She had spent most of her adult life surrounded by judges and lawyers, and she was executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

But Crooks also had spent years using a Make-A-Wish credit card to charge thousands of dollars in personal expenses.

She wasn't alone, she said when she was arrested in September 1999; others affiliated with the charity also had taken liberties, and she could name names.

In fact, Crooks was already naming names. On the advice of one of her attorneys, she had begun telling federal and state authorities what she knew, records show.

Crooks won't detail what she told the agents. But among other things, she helped them understand Tampa's sometimes complex social fabric - who was related, whose families were joined by marriage, who went to law school together, even who might be having affairs.

Many of Crooks' meetings with the agents are documented in her probation file, which the Tribune reviewed under Florida's public records law. Her last meeting recorded in the file occurred in May 2004, just before her probation ended.

Almost immediately upon her 1999 arrest, some of the people in the legal system Crooks had served for much of her adult life began a campaign to vilify her, a Tampa Tribune investigation has found. They saw Crooks declared a felon and sent to jail, although many in similar cases have been treated more leniently. She was ruined - a pariah.

Those who led this effort included former Hillsborough County Chief Judge F. Dennis Alvarez and former Maj. Rocky Rodriguez of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the Tribune found. Both were recently named by Circuit Judge Gregory P. Holder in sworn testimony as targets in a major federal and state corruption investigation, which focuses in part on allegations of case-fixing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse.

Alvarez and Rodriguez have been out of public service for several years. Holder has said that there is no indication a sitting judge is suspected of wrongdoing. The testimony came as Holder successfully defended himself against an accusation of plagiarism.

The corruption investigation is active, Carl Whitehead, special agent in charge of the FBI's Tampa office, said recently.

``These types of investigations are very complex,'' Whitehead said in an interview. ``And they do require a little bit of time to investigate. Wherever the allegations may take us, we're going to do that.''

Meanwhile, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the finances of the Make-A-Wish chapter, FDLE spokesman Rick Morera said.

Others who had hands in what happened to Crooks were a controversial state attorney, the late Harry Lee Coe III, and a local defense lawyer, Robert A. Herce, the Tribune found.

The four had strong social, professional and political ties that went back years. Beyond that, Herce was president of the local Make-A-Wish chapter, Rodriguez was vice president, and Alvarez's wife, Doris, worked in the chapter's office.

As chief judge, Alvarez played a pivotal role in nearly every major aspect of the Crooks case, records show.

He did so despite prohibitions against such involvement in the Florida Code of Judicial Conduct and even though he and Crooks had been close since high school. Crooks had been his first judicial assistant in the early 1980s and had managed his campaigns for the bench from 1980 through 1998. Alvarez is her son's godfather.

Alvarez hasn't responded to repeated calls from the Tribune. But his involvement was documented in hundreds of pages of sworn statements and interviews conducted under oath as the Crooks case headed toward court.

When Crooks decided to quit fighting and pleaded no contest, the material was packed into six cardboard boxes and put into storage in the custody of the state attorney's office. It remains there today.

The Credit Card

Alvarez learned about Crooks's abuse of the credit card the day Herce suspended her, Alvarez said in a deposition he gave as part of the Crooks investigation. Herce called him, and Alvarez met with Herce the next day at Herce's office. Alvarez's wife, Doris, was there, too. Herce showed him an important piece of evidence, Alvarez recalled: the application for the credit card Crooks used.

Herce began the telephone call by saying that he wanted Alvarez to know what was happening before gossip started.

``When he called me Monday, he says, you know, he says, `It's a heartbreaker.' He says, `I'm mad.' He says, `I think you ought to know because you're very close to her and Doris works'' at Make-A- Wish, Alvarez said.

``So I went down to his office Tuesday afternoon. ... That's when I first saw that document. It looked to me like a credit card application, okay. It was a very, very bad copy, either a faxed copy or a Xerox copy.''

Crooks' attorney at the time, Lynn Cole, asked Alvarez why Herce showed it to him.

``I think basically he was saying that he had no knowledge of the credit card being issued to Delores,'' Alvarez answered, even though Herce's signature was on the application.

Herce, in his deposition, said he also met about this time with three others on the Make-A-Wish board: Rodriguez, the sheriff's deputy and chapter vice president; Frank de la Grana, a fellow lawyer with whom Herce shares office space; and Charles Santana, an accountant who was the chapter treasurer. Santana's company had just started doing the chapter's audits and tax returns.

They decided together to take the case to the state attorney's office, Herce said.

The Courthouse

Once it got into the judicial system, the Crooks case went first to Judge Robert J. Simms, who held himself so far apart from everyone else at the courthouse that many there regarded him as an unpredictable maverick.

Cole soon asked Simms to let her subpoena records from the Make-A-Wish auxiliary in Sarasota. They would show that Crooks' prosecution was ``predicated upon the fear'' that Crooks had warned others about ``ongoing, improper conduct,'' Cole wrote in a motion. That might lead to ``action being taken against those individuals,'' the motion stated.

Simms granted it.

Coincidentally, Simms, a 10- year veteran, asked Alvarez about this time to transfer him from criminal to civil court. Alvarez complied in December 2000, then tapped a rookie judge, Herbert Baumann, to succeed Simms - even though Baumann had told Alvarez in writing that he had no criminal experience and preferred civil court, which was his specialty as a lawyer.

Baumann had been a judge for less than a year and had been assigned to family law, where many new judges start. When he moved to criminal, the Crooks case became his.

Next, Alvarez pressured Coe to assign Assistant State Attorney Paul D. Johnson to prosecute Crooks, Johnson told the Tribune in an interview - even though Coe already had Mark Lewis, a veteran prosecutor with a solid reputation, on the case.

When asked about the ethics of such an intervention, Mike Seigel, a University of Florida law professor, said Alvarez went too far.

``That is crossing the line between the functions of the court - the judicial branch and the executive branch,'' said Seigel, a former federal prosecutor in Tampa.

``The chief judge has no business making any suggestions, in my opinion, regarding the selection of a prosecutor who is going to try a case in front of any of the judges he technically supervises.''

Johnson, whom many regarded as Coe's best trial lawyer, had a rare agreement with Coe. He could take a pass on cases involving people he knew and liked.

``I didn't want to harm my friends,'' Johnson said. Coe ``had 100-plus [other] attorneys who could'' do the job, he added.

Johnson begged off the first time Coe came to him. Investigators were looking into the possibility that Crooks' husband, lawyer Jack Crooks, also might have benefited from his wife's use of the Make-A-Wish credit card. Johnson counted him among the friends he didn't want to hurt.

Shortly afterward, Coe told Johnson he had to take the case anyway. People close to Make-A-Wish wanted him especially, Coe said.

``Coe said Judge Alvarez had asked for me specifically,'' Johnson told the Tribune. ``That I was more aggressive, and that ... Bobby Herce had asked for me also.''

Finally, Johnson agreed, although he didn't think it was necessary. ``Mark [Lewis] was more than able to handle this prosecution and the problems it presented,'' he said.

The Conflicts

In his deposition, Alvarez acknowledged the potential ethical conflicts of the Crooks case.

Crooks called him after her firing and several more times before her arrest. Alvarez told her he didn't want to know details, he said. Leave me out of it, he added. When Crooks asked for legal advice, he replied: Listen to your attorney.

Alvarez also seemed sensitive to the difficulties that might arise if he had to testify about what Crooks told him.

``Because not only being a judge, also being the chief judge,'' Alvarez said in his testimony, ``it makes it very, very uneasy, very, very uncomfortable being a witness in any case, more particularly something like this where there is a personal relationship with an individual.''

But Alvarez said his concerns went out the window when Cole said Crooks had information about other abuses at the charity and insinuated that Crooks might know about other wrongdoing, too.

``I got heated,'' Alvarez said in his deposition. He decided to tell Coe what Crooks had been telling him. He had his assistant call Coe with a message:

``Tell him ... I'd like to talk to him about Delores Crooks, about some information that I think he may need one way or the other.''

``I'm pretty sure I told them ... that I had ... two or three conversations with Delores,'' Alvarez continued. ``And I told them basically the high points of each. I didn't go in depth like I've gone with you, but I told them, you know, what it was about.''

Alvarez had no advance knowledge of the charges, he said. ``I was hoping that somebody, or both sides, would have come to me and said, ... `Can you get everybody together, all right, so that things work out for everybody, that Make-A-Wish doesn't take a hit, Delores doesn't take a hit, I don't take a hit, the people on the board of directors who are friends of mine, who are friends of hers, don't take a hit and it could all go away short of something criminal coming of it?' ''

Simms died of a heart attack April 9, 2004, but he said in an interview shortly beforehand that he was surprised Baumann sent Crooks to jail.

Baumann declined to comment.

Coe committed suicide shortly after insisting that Johnson take the Crooks case. Coe had just learned that state agents were investigating him for alleged financial improprieties in an unrelated case.

The Witnesses

Baumann's inexperience as a criminal court judge was well-known at the courthouse. But even taking that into account, what happened the day he sent Crooks to jail was unusual.

After Crooks pleaded no contest to charges of theft and fraudulent use of a credit card, Baumann allowed seven people affiliated with Make-A- Wish to condemn her under oath. Three of them lectured Baumann on his legal options.

``I know you haven't been on the criminal bench that long,'' said board member de la Grana, ``but I ask you to please consider ... when you are in a position of trust and you violate that, that calls for an enhancement,'' or toughening, of the sentence.

Two others among the seven also were board members. Three were office workers. The seventh originally was the state's lead investigator in the case. He quit halfway through to take a job with the national Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Crooks took money donated to grant wishes to terminally ill children, they said.

``And it gets no lower than that,'' said Herce, the chapter president. He called Crooks ``the lowest form of thief,'' then joined de la Grana in lecturing the judge on sentencing.

Steve Hunt, the former state investigator, lectured Baumann on the law, too - without mentioning that he now worked for Make-A-Wish - then went further.

``I want you to consider the possibility of the one child who didn't get a wish and died wanting that wish because of [Crooks'] actions,'' Hunt said.

No one offered evidence this had happened. Nor did anyone reveal that the charity had been spending tens of thousands of dollars on things such as pampering the volunteers running the unregistered fundraising operation in Sarasota - money that wasn't being devoted to the wishes of dying children either.

Crooks made an impassioned appeal for leniency. Her attorney at the time, Steve Crawford, said she was pleading no contest to prevent Make-A-Wish from being embarrassed with a trial.

Finally, Baumann ruled. He found Crooks guilty, another departure from the usual. Generally, a first-time offender in a case such as this has judgment withheld, said Lewis, the original prosecutor.

Then Baumann passed sentence. Six months in jail, he said, along with four years of probation and repayment of about $7,000. The jail sentence was unusual, too. Many first- time white-collar offenders are given only probation and ordered to make restitution.

Crawford asked Baumann to give Crooks a few days to put her affairs in order. No, Baumann said. Crooks wept and was taken away in handcuffs.

Nine weeks later, Alvarez transferred Baumann again, to fill a new vacancy in civil court, where Baumann said he wanted to be all along. He had been on the criminal bench all of five months.

The Condemnation

Crooks controlled everything at the Make-A-Wish office, former subordinates said in sworn statements gathered for her prosecution. Only she could open the mail. Only she could call Herce. Only she could handle particular office issues.

Actually, Crooks told the Tribune, Herce called the shots, paid the bills and even decided what finger food would be served at monthly board meetings.

``Bobby, he was like the king,'' Crooks said in an interview, ``kind of like how Dennis Alvarez ran the courthouse.''

And, like Alvarez, Herce also played a key role in Crooks' prosecution, along with Rodriguez.

Johnson, the prosecutor who said he was assigned to the case at the insistence of Alvarez and Herce, remembers frequent calls from Herce. One came late on a Saturday night, Johnson said, and during it Johnson said the state was going to have to drop a count against Crooks.

``Bobby Herce went berserk,'' Johnson said. ``He was screaming at me.''

Rodriguez was heavy- handed, too.

``The paper trail if you could see it would make you sick,'' Rodriguez said of Crooks' credit card use at a board meeting called to consider her dismissal, according to the meeting's minutes. He already had criminal charges in mind, he said, including embezzlement, forgery and grand theft.

``I can charge her with racketeering because I can show a pattern,'' Rodriguez said. He and Herce would take the matter to the state attorney's office together, he added.

Rodriguez also spoke with Alvarez about the case, Alvarez said. Crooks wanted to repay her debt and avoid court, the judge told him. But Rodriguez said no and told the judge to stay out of it, Alvarez said.

Rodriguez did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

Still later, after Herce condemned Crooks from the witness stand the day she pleaded no contest, Rodriguez did the same speaking with reporters outside the courtroom.

Crooks, Rodriguez said, had a penchant for lying and manipulating people. ``We have a successful ending to a long ordeal,'' he said.

Ironically, Rodriguez found himself in a similar predicament in 2003. Sheriff's investigators discovered that he had made $6,000 worth of personal calls on his department-issued cell phone - mostly to his girlfriend, who also served on the Tampa Make-A-Wish board. Rather than being prosecuted, Rodriguez was allowed to retire and keep his pension after he paid restitution.

In his deposition, Herce acknowledged telling prosecutors that he wanted the case disposed of in open court, rather than through a plea agreement, which is usually negotiated in private. Asked why, Herce said he wanted to tell the court what he thought of Crooks.

``She knew what she was doing,'' Herce said. ``She had the staff terrified. She went through great pains to keep anybody from discussing things with one another or from trying to inquire as to anything she's doing. ... And last but not least she stole from dying children.''

The Money

Those who first took up the Crooks case at the state attorney's office were the prosecutor Lewis, the lead investigator Hunt, and financial investigator Kenneth Green, nicknamed ``The Ferret.''

One of the documents Herce eventually gave them was a letter Crooks wrote to him June 8, 1999, shortly before she was fired. In it, Crooks undermines what would eventually become part of her defense - that Herce knew about the credit card and OK'd her use of it. She wrote that Herce didn't know about the card or her use of it.

Crooks wrote the letter with her husband after national Make-A-Wish officials learned about her use of the card, she told the Tribune. She did it to shield Herce, she said, even at the risk of her own job.

``He allowed me to use the card,'' Crooks said. ``Now I had to protect him.''

Hunt and Green considered the possibility that Crooks was telling the truth about other irregularities at Make-A-Wish, they said, and Green looked at the Sarasota records.

``I never found anything that caused me to believe there was improprieties,'' Green said. ``The monies I saw was accounted for.''

But the Tribune, examining the same documents, found some in which even Herce acknowledged serious problems with the Sarasota auxiliary.

Green also concluded that the auxiliary didn't have a separate bank account, he said.

The Tribune, examining the same documents, found that the auxiliary not only had at least three bank accounts of its own, but also that more than $621,000 was deposited in them from September 1993 to December 1998.

The Tampa chapter's tax returns raised questions about the auxiliary, too. A review of public records revealed that the auxiliary wasn't registered, as required by law, with federal or state regulators.

Green didn't look into whether the auxiliary was operating legally, he said.

Hunt, described by co- workers as a top-notch fraud investigator, signed off on Green's findings as lead investigator.

``Me and my ferret and everybody, we looked at everything,'' he told the Tribune.

``We couldn't prove'' a crime, Hunt said. Although the state attorney's office lacked jurisdiction outside Hillsborough County, he looked hardest at the operation in Sarasota, he said.

In his new position at Make- A-Wish headquarters, Hunt works to see that no other chapter gets into problems like the ones here.

The Spending

The Crooks documents reveal other ties between the charity and those who investigated her.

After Crooks' arrest, Make- A-Wish headquarters dispatched two top officials to Tampa for an evaluation and damage control, records show. They met with Hunt and others at the state attorney's office, worked with chapter officials on what to tell the public, then wrote a letter advising the chapter on how to manage future publicity.

They are certain nothing irregular occurred with the money raised by the auxiliary, national Make-A-Wish officials told the Tribune.

But they didn't know local Make-A-Wish officials were spending donor money on things such as expensive dinners at exclusive restaurants, they said, or that there was never an audit of fundraising and spending during the auxiliary's peak years.

They are also certain the problems associated with the auxiliary were fixed by 1999 at the latest, the national officials said. But they weren't fixed for two more years, and Hunt did the fixing.

Barbara Lancer, a Sarasota socialite, was president of the auxiliary then. Hunt told her by telephone in 2001 that the auxiliary was operating ``as a separate entity and we need to talk about that,'' Lancer told the Tribune. ``I heard the flavor of the conversation. I told Hunt to do what they had to do.'' She left the charity at the chapter's next board meeting.

The Present

For Crooks, life today is far different.

She works as a processor for an insurance company owned by another old boss, former Tampa Mayor Bill Poe. He was among the few to speak in Crooks' defense at her sentencing.

``With Mr. Poe,'' Crooks said, ``loyalty is the bottom line.''

She no longer mingles with Tampa's upper crust. Until she finished probation last year, she couldn't even drive across the Howard Frankland Bridge without permission.

``I am a convicted felon,'' she said. ``I can't vote. I can't do all the normal things. There's a certain stigma.''

Occasionally she sees old Make-A-Wish colleagues. Most are polite and friendly, she said. She has yet to encounter Alvarez or Herce, and she doesn't want to.

Meanwhile, Crooks has remained an informant in the ongoing federal and state corruption investigation.

Cole, her first attorney, arranged the initial contact with the agents running the probe in August 1999, Crooks said - a month before she was charged. She met with officials from the U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the IRS, Crooks said.

The federal agents eventually ceded the Make-A-Wish leg of the investigation to the FDLE. Crooks' last documented contact with FDLE agents was in May 2004. The agency has since said that it's conducting an inquiry into allegations of financial mismanagement and fraud by past and present associates of the chapter.

Herce said he had no knowledge of the investigation and doesn't know what it might be about.

``It has to be instigated by Delores Crooks,'' Herce told the Tribune. ``She probably came up with some wild conspiracy about judicial intervention. I can't imagine for the life of me why FDLE would be interested.''

For its part, the chapter continues to thrive. Its most recent tax return, for the 12 months ended August 2003, reported donations and other revenue exceeding $1 million.

Chapter President Randy Feldman, a Tampa orthodontist, has declined repeated requests for interviews. Although the organization says it's doing everything by the book now, it won't substantiate that.

In November, old and new board members and well-connected friends were welcomed warmly to the chapter's glitzy annual fundraiser, the Night of the Iguana.

Herce was there. So was Alvarez.

As the night's program began, the former chief judge was called forward to give the invocation.

Alvarez, smiling, took center stage.

Reporter Doug Stanley and researcher Michael Messano contributed to this report. Reporter John W. Allman can be reached at (813) 259-7915 or

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