Two years ago, a Miami jury ordered a pair of Miccosukee Indians to pay about $3.2 million to a local truck driver for causing the death of his wife in a 1998 car accident.
The defendants have insisted they have no money of their own to pay the judgment. But now a lawyer for the victim's family has produced at least $2 million in checks issued by the Miccosukee Tribe for the two Indians' legal defense.
"Somehow, the defendants had millions to pay their lawyers, but not a penny to pay the survivors of the woman killed in the crash," said attorney Ramon M. Rodriguez, who represented the victim's Miami-Dade family.
The tribe's check payments â€" until now a secret â€" were issued directly to the Miami law firm of former U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis and ex-federal prosecutor Michael Tein, according to court records.
Yet Tein recently swore to a judge that the two tribe members themselves â€" not the Miccosukee Tribe in West Miami-Dade â€" paid their legal bills.
"Our client is not the Miccosukee Tribe," Tein testified during an August hearing in the wrongful-death case. "The defendants have been responsible for our fees and they … had been paying our fees."
Rodriguez â€" armed with 61 checks showing the tribe's payments to the law firm between 2005 and 2010 â€" claims Tein "boldly lied" to Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ronald Dresnick while Lewis remained "silent."
In a response filed Thursday, the two lawyers denied any misconduct.
Rodriguez's accusation is the most serious yet in the bitterly fought civil case, bookended by the tragic death of 30-year-old Liliana Bermudez and the two tribe members' refusal to pay her surviving husband, Carlos Bermudez, and son Mathew for their loss.
At a 2009 trial, Tammy Gwen Billie, the driver who killed Liliana Bermudez on the Tamiami Trail, and Jimmie Bert, who owned Billie's uninsured Acura Legend, admitted fault. The Miami jury only decided damages, issuing a $3.17 million award.
In court papers filed Thursday, the law firm said that contrary to Rodriguez's allegations, Tein did not "provide false testimony" and Lewis did not "misrepresent facts." Both lawyers said that Rodriguez also inflated their clients' fee payments, which he claimed to be at least $3.1 million. Now Judge Dresnick is considering whether to hold a hearing on the perjury allegations.
In their filing, Lewis and Tein said Billie and Bert paid the legal fees with their own money through the Miccosukee Tribe, which issued the checks on their behalf because the clients "do not maintain checking accounts." Rodriguez disputes that, saying both indeed had checking accounts.
Lewis and Tein said the money their firm received came from distributions that the Miccosukee Tribe makes to members every quarter. The money was either drawn from the two Indians' distributions or advanced to them as loans, they said.
Tein, in an interview, declined to comment on why his clients have been unable to tap into that same pool of Miccosukee distributions to pay the $3.17 million jury award to the Bermudez family.
The Miccosukees make tens of millions of dollars in yearly distributions to their 600 members from profits generated by the tribe's gambling operation on the West Miami-Dade reservation.
For the Bermudez family, it has been virtually impossible to collect their judgment, even when the Indian defendants admit they have some assets. Rodriguez, said the defendants have flipped-flopped in the past about paying their lawyers. Last year, both testified that they had not paid any fees or ever seen any legal bills. Yet earlier this year, both filed affidavits asserting they had paid Lewis and Tein's legal fees. They restated that same point in their lawyers' court filing Thursday.
Rodriguez also said that contrary to Lewis and Tein's representations, Bert, the father who owned the car, indeed had a personal checking account through which the Miccosukee disbursements could have flowed. Rodriguez said Billie, the driver of the car, also had a bank account held jointly with her father.
For her part, Billie, a former Miccosukee shop clerk, has disclosed in court records that she has no recent income and made just $7,305 in 2009. She said she only received between zero and $4,000 in quarterly distributions from the tribe since 1999 â€" a seemingly insufficient amount to pay Lewis and Tein's substantial legal fees.
Also, she had spent much of the past decade in prison resulting from her convictions in the Bermudez vehicular homicide case and separate drug-related driving offenses.
Her father, Bert, said he has received between $35,000 and $40,000 in quarterly distributions from the Miccosukee Tribe since 2007, and that he earned another $118,391 from his job at the tribe's treatment center in 2009.
But Bert has also said in other court papers that his Miccosukee distributions have "varied from not receiving anything to sometimes receiving thousands of dollars at a time" since 1999.
Rodriguez has aggressively pursued numerous sanctions against Lewis and Tein in an attempt to collect the Bermudez family's judgment. He has only been successful once.
Last month, Dresnick fined the Lewis Tein law firm $3,500 for misleading Rodriguez during his efforts to delve into the defendants' financial history.
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