Maxwell: 7 things to know about recently arrested Sheriff Marcos Lopez
Any time a sheriff gets arrested, it's obviously a big deal. And with Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez, it was a wild deal to boot, with authorities saying he ran a 'massive' gambling operation that included a full-fledged casino — in Kissimmee, of all places.
Still, anyone who paid even passing attention to Lopez's tenure probably wasn't shocked to learn he may have done something wrong. This is a man, after all, who was deemed untrustworthy by the region's last two prosecutors.
Lopez may have been a red flag in a green uniform, but he found an ally in Gov. Ron DeSantis in their joint crusade against State Attorney Monique Worrell. And the sheriff had a generally high-profile career that got even higher with his recent arrest and suspension from office.
If you haven't been following along before, here are seven things to know about Lopez:
1. Two different state attorneys declared Lopez untrustworthy.
Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell, a Democrat, and Andrew Bain, the man our Republican governor chose to temporarily replace Worrell, may not have agreed on much. But both agreed Lopez couldn't be trusted.
Bain was the first to place Lopez on the office's official 'Brady List' of law enforcement witnesses the office considered unreliable after an incident where the sheriff's office improperly and indecently posted a photo of a dead 13-year-old girl on social media. Bain concluded that Lopez's office had conducted an inadequate, if not laughable, probe into the sheriff's role in the incident and that Lopez's conflicting statements made him untrustworthy.
After Bain left office, Lopez appealed his decision. But Worrell's office rejected his plea, deciding to keep Lopez on the scarlet-letter list of cops with veracity concerns. It doesn't get much more damning than that.
Osceola Sheriff Lopez placed on Brady list of law officers deemed untrustworthy
2. The Orlando Sentinel editorial board also urged voters to remove Lopez from office.
This might not normally be noteworthy — except that the Sentinel endorsed Lopez in 2020 back when Lopez promised to usher in a new era of transparency and accountability. Voters liked what they heard. So did the ed board. But it turned out to be a crock.
So last year, instead of defending its prior last decision, the ed board acknowledged reality and reversed course, urging voters to get the Democratic incumbent out of office, saying he had clearly lost the public trust.
3. Lopez was a key ally to Ron DeSantis in the governor's crusade against Worrell.
The DeSantis team said it also consulted with Orange County Sheriff John Mina but relied heavily upon accusations made by Lopez that purported to prove Worrell was soft on crime. Well, many of those accusations turned out to be bunk. A Sentinel investigation would later reveal that nearly half of the 74 drug-trafficking cases that Lopez claimed Worrell had dropped were still working their way through the system and that other cases weren't prosecuted because of evidentiary problems.
Interestingly, DeSantis teamed up with Lopez to go after Worrell in 2023 — the same year the state said it started investigating Lopez's crimes.
4. Attorney General James Uthmeier called the arrest 'solemn.'
Anyone who has watched Florida's newly appointed attorney general knows he gets downright giddy when he talks about Worrell's removal from office. (As evidence, watch the press conference Uthmeier did last month in Orlando where he taunted Worrell with Sheriff Mina at his side.)
But Uthmeier took a very different tone when Lopez was arrested, calling it 'a solemn day for Florida and our law enforcement community.'
Lopez's arrest was definitely darkly serious. But it was probably especially solemn for members of the DeSantis administration who'd essentially made Lopez their lead character witness in the case against Worrell.
5. Lopez didn't put body cameras on all his officers.
Three years ago, Osceola deputies shot and killed a 20-year-old man accused of shoplifting pizza and trading cards. Lopez said it was a fair shooting — but never had any body-camera footage to prove it. After that case raised questions and prompted a lawsuit, Lopez vowed to get to work on cameras. But that was the same thing he'd told the Sentinel more than two years earlier when he was first trying to get in office.
Cameras are so commonplace nowadays that any sheriff or chief who chooses not to make body cams standard equipment is making an intentional decision not to give prosecutors and the public the full story.
No body-cams rolled as Florida cops shot 20-year-old. That was a choice | Commentary
6. Lopez is innocent until proven guilty.
Lopez hasn't been convicted of a thing so far. Maybe he never will be. He deserves his day in court.
But the sheriff's office at large has a lot of questions to answer. Chief among them: How was this casino allowed to operate as long as it did? The Sentinel reported Wednesday that, prior to the sheriff's arrest, the sheriff's office had been dispatched to 'at least 50 incidents at The Eclipse casino.' Well, casinos aren't legal in Central Florida. So how many times should a law-enforcement agency have to show up at one before shutting it down?
Osceola deputies made multiple responses to casino allegedly controlled by sheriff
7. He still shouldn't be in office.
That is one of the main takeaways from all this: Even if you don't account for this recent arrest, Lopez has provided ample evidence that Osceola voters deserve better. Take it from the two different prosecutors who agreed on little else.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
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