Standing on stage last fall at the ninth annual Night of the Iguana fundraiser, one of Tampa's premier social events, the Tampa orthodontist was trying to get someone to listen to him.

But the thousands of partygoers spread out before him in the Tampa Port Authority's Cruise Terminal 2 paid no attention.

They had come to raise money for the local chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and they were packed around bars offering free drinks, around tables overflowing with delicacies from some of the city's fanciest restaurants, around items they would be bidding on later in an auction.

Frank de la Grana, a Tampa lawyer and Make-A-Wish board member, stepped to the microphone and sounded an air horn. Then he introduced the night's guest of honor: Adam McCaskill, an 8-year-old with big eyes and a bald head who was fighting a form of cancer that has since gone into remission. He got his wish: a Christmas snowboarding trip to Colorado.

Adam is why the charity exists, why the revelers had dropped at least $125 to get in the door. Yet few noticed him. He came and went in the shadow of the merrymaking.

That attitude is nothing new for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Sarasota/Tampa Bay, as the local chapter is formally known.

Over the past decade, the charity has been transformed into a magnet for some of Tampa's wealthiest and most visible denizens and has granted more than 1,000 wishes to seriously ill children.

But a Tampa Tribune investigation has found that:

* For much of that time, it used money intended for sick children to pay for questionable expenses such as lavish dinners for chapter leaders and volunteers.

* It permitted and covered up a rogue fundraising operation in Sarasota through which hundreds of thousands of dollars passed, some of which has never been accounted for.

* It failed to comply with state and federal laws regulating charities. The charity says everything is as it should be now but refuses to substantiate that.

* Then, when one of their own began telling authorities about the chapter's secrets after she was accused of fraud, some of those associated with the charity mounted a behind- the-scenes campaign to hustle her to jail.

The woman in question, Delores Crooks, was once executive director of the local Make- A-Wish chapter.

Crooks had worked closely with two of those recently named in sworn testimony as targets of a federal and state corruption investigation that included the Hillsborough County Courthouse: Chief Judge F. Dennis Alvarez and former sheriff's Maj. Rocky Rodriguez. The investigation centers on allegations of loan- sharking, prostitution and past case-fixing.

Alvarez was at the center of the effort to quiet Crooks in 2000 and 2001, the Tribune found, and Rodriguez was involved, too.

Circuit Judge Gregory P. Holder testified last month that the investigation involved Alvarez, another judge and Rodriguez, all of whom have been out of public service for several years. Holder later said there is no indication a sitting judge is suspected of wrongdoing. The testimony came as Holder successfully defended himself against an accusation of plagiarism.

Although it has produced no charges, the corruption investigation is active, the FBI says. As a result, the bureau won't discuss the investigation or Crooks' role in it.

Nor will Crooks talk about her role, although public records confirm that she has been meeting with agents since 1999. They have told her not to discuss specifics, Crooks said.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is looking into some of the financial issues involving the local Make- A-Wish chapter, FDLE spokesman Rick Morera said recently.

``The FDLE is conducting an inquiry regarding allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud by past and present associates of the Tampa-Sarasota Make-A-Wish chapter,'' Morera said. ``The alleged improper behavior by individuals in no way affects the commendable efforts of the Make- A-Wish organization in the community.''

The Allegations

Perhaps no one better personifies the dichotomy between the public and private faces of the local Make-A-Wish organization than Crooks. Once the chapter's executive director, she went to jail four years ago over her personal use of a Make-A-Wish credit card. She charged restaurant bills, trips and even haircuts on the card.

Her explanation was that others within the charity were doing more or less the same thing, using money meant for sick children to treat themselves well. She wasn't going down alone, she told co-workers and others. Her defense team spent more than a year gathering evidence to prove her point.

But Crooks abandoned her effort in 2001 and pleaded no contest, thus acknowledging about $7,000 in wrongful spending. She was sentenced to six months in jail and four years on probation, which she completed last year, and was ordered to repay the money. The evidence amassed by her attorneys and by prosecutors was packed into a half-dozen cardboard boxes and put into storage in the state attorney's custody.

The thousands of documents in those boxes include sworn statements, financial records and transcripts of depositions, which are interviews of witnesses conducted under oath as criminal and civil cases move toward trial. Somehow, state attorney's investigators assigned to the Crooks case didn't connect the dots. But Crooks had a point, those documents show.

Charity officials spent tens of thousands of dollars - money that could have fulfilled more wishes for dying children - to fund events for themselves and take care of their friends.

Some of it went for expensive, self-congratulatory dinners. Some paid for accounting contracts awarded to a lifelong friend of the chapter's president when the same services were available from other accountants for free. Some was spent entertaining auditors from the national Make-A- Wish organization to keep them from looking too closely at the chapter's books, Crooks said.

The records also reveal that chapter officials knowingly allowed a rogue fundraising auxiliary to operate in Sarasota outside charity rules, defied orders from the national Make-A-Wish Foundation to shut down the auxiliary and then covered up the operation when an examiner from the national organization came to town to conduct a routine review.

The auxiliary existed without regulatory oversight, the Tribune has discovered. It should have been registered with federal and state agencies, but it wasn't.

Make-A-Wish's Sarasota field office now complies with the law and the organization's rules, charity officials say.

But while it was operating in the dark, hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through it, the Tribune has found. To this day, no one has accounted for where all of it went.

From The Beginning

The Sarasota operation was a remnant of the first local Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was founded there in 1986. The organization fared poorly until Robert A. Herce, a defense lawyer from Tampa and a close friend of Alvarez, was elected president in the early 1990s. Herce moved the chapter's main office to Tampa and turned the Sarasota operation into a satellite run by a few volunteers.

The volunteers reincorporated in 1991 as the Make-A- Wish Auxiliary Inc. Then papers were filed with the state in August 1993 dissolving it, records show.

But the auxiliary kept operating. Over the next four months, more than $11,000 was deposited into an auxiliary bank account, records show. Much more was to follow - thanks in part to the efforts of Barbara Lancer, a Sarasota socialite who soon became the auxiliary's president.

Lancer, married to a Sarasota lawyer, voiced determination to make the auxiliary into something more than a Make- A-Wish outpost, and she quickly became its public face in Sarasota. She ran the operation from her house on Siesta Key, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Donations skyrocketed.

From September 1993 to December 1998, the auxiliary banked at least $621,000, records show. Of this, $416,696 was forwarded to Tampa. Previously, the biggest contribution from Sarasota to Tampa was $5,800 in May 1991.

The people running the auxiliary raised ``an awful lot of money for us,'' former Tampa board member and treasurer Charles Santana told the Tribune, ``an awful lot of money.''

They did it in part by throwing expensive fundraisers - standard procedure for mainline charities in affluent communities such as Sarasota, where so many donors are wealthy and expect to be treated well for their contributions.

Michael's On East, a swanky restaurant on Sarasota's East Avenue, catered the auxiliary's largest fundraising event, an annual tennis tournament and auction. The restaurant donated all the food for it, co-owner Philip Mancini said. He typically got vendors to donate things such as table linens and wine as well, Mancini added. The charity had to pay only for waiters and food service staff, he said.

Such events aren't unusual among nonprofit agencies courting the well-to-do, experts say.

``If you have a fundraising dinner and wealthy people want to pay a lot of money for it and they also make a contribution, ... they may not be happy if you serve them McDonald's,'' said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a Chicago-based nonprofit watchdog. ``They want a nice evening out to motivate them to go.''

Record Of Spending

But officials with the Tampa chapter got into the habit of indulging themselves and pampering the auxiliary's volunteers, too, records show.

Board members, employees and their spouses traveled from Tampa to Sarasota once a year for a dinner saluting the auxiliary. The dinners were held at some of Sarasota's most expensive restaurants. The Tampa chapter covered the cost. On one occasion, the Tampa contingent made the Sarasota trip on a donated private party bus supplied with wine and hors d'oeuvres.

One dinner was at Roessler's, an exclusive restaurant that sits beside a private lake amid 3 acres of formal gardens. Herce signed a Make-A- Wish check for the event in the amount of $3,390, bank records show.

Other years, the dinners were held at Michael's On East. They were moved there at the Tampa chapter's request, Lancer said.

It was money well-spent, Herce told the Tribune.

``When you're involved in an organization like Make-A- Wish,'' Herce said, ``you have got to show appreciation for the hours of work that the volunteers do. I'll defend that every day of the week. That was the right thing to do. I'd do it again. Sometimes you've got to spend a little money to make a lot of money.''

The auxiliary was frugal, Lancer said.

``We were cheap, very cheap,'' she said. ``There was a time I don't think we had a penny in postage. Everything was donated.''

The board, she said, met at an inexpensive restaurant that served only breakfast and lunch.

But records show the auxiliary spending tens of thousands of dollars on postage, personal reimbursements, printing and picking up the bill for board lunches at two Sarasota restaurants, including bar tabs.

The auxiliary wrote 14 checks to cash totaling $9,998 from January 1995 to October 1998. The Tribune could find nothing to document how this money was spent, but Lancer said it was used for things such as cash giveaways at fundraisers.

It also issued checks over roughly the same period reimbursing Lancer and other volunteers for thousands of dollars in spending for things such as postage, while simultaneously issuing checks to the local postmaster for thousands more in postage, records show.

Registration Was Missing

The auxiliary did all this - wrote its own checks, kept its own books and maintained its own board of directors - without complying with federal and state laws passed to ensure government oversight of charities.

For example, the auxiliary should have been registered with the state Department of Revenue and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. It wasn't, records show.

When it was reorganized after its dissolution in 1993, it also should have been reregistered with the state Division of Corporations, but it wasn't.

It should have been registered as a tax-exempt charity with the IRS, but it wasn't.

It should have had its own federal tax identification number. Instead, it used the Tampa chapter's.

It also should have been filing annual returns with the IRS, but there is no record of those in the thousands of documents the Tribune examined.

Nor is the Sarasota auxiliary mentioned on the Tampa chapter's returns. Instead, the chapter's returns certify that they don't include affiliates.

It's impossible to tell without such documentation where all the auxiliary's money went.

Santana, the Tampa chapter's former treasurer, said in an interview that the chapter's IRS filings always included the auxiliary figures, although they weren't detailed. His firm has prepared the chapter's tax returns since September 1998, records show. But Santana also said he saw little paperwork from the auxiliary and didn't know it was writing its own checks.

``We never really knew what [the auxiliary] had,'' Crooks said in a separate interview. ``When they decided to give it to us, they just gave us a check.''

Another firm, Ligori, Vaillant & Co., audited the Tampa chapter's books and prepared its returns before 1998, records show. Those don't detail what Sarasota was taking in or spending, either.

Local Make-A-Wish officials said they wouldn't object to Ligori, Vaillant & Co. talking with the Tribune. The newspaper twice asked Roland Vaillant for an interview. Vaillant declined.

Lancer thought the Tampa chapter was reporting the auxiliary's finances and also thought the auxiliary was registered with the IRS, she said. But she didn't see any of the chapter's tax returns, she said.

The Tampa chapter, she added, authorized the auxiliary's use of its tax identification number, but she provided no details about who did so or when.

Known Problems

The Make-A-Wish board in Tampa knew there were problems with the Sarasota auxiliary, the minutes from a March 1, 1998, board meeting show - but did nothing about them.

``Mr. Herce spoke of Auxiliaries,'' the minutes say. ``Sarasota is in violation of many rules, national and local. They represent themselves as their own foundation; financial rules (serious). Auxiliaries need to be revamped; cannot be own corporation. ... If they do not comply, the chapter will be breached.''

Herce told the Tribune he didn't remember saying this.

The minutes also show a board member mentioning the national Make-A-Wish organization.

``Mr. Herce stated that we do not want them involved,'' the minutes continue.

The board also discussed donations to the charity - sometimes bequeathed by a family in memory of a loved one - being delivered to Lancer's home.

``Barbara Lancer wanted the money, jewelry and antiques sent to her house,'' the minutes say.

Those items ranged in value from less than $100 to $4,000, documents show. The minutes don't address what happened to them, and there's no indication in the record that anyone ever checked to find out.

``There was a couple of times there was some estate money. I don't remember specifics. I remember sometimes there were some,'' Lancer told the Tribune. ``Perhaps it came to my house before we had an office.''

If so, she would have sent it to Tampa, Lancer said.

Herce was angry when he saw the minutes, employee Marilyn Meyers said in a deposition given in the Crooks case in March 2000.

``Bobby came to the office because he was upset about the minutes,'' Meyers said. They had been written by the chapter's public relations coordinator, Stephanie Ziegler.

``We all just defended Stephanie and said that she just did was she was supposed to do,'' Meyers said.

Meanwhile, although she and Herce gave the auxiliary broad latitude, Crooks tried repeatedly to shut it down, records show.

Crooks ``wanted me to get rid of Barbara. She wanted me to get rid of Sarasota,'' Herce said at a June 1999 board meeting, during which the board voted to fire Crooks.

But he resisted, telling Crooks that Lancer was ``off limits,'' Crooks said.

``They give us $150,000 a year, and we're not losing them,'' Herce said, according to board meeting minutes.

Only when Crooks was arrested and began threatening to reveal the chapter's secrets did Herce's attitude toward Lancer change.

``She is a housewife that plays a lot of tennis,'' he said in a deposition given in the Crooks case in 2001, shortly before Crooks was sent to jail.

The Coverup

Chapter officials worked to cover up the auxiliary when a representative from the national Make-A-Wish organization, Kelly Koepke, came to town in 1999, records show. Koepke was to conduct a routine two-day review of the Tampa chapter's finances, wish-granting and administration.

Koepke, no longer with the charity, said she knew beforehand that national had ordered the Sarasota operation shut down two years earlier. It had been operating outside the national organization's rules, records show.

``We assumed it had been dealt with,'' Koepke told the Tribune.

It hadn't been - and with Koepke on the way, Herce told Crooks to hide it, Crooks said.

Crooks called Lancer to spell out what would happen, Lancer said in her deposition in the Crooks case.

``She said, `We are coming down there and we are gathering all your records, absolutely everything,' '' Lancer said. ``They came in and they just wiped us out.''

What the records revealed was so startling, Crooks later said, that she told board Vice President Rocky Rodriguez about them.

Rodriguez at the time was a Hillsborough County sheriff's captain - he was promoted later to major - whom many considered a likely successor to then-Sheriff Cal Henderson. As vice president, he was about to succeed Herce as chapter president.

Rodriguez, Crooks said, was livid because the Sarasota documents might be evidence of a crime and proved that the Tampa chapter had ignored national's instructions to shut down the auxiliary. He told her to alert Herce immediately, Crooks said. Herce, she said, told her to take the documents home and hide them.

Herce denied this and said that if it happened, Crooks acted on her own.

Lancer, meanwhile, said Crooks told her ``she was going to hide'' the records and that Lancer should stay away from a board meeting Koepke planned to attend.

``They were afraid I was going to tell them about [Sarasota's separate bank] account,'' Lancer told the Tribune. ``I was totally unaware it was being kept a secret until they said, `Give us your bank records.' ''

Crooks sent Herce a warning by fax.

``Please review, this is just the tip of the iceberg,'' Crooks wrote. ``We'll need to ... strategize our stories before Kelley's arrival.''

Another fax sent to Herce six days before Koepke's arrival shows that the chapter was trying to clean out the auxiliary's bank account. It was written by Alvarez's wife, Doris, who worked for the local Make-A-Wish chapter then.

She had called to close the auxiliary's account and transfer the money to a chapter account, but it couldn't be done on the strength of Herce's signature alone, Doris Alvarez reported.

``I was told since it is a business account and there is a large amount (almost $25,000.00) that someone would have to actually go to the bank and sign documents and then a wire transfer could be done,'' she wrote.

Herce told the Tribune he didn't remember this, either.

The faxes are among the thousands of documents accumulated in the course of the Crooks case. Others show that Herce and Crooks sent office workers home before Koepke's arrival because they knew about the auxiliary and might give it away.

Meanwhile, to keep Koepke occupied, Crooks said, she and Herce took her to dinner at Bern's Steak House. The bill came to more than $150.

``It was great, I gotta tell ya,'' said Koepke, who now works as a writer in New Mexico.

The chapter did this routinely to keep outsiders such as auditors from the national Make-A-Wish organization from examining its books too closely, Crooks said. Sometimes the visitors would be treated to expensive dinners out, Crooks said, and sometimes arrangements would be made for them to be entertained at the homes of local judges.

Herce told the Tribune that he regularly took visiting Make-A-Wish officials to Bern's for dinner and always paid the bill himself.

Not this time, however.

Presented with a copy of the meal's receipts and his reimbursement check, Herce said Koepke's dinner must have been an exception.

The national Make-A-Wish Foundation has no written policy limiting how much should be spent entertaining visiting officials, said its general counsel, David Mulvihill. But chapters should be prudent about how they spend money donated to help sick children, he added.

``We don't pick the most expensive restaurants,'' Mulvihill said. ``That's not what we do.''

Koepke came and went none the wiser about Sarasota.

Looking Back

What happened to all the money donated to the Sarasota auxiliary during its heyday? Why wasn't it properly registered and its finances reported to the IRS? And why did the Tampa chapter go to such lengths to hide it from the national Make-A-Wish organization?

National officials can't say. They're confident no abuses occurred, they told the Tribune. But they have never audited the auxiliary's books, didn't know the auxiliary continued to operate in defiance of their orders and didn't know about the coverup, they said.

Meanwhile, chapter officials in Tampa insist that the auxiliary is being run properly and monitored closely now. But when pressed for substantiation of this claim, they question the value of digging up the past.

``Resurrecting the past, especially at this time, has no valid purpose,'' Feldman, the chapter president, wrote the Tribune in an e-mail after ignoring repeated requests for an interview, ``and would only diminish the efforts of all who have worked so diligently to assure that the highest quality of wishes are being granted and the ethics and integrity of our chapter is beyond reproach.''

``Who cares what happened six years ago?'' asked Vee Yerrid, the chapter's current executive director. There has never been any wrongdoing involving the auxiliary, she said.

The record, though, suggests otherwise.

It also shows that when Crooks said as much, a mountain slid down on her. To be sure, a mountain partially of her own making: She had been abusing her Make-A-Wish credit card for years.

But she also was a threat, and the people she was threatening went to extraordinary lengths to silence her, the Tribune found.

They did so from the highest positions of public trust. And they got away with it.

But people don't stay quiet forever.

And paper trails never go cold.

Tomorrow: Who brought the mountain down, and what happened when it fell.

Reporter Doug Stanley and researcher Michael Messano contributed to this report. Reporter Michael Fechter can be reached at (813) 259-7621 or

Reporter Doug Stanley and researcher Michael Messano contributed to this report. Reporter Michael Fechter can be reached at (813) 259-7621 or mfechter@tampatrib.com. mfechter@tampatrib.com.Reporter John W. Allman can be reached at (813) 259-7915 or jallman@tampatrib.com.