Daughter of ex-Florida mayor pleads guilty to pandemic fraud; other daughter served time

MIAMI — Another daughter of former Broward County Mayor Dale Holness has pleaded guilty to a fraud charge stemming from a COVID-19 pandemic benefits program.

But as part of her federal plea deal, Richelle Holness will be spared from another charge accusing her of stealing from her father’s county commission campaign in 2020.

Holness, 41, of Lauderhill, faces up to six months in prison at her sentencing in January after admitting in Miami federal court on Thursday that she fraudulently received about $30,000 in emergency benefits from a federally funded state unemployment program between May 2020 and August 2021, according to federal court records.

For part of that time, she was working on her father’s county commission campaign.

Holness acknowledged that she “knowingly made materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” when she claimed on her Pandemic Unemployment Assistance application that she “did not work or earn money during the period that she was receiving the benefits,” according to a factual statement filed with her plea agreement.

However, Holness, who worked as the treasurer for her father’s county commission run through November 2020 out of his real estate office in Fort Lauderdale, will be spared from the charge of conspiring to commit wire fraud related to allegations of campaign theft.

The FBI investigated the case and the daughter was initially charged with diverting thousands of dollars from her father’s campaign for her own personal spending. She noted in election campaign reports that the expenses were for rent, consulting and data processing services.

But, under her plea agreement with federal prosecutors Jeffrey Kaplan and Justin McCormack, that wire fraud charge will be dropped at her sentencing.

Richelle Holness’ defense attorney, David Howard, said the “government took a second look at it and made what we believe was a reasonable determination” about the evidence. “We have no complaints,” he told the Miami Herald on Monday.

Father was Broward commissioner, mayor

Dale Holness, 67, could not be reached for comment on Monday. He served on the Broward County Commission beginning in 2010 and was the county’s mayor in 2020.

The following year, he ran to replace the late Rep. Alcee Hastings in Florida’s 20th Congressional District 20, but lost by just five votes in the Democratic primary to health care company CEO Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.

He ran for the House seat against Cherfilus-McCormick again in 2022 and again lost in the primary, this time by nearly 27,000 votes.

Another daughter convicted of PPP fraud

The charges against Richelle Holness came after the former mayor’s other daughter, Damara Holness, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud in 2021 for obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in coronavirus relief loans by submitting false tax and payroll information for her consulting business.

In 2022, Damara Holness, 32, a former political consultant in Plantation, was sent to prison for one year and eight months after pleading guilty to stealing $300,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program meant to help small businesses during the pandemic.

In March 2020, as the nation was starting to feel the deadly effects of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill called the CARES Act that aimed to blunt the damage to businesses during the inevitable economic downturn. The Small Business Administration’s PPP loan program was included in that emergency legislation, totaling about $800 billion.

The CARES Act also included funding for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which subsidized benefits for people who lost their jobs in Florida and other states.