Some of my work:

How a longtime Louisiana DA got the plea deal of a lifetime after using his office to prey on women for decades.

More than 20 women accused Harry Morel, a longtime district attorney in Louisiana, of using his office to prey on women. In a 12,000-word longform piece, I investigated why federal prosecutors allowed Morel to plead to a single obstruction charge and spend less than two years in prison. Meanwhile, the FBI agent who investigated Morel, Mike Zummer, said he was fired from the FBI for speaking out about what he said were prosecutors who worked to protect Morel and their own reputations.

Thanks to a few Florida laws, thousands of people each year can’t obtain a public defender.

My original data reporting showed, for the first time, that more than half of misdemeanor defendants in Florida in 2018 went to court without a public defender present. This story won the 2019 Sigma Delta Chi award for non-daily, non-deadline reporting.

Miami’s top prosecutor leaves police-shooting investigations open for years — preventing victims from winning civil-rights lawsuits.

After I published this story, the Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s Office changed its investigative policies and created a transparency dashboard on its website.

I broke that the Trump Administration placed more than 1,000 children at a migrant camp outside Miami.

My colleague and I were the first reporters to break that the Trump Administration had placed more than 1,000 children — some separated from their parents — at a migrant camp in Homestead, Florida.

A firm tied to John Kelly then bought the contractor running the Homestead camp and floated a stock IPO.

I broke that a firm called D.C. Capital Partners — which had once employed White House Chief-of-Staff John Kelly — had bought the contractor running the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children and was planning an initial public offering on the stock market. The company shelved its IPO plans after this story ran.

I exposed that Miami-Dade County police officers beat a man on camera, lied about the arrest, and were nearly charged with perjury.

Miami-Dade County Police officers were filmed violently arresting Ephraim Casado after he was accused of driving erratically and throwing a Gatorade bottle out of his window. Video footage directly contradicted sworn, written statements by the officers involved, and I obtained documents showing that prosecutors considered charging the officers with perjury over the incident. Former MDPD Director Juan Perez then called an emergency press-conference the day my story published to address the incident.

Miami-Dade County Police quietly tried to record everyone’s movements via a camera mounted on a private plane.

This story exposed how Miami Dade County Police had applied for U.S. Department of Justice grants to conduct “wide-area surveillance” on the entire county of 2.7-million-plus people without obtaining county approval. This story sparked protests at county hall and a condemnation from the ACLU. MDPD then scrapped the program.

Orlando-area Sheriff John Mina has been in the public eye for years — but has never spoken to the press about killing a 17-year-old child in 1999.

Mina shot 17-year-old Joseph A. Dungee to death in 1999. Dungee’s mother told me she’s never heard from Mina in the decades since.

The U.S. Government planned to use secret Facebook accounts to spread propaganda in Cuba.

I broke news that the United States government wanted to use “non-branded” Facebook accounts in Cuba to spread content from Radio Martí, the federal government’s Miami-based, pro-America “news source” for Cubans.

I analyzed data in 20 cities to show that, after pandemic-related releases, local jail populations then swelled back to normal in most major cities by the start of 2021.

COVID-19 could have changed the criminal legal system permanently. In March and April 2020, local jails released thousands of people in an attempt to keep incarcerated people distanced during the pandemic. But instead of continuing to release people, data I analyzed showed that, once summer hit, jail populations in most major cities began rising again instead, and in many cities, including New York, Houston, and Miami, jail populations were the same as or higher than they were when the pandemic began.

I obtained two years’ worth of drug-bust data in Houston and mapped it to show that 80 percent of small drug-busts are targeted against Black residents.

Houston PD arrested a homeless man over just 0.6 grams of methamphetamine in February 2021. That man, 57-year-old Israel Iglesias, then died in custody of the jail system. In response, I obtained two years’ worth of Harris County charging data — the information revealed that Houston-area cops and prosecutors are clearly targeting people of color for arrest. I also used a mapping tool to create an interactive map of each arrested person’s home — that data showed clear gaps in white neighborhoods.

How the Florida Sheriff’s Association, a private anti-justice-reform lobbying group, uses taxpayer money to push state officials to be tough-on-crime.

The Florida Sheriff’s Association is one of the most powerful anti-justice-reform groups in Florida. It represents the state’s local county sheriffs and hires teams of lobbyists to make sure that drugs stay illegal and prison sentences remain long in the Sunshine State. But the group quietly makes its money by selling cars, boats, tires, and other equipment to local police departments and sheriff’s offices, in what appears to be a clear conflict-of-interest.

The NXIVM cult was quietly running a “daycare” for children in Midtown Miami until I asked the state about it.

The wife of Latin pop icon Alejandro Sanz founded the “Rainbow Cultural Garden” daycare center in Miami — but the facility was tied to convicted sex-trafficker Keith Raniere and, I discovered, operating without state licenses.

In leaked audio, North Miami’s police chief said his officer was told not to shoot an unarmed health-care worker.

In 2017, footage of the shooting of health-care worker Charles Kinsey went viral online after Kinsey was filmed lying on the ground with his hands in the air begging North Miami Police not to shoot him. Kinsey had simply been trying to help an autistic man out of an intersection. My coworker and I later obtained an audio interview with then-North Miami Police Chief Gary Eugene, in which the chief said SWAT Officer Jonathan Aledda had been told not to fire his gun but did so anyway. Days after this story was published, Aledda was arrested. This audio also showed that Eugene gave different sworn statements to both the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and his own Internal Affairs department. Eugene was also terminated.

In a leaked deposition, the former mayor of North Miami Beach admitted that the developers of the Trump Tower III in South Florida had secretly been paying the mayor’s wife for years.

As part of a separate criminal prosecution, former North Miami Beach Mayor George Vallejo told investigators that the Dezer family — who have worked closely with Donald Trump — paid Vallejo’s wife through multiple LLCs, including one shell company located in Wyoming.

“I am the law”

I obtained documents and photos showing a longtime Miami city commissioner following his political rivals in a private car at night while wearing a windbreaker and baseball cap.

Text-messages suggest Miami candidate’s employees may have tampered with absentee ballots.

I obtained the log of a WhatsApp chat between multiple campaign workers for then-Miami City Commission candidate Alex Diaz de la Portilla. The chat showed campaign workers joking about taking absentee ballots from unsuspecting people and throwing them out,

Leaked chats showed Turning Point USA members “joking” about rape, white supremacy, and pedophilia.

I obtained a chat log from the Florida International University chapter of the campus-conservative group Turning Point USA, which showed members sharing racist jokes about Syrian refugees and praising white nationalist Richard Spencer.

I wrote a series detailing the dangers inherent in Florida Power and Light’s plans to bury nuclear waste underneath Miami’s drinking-water aquifer.

I consulted multiple studies and local scientists, who warned the waste could leak upwards into South Florida’s largest source of drinking water, the Biscayne Aquifer. FPL denies that the plans pose any risk.

I broke news that the pesticide sprayed over highly populated parts of Miami to fight the Zika virus also posed threats to human health.

As it turns out, naled, the pesticide sprayed from airplanes to kill Zika-virus-carrying mosquitoes, also posed threats to pregnant mothers and was banned for use in Europe. The stories sparked local protests and pushed Miami-Dade County to improve their spraying plans and public warnings to better ensure people did not breathe dangerous amounts of pesticides.

I won writing awards for… ranking the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates by how sweaty each got in Miami weather.

The very first Democratic Presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle occurred in Miami in June 2019, during what was then a historic heat-wave in an already very-hot city. Almost every candidate decided to campaign outdoors. Some handled the sauna-like weather well. Others most certainly did not. I’m not sure how proud of this column to be.