It didn’t take long for Bill Riley Jr.‘s name to disappear from the list of licensed real estate salespeople at Rosa Commercial Real Estate, the brokerage firm owned by former Hialeah Councilman Oscar de la Rosa, stepson of Hialeah Mayor Esteban “Stevie” Bovo. The brokerage firm that got $640,000 fee for the sale of the 1505 Ponce de Leon building to Location Ventures and developer Rishi Kapoor, who we have learned was paying Miami Mayor Francis Suarez to speed the process along.
Riley was arrested afternoon with Miami Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla on charges of public corruption that include money laundering and bribery. Authorities say he funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the commissioner’s political action committee in exchange for a vote to give away a public park to his clients, the anti-vax Centner family that owns The Centner Academy.
By Thursday evening, he was gone from the list of licensed real estate associates with the firm.
By Monday, de la Rosa’s firm had also dropped Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago and his chief of staff Chelsea Granell Lindsey (she went first), as well as someone named Anthony Casas. They were replaced with Amanda Bonvecchio, de la Rosa’s wife.
This is the brokerage firm that got a $640,000 fee for selling the 1505 Ponce de Leon building to Location Ventures, the company owned by developer Rishi Kapoor, who is under FBI investigation after the Miami Herald exposed that he had been paying Miami Mayor Francis Suarez $10,000 a month for consulting (read: to help with the permitting process).
It looks like Rosa Commercial Real Estate is cleaning house.
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