While heading a board overseeing private prison contracts, Alan Duffee stole nearly $225,000.
By JONI JAMES
Published February 14, 2006
TALLAHASSEE - A former Florida prison official has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $225,000 in state money nearly three years after he used the cash to help buy houses for him and his girlfriend.
Alan Brown Duffee, the former executive director of a defunct board that oversaw Florida's private prison contracts, admitted Thursday in Tallahassee to one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.
Duffee, 40, faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He is to be sentenced in April.
Neither Duffee nor his attorney, Stephen Dobson, could be reached Monday.
A plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee shows Duffee admitted that he moved money in 2003 from a bank account for the Florida Correctional Privatization Commission to another bank account to which only he had access.
About $124,000 from the first two transfers - $50,000 on May 6 and $100,000 on May 29 - helped with the closing costs on homes for him and for his girlfriend, court documents show. It's unclear what became of another $74,972 he transferred in September and October of 2003.
The money came from the commission's building maintenance reimbursement fund. At the time of Duffee's indictment in September, federal officials seized his home, car and bank accounts.
Duffee strove as recently as a year ago to play among Tallahassee's top lobbyist ranks. Shortly after leaving the commission in 2004, he purchased a multicity lobbying firm, the Windsor Group, and had a contract to buy Clyde's and Costello's, a bar one block from the state Capitol that has long been a favorite of political insiders. Duffee eventually defaulted on both deals.
Duffee served three years as executive director of the privatization commission. The governor-appointed panel oversaw the state's five privately run prisons until May 2004, when the Legislature voted to abolish the commission amid complaints from vendors about favoritism and a St. Petersburg Times report that Duffee had hired a former state prison official as a consultant in violation of state law.
