Fired Fla. ex-lawmaker denies accessing porn
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) – A former Florida lawmaker fired from the Department of Juvenile Justice after being accused of viewing adult pornography on his state laptop said Thursday he didn’t access the images and that senior managers set him up.
The department released a 13-page report on the contents of former state Rep. Gus Barreiro’s laptop on Wednesday. The report says the computer was used to view 42 Web pages containing “sexually explicit, sexually provocative and other content.”
An examination of the laptop also showed that a user had logged on to an Internet site that advertises itself as the “ultimate source” for “Free Sex Personals, Adult Dating, Amateurs & Swingers.” The user logged in as “cubancigar107” and searched for member profiles and video. Barreiro was born in Cuba and represented district 107 as a lawmaker.
Using a state computer to access such sites violates department policy on Internet use and employee conduct.
Barreiro said Thursday he had “absolutely not” accesssed any of the 382 images cited in the report.
“One thing I do know: It was all staged,” Barreiro said.
Barreiro, 49, was fired in January as the department’s chief of residential programs, a job he had held since March. The former Republican from Miami Beach was elected to the House in 1998 and left in 2006 because of term limits.
Investigators wrote that at the time the images were accessed, Barreiro’s login was used on the computer. Barreiro said eight people had his password and the department could access his computer at any time.
It was common for senior managers to give their passwords to their subordinates, Barreiro said. He confirmed that he refused to identify to investigators who had his password, but said that three people lied when contacted by the department, saying they did not have it when they did.
Barreiro said he fell out of favor at the department after he drew attention to brutal beatings at a Florida reform school in Marianna that happened in the 1950s and ’60s. In particular, Barreiro talked about a grave site at the school where a group of men who lived there believe children beaten to death were buried. Barreiro said he was asked, “why don’t you let the dead lie dead” and was told no one liked him.
“I was told I was a target,” Barreiro said, adding that he was told, “Listen, be careful, they’re going to get you, they’re going to set you up.”
Barreiro was asked to hand over his laptop for examination in January. He confirmed that he had another employee look at it, back it up and make sure nothing was on it before turning it in. Investigators, however, found files that had been deleted but were still recoverable.
Investigators then interviewed Barreiro. They showed him images from a Facebook page he confirmed accessing from the laptop. They then showed him sexually explicit images he denied accessing, saying, “I don’t know how in the hell that got on my computer,” according to the report.
When investigators told Barreiro both sets of images had been accessed around the same time, he said, “that’s really interesting,” according to the report. He also denied going to match.com, another site investigators say was accessed on the laptop by a person using the login “blueeyesman66.” That username was “not found” on the site Thursday, though a message said the profile could be “hidden”; a search for “cubancigar107” on the other Web site was also “not found.”
An examination of the desktop computer in Barreiro’s Tallahassee office found no evidence of inappropriate images. None of the explicit photographs on the laptop were of children.
Barreiro said he was seeking legal advice, that his name had been “slandered” and that the department has a “documented history” of “tampering with evidence.”