ORLANDO, Fla. — About four months after Orlando political strategist Eric Foglesong pleaded guilty to stealing money from a campaign and was ordered to pay $20,000 in restitution, he waded back into local elections, contributing nearly $900 to a pair of little-known independent candidates who filed to run in two hotly contested legislative races.
Foglesong, who would soon begin falling behind on his home rent payments, also likely wrote the $1,187 check that paid the qualifying fee for one of those candidates, according to three handwriting experts who compared a photocopy of that check to writing on documents Foglesong filed in court.
The candidacies of the two independents — Jestine Iannotti, who ran for Senate District 9, and Juan Rodriguez, who ran for House District 29 — were later promoted by Republican-linked groups with ads apparently meant to siphon support away from Democratic candidates.
Both races were eventually won by the Republican candidates: Sen. Jason Brodeur), who Foglesong has personally supported in the past, and Scott Plakon.
“I have always believed that Mr. Foglesong was used either willing or unwilling as a pawn to facilitate third-party ringers for the Senate District 9 race and my race, the House District 29 race,” said Tracey Kagan, the Democratic challenger who lost to Plakon.
Foglesong, 44, declined to answer questions from The Orlando Sentinel. He said the newspaper was attempting to “defame” him personally and also “beat up” on Chris Dorworth, the former state legislator and lobbyist who is a longtime fixture in Seminole County politics.
“In politics, sometimes things aren’t as complicated or nefarious as the media would have you believe,” Foglesong said in a written statement. “I have a track record of supporting people, not parties, and I have never shied away from offering free advice or a helping hand. It’s fine to criticize my beliefs or my clients, but not to demonize me for representing their lawful interests.”
Foglesong and Dorworth are friends, and The New York Times has reported that federal investigators are aware of a conversation between Dorworth and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz about lining up a third-party candidate to help Brodeur win his Senate race.
Democrats have called on investigators to probe the District 9 race because of similarities between it and another state Senate election in South Florida, where local authorities recently filed charges against a former state senator and a man he’s accused of paying to run as a “ghost” candidate.
Dorworth did not respond to requests for comment. He told the Times that he was not involved in Iannotti’s candidacy and did not recall such a conversation with Gaetz. Iannotti has since moved to Sweden and has not responded to requests for comment.
An ad aimed at liberals touting obscure non-party affiliated state Senate candidate Jestine Iannotti was paid for by a mysterious group based out of Winter Springs.
Foglesong did not answer a list of questions about his role in Iannotti’s candidacy, which has drawn particular scrutiny because a dark-money group paid more than $500,000 for nearly identical mailers promoting her and no-party-affiliation (NPA) candidates in two other state Senate races in Miami.
Prosecutors in Miami earlier this year charged one of those NPA candidates and Frank Artiles, a former legislator-turned-lobbyist, who is accused of paying the candidate to run. The Miami Herald has reported that Artiles was overheard boasting about the plot during Brodeur’s election night victory party at a bar in Seminole County.
In addition to directly contributing to Iannotti, it appears that Foglesong wrote the check that covered her filing fee in June, according to three handwriting experts who at the Sentinel’s request compared a photocopy of the check to documents included in an eviction lawsuit filed against Foglesong this year.
Thomas Vastrick, a Central Florida-based forensic document examiner with more than four decades of experience working in a law enforcement crime laboratory and private practice, said “the evidence is fairly clear cut” that the same person’s handwriting appears in the court filing and on the check, which was written in the name of “Jestine Iannotti Election Fund Campaign Account.”
“I have a high level of confidence that these were all executed by the same person,” Vastrick told the Sentinel.
Handwriting comparison experts compared handwriting from the check used to pay Jestine Iannotti's campaign filing fees (top) with samples from a court case (bottom) involving Eric Foglesong, the political consultant who donated to Iannotti's campaign. The experts said it's likely the same person wrote the check as wrote the samples.
The other experts, Central Florida-based Bill Smith and Richard Orsini of Jacksonville, agreed. “It is probable,” that the check and the court documents “were written by one and the same writer,” Orsini wrote in a report prepared for the Sentinel.
Beyond Foglesong, Iannotti had just three other contributors. One of those donors, Adam Heath, is Facebook friends with Foglesong. A man who came to the door at Heath’s Orlando home earlier this week said he wasn’t available. Other attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
Another man listed as a contributor, Todd Karvoski, told a Sentinel reporter who visited his MetroWest apartment last month he’d never heard of Iannotti and didn’t give money to her campaign. Karvoski isn’t registered to vote, state election records show.
Yet the day the Sentinel published a story with Karvoski’s comments, the reporter received an email from someone claiming to be Karvoski that directly contradicted what he said earlier that week.
“I realized a day after you were there that I had made a $100 contribution to a campaign but it was the first time I have ever made a contribution to a campaign and I thought at the time that the girl running as an independent sounded cool and would be better than the republicans and democrats that have messed things up so much,” the email said.
Karvoski never responded to a phone call from a reporter trying to confirm he sent the email. When the reporter visited his apartment last week, a woman who came to the door said he was not home.
Other aspects of Iannotti’s campaign were also unusual. Last summer, when most campaigns were in full swing, Iannotti spent several weeks in Sweden, according to Facebook posts shared with the Sentinel. She moved to the Stockholm area in March, according to another post.
Last September, Iannotti sent a statement acknowledging she had received several media inquiries about her candidacy and asking for “privacy.”
“I have a great concern for the tenor and tone of the current political debate which is why I chose to run,” she wrote.
Foglesong, who has been a behind-the-scenes political operative in Florida and Louisiana for many years, has engaged in controversial tactics in the past.
In 2010, while serving as campaign manager for Orange County mayor candidate Bill Segal, Foglesong secretly met with then-State Attorney Lawson Lamar to accuse one of Segal’s rivals in the race of breaking campaign finance laws.
The allegations were later found to be false, but Lamar’s office launched a separate undercover sting that eventually led to the rival candidate — former Orange County Commissioner Mildred Fernandez — pleading guilty to bribery and other charges. Fernandez’s attorney accused Foglesong of using “dirty tricks” to drive her from the race, though Foglesong, who was identified as a confidential source for detectives in court documents, said at the time he was acting on legitimate concerns.
A few years later, when working on the re-election campaign for Orlando City Commissioner Robert Stuart, a political committee that Foglesong led sent mailers attacking Stuart’s opponent that, among other things, included a picture of her home. “Are my children going to be on the next mailer?” the rival candidate, real-estate attorney Asima Azam, said at the time. Stuart’s campaign also ran a poll asking voters about Azam’s Muslim faith.
“When you boil things away, politics is about winning and Eric has devoted his career to helping people win,” said former Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer, one of Foglesong’s former clients.
While Foglesong is best known for working with Democratic candidates, he has become a supporter of some Republicans, too — particularly in Seminole County.
For instance, when the Orlando hand doctor and medical marijuana entrepreneur Jason Pirozzolo hosted a February 2017 fundraiser at his home for Brodeur’s state Senate campaign, Foglesong was one of the people that Pirozzolo publicly thanked in a Facebook post. Foglesong later donated $1,000 to Brodeur’s campaign, though Brodeur refunded him two weeks later.
Foglesong was also one of the earliest contributors to then-Florida House candidate Chris Anderson, though Anderson also later refunded the donation. Weeks after he filed to run, Anderson was hired by Joel Greenberg at the Seminole County Tax Collector’s Office. In 2019, he was appointed Seminole’s Supervisor of Elections by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was re-elected to the post last year.
It’s unclear why Brodeur and Anderson refunded the donations.
Foglesong, too, briefly worked for Greenberg in 2017, when the now-disgraced former Tax Collector paid Foglesong $10,000 for “community relations consulting.” Foglesong said last month he was hired to help determine whether Greenberg could work with his counterpart in Orange County to open more offices along the county border.
Most recently, Foglesong donated $1,000 to the campaign of former Longwood City Commissioner Ben Paris, who ran unsuccessfully against Seminole County Commissioner Lee Constantine — one of the county’s most vocal opponents of River Cross, the controversial housing development that Dorworth is trying to develop in rural Seminole County.
Foglesong’s career was rocked in April 2019, when he was arrested and charged with stealing $20,000 from a political committee that supported John Mina’s campaign to become Orange County sheriff.
He pleaded guilty last year to one count of grand theft, court records show, though adjudication was withheld so he has not been convicted of the crime. However, he was ordered to pay restitution and is on probation through February 2023.
In a March letter to an Orange County judge, Foglesong wrote that the “initial media splash” from the arrest “caused a unique and previously unparalleled disruption in my business and my family’s fortunes.” Foglesong’s landlord had filed a suit seeking to evict the family from their Maitland home over unpaid rent. They have since moved, but the case is ongoing.
Friends have tried to help Foglesong, who has four children, and his family get back on their feet. One of them: Carson Good, the Winter Park developer and fundraiser for DeSantis whom DeSantis appointed to the board of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which runs Orlando International Airport.
Good said his company has hired Foglesong’s consulting business over the years for a variety of mostly real estate-related tasks, including performing “due diligence” on properties Good was considering buying and arranging introductions with potential business partners.
“I think he is smart, and very well-liked in this Central Florida community,” Good said.
Another person who has hired Foglesong recently is Bertica Cabrera-Morris, a local lobbyist who represents clients before the airport authority.
“I use him for research. He knows a lot of people,” she said. “What I can tell you, as far as I’m concerned, he’s been super kind. I haven’t seen any dirty stuff.”
(Martin E. Comas contributed to this report.)
