement. Among other things, Williams reported that Ervin submitted an invoice of $20,867.94 on behalf of her niece for catering provided at a parks event.”

When the Miami Times published its article, Mr. Williams said he had not yet seen the lawsuit, but wondered why Ervin waited two years after he filed his whistleblower complaint to sue him.

“Ervin said it’s because she is running for re-election and wants to refute Williams’ allegations,” and that she “wants to get it out to the public” to clear her name, according to the article.

As promised, we have the Whistleblower Complaint filed by Opa-locka former City Manager Darvin Williams.

And as promised, it’s a wild ride!

In his own words, Mr. Williams explains that he was hired in Opa-locka on April 6, 2022, and eight months later on December 2, 2022 Natasha Ervin was sworn in as Vice Mayor.  They “had a strong working relationship” and became good friends and often double-dated with their respective spouses.

Their friendship took a bad turn beginning with his tour of the city parks on Sunday morning, June 23, 2024, when he discovered that one of the parks was unattended by staff.  The door to the park office was locked and there was a note on the door stating “Stepped away.  Contact Butler (305) 505-6339.”  The sign by the note said, “Will return at 9:30.”

The problem was that it was already 11:45 am, and there was no city employee in sight.  He drove to another park and spoke with a staff member there who tried to call “Butler,” but there was no answer.  While Mr. Williams was still on site, the staff member received a call back from Terrence Butler, a new hire.  He claimed he had “left to get something to eat.”

Mr. Williams left that park and called Mr. Butler’s supervisor, Daicari Griffin, the recently promoted Parks Superintendent.  When told what happened with Mr. Butler, Mr. Griffin gave Mr. Williams “a totally different story.”

According to Griffin, Mr. Butler said he had a headache and went to Walmart for aspirin.  In his whistleblower complaint, Darvin Williams said he “found this story challenging for several reasons.”

For one thing, if Mr. Butler needed an aspirin, there are first aid kits at all the parks that include aspirins.  He was also upset that Butler apparently lied to him about why he left his post, and was concerned about potential liability due to the park being unattended. And finally, the city is responsible for employees who are on duty and he was concerned about “the plan if Mr. Butler got into a car accident and damaged property or injured someone?”

The excuses these two employees gave to Mr. Williams, i.e., that Butler didn’t know there were aspirins on hand, then lied about why he left, and that Mr. Griffin was “unaware of the legal responsibility of staff while they are on the clock,” were shocking.

Mr. Williams told Daicari Griffin that he needed “remedial management training,” and Terrence Butler was “terminated for abandoning his work station while on the clock.”

As soon as he took these necessary measures, several park employees came forward with even more disturbing stories, not the least of which was that Parks Superintendent Daicari Griffin had a job outside of the city as an Assistant Coach for a high school in Hialeah, where “he worked at times while still on the clock for the City of Opa-locka.”

There was another park employee, Michael King, who “was allowed to clock-in at the beginning of his shift and leave for the day.”  With the help of his Assistant City Manager and Human Resources Director, Mr. Williams discovered that Michael King’s time card’s “punch out times had been digitally entered by Parks Director, Mrs. Zonya Ray.”  Mrs. Ray, a 35 year employee with the city, had recently been promoted by Mr. Williams to Interim, then Permanent Parks Director.

Mrs. Ray had quite a few difficulties keeping up with her duties, and in fact, “she had been counseled several times and even suspended.”  But for the most part, she had been cut some slack due to her many years of public service at Opa-locka.

When questioned by the Human Resources Director about her aiding and abetting Michael King by clocking him out at the end of a shift he never worked, “Mrs. Ray had no response for this.”

The HR Director immediately recommended termination for all three employees, Daicari Griffin, Terrence Butler, and Zonya Ray.  Mr. Williams fired the first two employees, but chose to give Mrs. Ray the dignity of resigning due to her many years of service.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, Zonya Ray declined to resign and “instead took ill.”  She ended up in the hospital and “did not return to work for weeks.”

Then the troubles really began, and Mr. Williams finally had a glimpse of why Opa-locka is infamously known as THE most corrupt city in the entire state of Florida.

Bar none.

According to Mr. Williams’ Whistleblower Complaint, while Zonya Ray was still out on “sick leave,” she and her sister, Angelina “Chris” Roberts (who also worked for Opa-locka) attended a park event and verbally assaulted staff members and called them “backstabbers.”  Roberts also took it upon herself to “monitor” one of the employees she believed was a whistleblower against Griffin, Butler, and Ray.

When Zonya Ray finally decided to return from her “sick leave,” she began “antagonizing and harassing” employees who she believed ratted on the three of them.  She had to be counseled by HR to “cease targeting certain individuals of her staff.”

Just when things couldn’t get much worse, enter the former friend of Darvin Williams, the very same Natasha Ervin who waited two more years to file her frivolous lawsuit against him for political reasons.

Vice Mayor Ervin began in earnest a vicious campaign to get Mr. Williams fired for the “crime” of terminating useless employees who never would have lasted five minutes in private sector jobs.

Ms. Ervin contacted the “friends and family” of the fired employees and had them attend the July 10, 2024 Commission meeting to demand that the fired employees get their jobs back.

Natasha Ervin “ramped up the attacks” against the City Manager and now the Police Department at the July 24, 2024 Commission meeting.  She was apparently unhappy with the Chief of Police and had spread the word in advance of the meeting that once Mr. Williams was terminated, a new Police Chief could be hired.  Her attack on the Police Department had to do with “an assumed target of the police department’s investigation.”

Throughout the meeting, Natasha Ervin verbally attacked and tried to humiliate City Manager Darvin Williams as well as the Chief of Police.  She was particularly enraged that one of the Parks employees was under criminal investigation, and then proceeded to illegally interfere with those proceedings.

Here’s where the various complex (some would say incestuous) relationships among the many Opa-locka city officials and employees is revealed and the entire mess borders on the bizarre.  In fact, you would need a flow chart just to follow all the players and their connections to each other.

The Angelina “Chris” Roberts mentioned above, who is the sister of the fired Zonya Ray, was also a Police Department employee, as well as the close long-term friend and tenant of Vice Mayor Natasha Ervin and a “paramour of political agitator and Commission candidate, Brian Dennis.”

Angelina and her daughter, along with Natasha’s daughter “run the Opa-locka Booster Club, a nonprofit program that is run in conjunction with the city’s Parks program.”

Meanwhile, Brian Dennis, who is the tenant of Commissioner [Joseph] Kelley, sits on the Community Relations Board with his “paramour” and Vice Mayor’s tenant, Angelina “Chris” Roberts.  “They both were appointed by their respective landlords.”

As if that weren’t interbred enough, Mr. Williams wrote that he also “recently learned” that Zonya Ray, the fired Parks Director and sister of Angelina Roberts, had also been a tenant of Vice Mayor Ervin’s for many years.

When Mr. Williams first met Roberts at his first Commission meeting, she had “engaged in a physically threatening and profane altercation with then Commissioner Chris Davis.”

Instead of firing the pugilistic employee, as suggested by her own supervisor in the PD, the newly hired City Manager opted for a suspension.

We’re sure Mr. Williams regrets that move right about now.

But we digress.

In his Whistleblower Complaint, Darvin Williams also went on to explain the “popular trick among members of the Opa-locka Commission,” which is to have residents come to meetings to complain and “incite negative conversations.”

Which is exactly what Michael Joseph does at his North Miami Beach Commission meetings!

By that point in his Opa-locka career, Mr. Williams was subjected to organized harassment by the various and sundry players in office and their supporting cast, and the hostile work environment was becoming intolerable.

It got even worse once he publicly exposed what he referred to as “Graft and Embezzlement.”

It was puzzling to Mr. Williams that Vice Mayor Natasha Ervin had become so personally “vested” in the employees he fired, especially Terrence Butler and Daicari Griffin, both part-time employees who had been working for the city less than a year.

As it turns out — get ready for this hot, twisted mess — Griffin is the baby daddy of Angelina “Chris” Roberts’ daughter, Jontikqua Roberts, and the Vice Mayor is her godmother.  All three generations of these women live in the house they rent from the Vice Mayor.

In his research about the strange but true relationships between and among the Opa-locka officials, Mr. Williams eventually discovered an invoice from Krafty Kustom Designs, LLC in the amount of $3,650.00 for “assistance with setting up the celebration for the City’s birthday.”

It turns out that Krafty Kustom Designs is owned and operated by Jonktikqua Roberts, the daughter of Opa-locka’s Police Department employee, Angelina “Chris” Roberts, who is the sister of Parks Director Zonya Ray.  If that weren’t sketchy enough, Zonya Ray had also “revealed in her outside employment form” that she had a financial interest in Krafty Kustom Designs.

About this particular entanglement Mr. Williams wrote, “It appears that Mrs. Ray … not only booked her niece to work for the parks but may also received compensation to do so.”

Its gets worse.

Vice Mayor Natasha Williams also has another niece, Alexia Diaz, who was a catering vendor for the city.  The invoices that Ms. Diaz submitted to the Vice Mayor for payment were in the Vice Mayor’s handwriting.

Even more suspicious, no one at the Parks department had ever seen Alexia Diaz bring or serve the food.  Apparently, the Vice Mayor’s husband brought the food and sometimes served it personally.

“The Vice Mayor was aware that she could no longer cater to the city once she became an elected official,” Darvin Williams wrote in his Whistleblower complaint.  “This conduct clearly appears to attempt to circumvent law and ethics.”

Ya think?

Darvin Williams also wrote that at a Commission meeting held on June 14, 2023, the Commission voted to reimburse Vice Mayor Natasha Ervin the sum of $26,423.41 “for expenditures she made for park events.”

He closed his Whistleblower Complaint by strongly recommending that “law enforcement agencies, regulatory agencies, and the city review these expenditures to ensure that products and services from which they come have no close ties to the Vice Mayor.”

Welcome to our world, Mr. Williams.  Welcome to our world!

Darvin Williams attached fifty pages of exhibits to back up all his allegations, and we strongly urge you to read it in its entirety.

You might want to pop a kettle of corn first.

According to Mr. Williams, everything he ever said about Natasha Ervin is summed up in the official Whistleblower Complaint that he filed with the State of Florida.

His own words and statements are a far cry from Natasha Ervin’s lawsuit, in which she alleged that he publicly stated:

1. “NATASHA ERVIN embezzled money.”
2. “NATASHA ERVIN stole funds.”
3. “NATASHA ERVIN committed embezzlement in Opa-locka.”

She also alleged that he “published the statements to third parties through verbal statements, social media posts, online publications, and/or other public communications,” and that he “made these statements to the media, City staff and in writing in the summer of 2024.”

Unless Natasha has irrefutable evidence to back up those allegations, this appears to be one hell of a frivolous lawsuit.

It will also open the door for Mr. Williams to sue her for defamation, slander, libel, and malicious prosecution.

Just saying.

But wait!  THERE’S MORE!

The Miami Times article also brought up a so-called whistleblower complaint filed by then-Assistant Police Chief Robin Starks against Darvin Williams and then-Police Chief Kenneth Ottley in September of 2024.

We have beans to spill about this as well, which we will do in Part 3, our final column in this miniseries.

Stay tuned.

Stephanie