A.G. Gancarski
When State Rep. Reggie Fullwood pleaded guilty to two felony counts in his wire fraud trial Thursday, there were some in Jacksonville who might have been surprised by the Democratic stalwart’s fate.
Clearly, those observers didn’t know Jacksonville.
Fullwood’s guilty plea was more notable for being in the midst of his re-election campaign than it was for having happened.
Because in Dirty Duval, there is precedent for politicians going down because they couldn’t keep their hands out of the till.
One solid example: Don Gaffney, a former councilman and state legislator in the 1980s.
Gaffney got run out of office when he was convicted of four counts of mail fraud in 1988.
There was a happy ending — of sorts — for Gaffney. He resurfaced to run for election again in 2016 … which, if that’s meaningful precedent, signifies Fullwood could make a comeback sometime in the 2040s.
In the 1990s, another example from the Duval Delegation: Willye Dennis.
Dennis and her daughter pleaded guilty to taking federal funds intended for a day care center they ran, using them instead (like Fullwood) for more interesting personal expenses including Jags tickets and a University Club membership.
The St. Petersburg Times (now known as the Tampa Bay Times) noted Dennis was one of a group of legislators facing similar legal issues contemporaneously.
It bears mentioning — though she has not been convicted — that soon-to-be-former Rep. Corrine Brown faces a trial next year for her involvement in the One Door for Education charity, for which she fundraised (even as the charity did not actually perform meaningful charitable functions) and from which she and her chief of staff allegedly derived approximately $800,000 of material benefit, ranging from sky boxes at Jaguars games and Beyonce concerts to repeated withdrawals of walking-around money.
In other words, Rep. Fullwood wasn’t the first Jacksonville politician to cop a plea on a corruption charge.
And he won’t be the last.
Fullwood — perhaps by the time you read this — will either resign from office voluntarily or be forced out by the House speaker.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has a race to run and a seat to retain.
As FloridaPolitics.com reported Thursday, Fullwood’s name will remain on the ballot, a proxy for a replacement candidate; more than likely, primary runner-up Tracie Davis, a former deputy supervisor of elections who came within four percentage points of knocking Fullwood out of the race in August.
There is, in Jacksonville political circles, a cottage industry involved in predicting how this all will go.
The local daily said there would be a “mad scramble” to field a candidate to stand in for Fullwood.
Other commentators are saying Republican Mark Griffin may have the inside track to buck his party label and win the race in the heavily Democratic district.
Maybe. Maybe not.
There is precedent for a replacement candidate winning with the name of a disgraced proxy on the ballot.
Consider the example of Mike LaRosa.
LaRosa became a candidate in late September 2012, after it was reported Rep. Mike Horner was a customer of a brothel in Central Florida.
LaRosa was running against a candidate who had her own problems, such as not actually living in the district (which, ironically enough, is a charge levied by Fullwood partisans against Pastor Griffin, who lives outside of HD 13 himself).
Want another example?
How about Will Weatherford?
Weatherford won his first election in 2006 with another man’s name on the ballot.
He won in a landslide, helped along by the fact that his Democratic opponent was Baker Acted during the campaign.
And then there was the case of Daniel Davis.
Davis, who was a city councilman in Jacksonville, actually walked into a seat in the State House, replacing the unopposed Jennifer Carroll after she was selected as Rick Scott’s running mate in 2010.
To sum up: political scandal among Jacksonville elected officials is nothing new. And in Florida, replacement candidates are nothing new either.
With that in mind, the aforementioned “mad scramble” may not be much of a scramble after all.
