Fort Walton Beach, FL – September 22, 2023 – United Way Emerald Coast (UWEC) hosted its third annual 40 Under 40 Awards with an inspiring evening at Shoreline Church. The night kicked off with an exclusive VIP Event uniting past honorees with the current recipients.

The program featured a keynote address by former 40 Under 40 honoree, Bobby Parker. Bernard Johnson, representing Florida Power & Light Light, highlighted the significance of sponsoring this event as well as the valuable contributions of this emerging generation.

Just before the award presentations, Dr. Michael Mosely from Rocky Bayou Christian Church offered a toast to the entire class.

The 40 Under 40 Awards shines a spotlight on the accomplishments of young professionals who demonstrate exceptional leadership, innovation and dedication to Okaloosa and Walton counties. These individuals have not only achieved significant career milestones but have also made a lasting impact on their communities through their philanthropic efforts and community involvment.

The honorees were nominated by friends, family members, or peers and asked to complete a thorough application. A committee of established community leaders reviewed these applications, focusing on the nominee’s professional achievements, leadership qualities and commitment to making a difference. The final list of honorees represents a diverse range of industries, from non-profit organizations to publishers to entrepreneurs.

“United Way Emerald Coast is truly honored to acknowledge the outstanding achievements of these young professionals,” said Kelly Jasen, President & CEO, United Way Emerald Coast. “I hope their hard work, determination and community spirit serve as an inspiration to others. Congrats to all who have been recognized!”

The 40 Under 40 Awards was possible thanks to the generous support of Presenting Sponsor Florida Power & Light and additional sponsors including All In Credit Union, Eglin Federal Credit Union, Tap the Coast, Rocky Bayou Christian School, Ace50 Media, CCB Community Bank, Capital City Bank, Cox Media and Publix. Their commitment to recognizing the achievements of young leaders making a difference in our region made the celebration extra special.

For more information about the 40 Under 40 Awards, please visit united-way.org/emergingleaders or contact Aubrey Robbie at emergingleaders@united-way.org or 850-812-3386.

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United Way Emerald Coast is a local, volunteer-governed organization that works with hundreds of partners to fight for the health, education, and financial stability of every person in Okaloosa and Walton counties. To drive positive change, United Way Emerald Coast evaluates our community’s diverse needs, mobilizes the caring power of the community, and directs resources to the areas that will have the most positive impact in our community.

At a closing retreat and graduation ceremony on May 12, 2023, Florida’s Great Northwest (FGNW) Foundation honored its new graduates from Leadership Northwest Florida, a new regional collaboration program focused on community, content and connection.

Eighteen leaders from across Northwest Florida participated in the inaugural program that fostered a deeper understanding of the region’s diverse landscape.

Class I participants were immersed in a seven-month educational program which offered a holistic view of the conditions, challenges and opportunities that are shared throughout Northwest Florida focusing on the areas of Business Vitality, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Infrastructure, Talent, and Quality of Place.

Marcus McBride who is president & ceo of CareerSource Escarosa was selected as a participant in the inaugural Leadership Northwest Florida class. He was also elected by his classmates to serve as President of Class I.

“I am grateful for the connections established, information shared, and countless economic development resources identified across the Northwest Florida territory,” said McBride. “The Leadership Northwest Florida program was well-organized, allowed every leader in this cohort see the Panhandle of Florida in its truest form and understand how invaluable our communities are when connected with a common purpose.”

Another class participant was Elizabeth Forsythe who is a Senior Associate with CBRE, Inc. She shares a similar experience with the Leadership Northwest Florida program.

“Making new life-long connections and friends, visiting and hearing from successful business owners throughout the region, learning about the partnerships and innovation initiatives happening right here along our Emerald Coast, and learning more about our incredible talent base are just some of the things I took away from this program,” said Forsythe. “The work that Florida’s Great Northwest does to attract new businesses to the area, and to spread the word about all this region has to offer is invaluable!”

Congratulations to all the graduates from Class I of Leadership Northwest Florida:

• Kimberly Aderholdt, Navy Federal Credit Union
• Robert Arnold, Grayton Beach Capital
• Elizabeth Crowe, Florida State University Panama City
• Jason Crowe, Community Bank
• Grey Dodge, The City of Panama City
• Elizabeth Forsythe, CBRE, Inc.
• Tiffany Garling, Jackson County Chamber of Commerce & Jackson County Economic Development Committee
• KC Gartman, Baptist Health Care
• Kelli Godwin, ITI Digital
• David Harless, Regions
• Lesley Hatfield, Holmes County Development Commission
• Charles James IV, Clark Partington
• Ryan Long, The Highland Group
• Marcus McBride, CareerSource Escarosa
• Stacey McGilvray, Hancock Whitney Bank
• Chuck McIntosh, Florida Caverns RV Resort
• Johnathan Taylor, LandrumHR
• Matthew Wright, Troy University

If you are interested in applying for consideration of Class II of the program, visit FloridasGreatNorthwest.com/LNWFL.

The deadline to receive applications for the Class of 2023-2024 will be September 6, 2023. For more information, please contact Kasey Killebrew at 334-790-4557 or kkillebrew@fgnw.org.

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 Leadership Northwest Florida

For Northwest Florida to continue to compete, diversify and thrive, it will take informed, dedicated leaders who understand the complex and competitive environment of economic transformation.

Leadership Northwest Florida is designed to be an educational program offered for professionals in all industry sectors desiring to grow their knowledgebase, network, and skillset in the 12-county region of Florida’s Great Northwest footprint.

This experience will ultimately result in long-term influence of the leadership graduates for the betterment of Northwest Florida.

Florida’s Great Northwest

Florida’s Great Northwest is the regional economic development organization for the Florida Panhandle.

The organization was created to promote Northwest Florida for economic growth and diversification, advocate for economic development issues that affect the region, and collaborate to improve regional competitiveness.

The organization accomplishes this in partnership with the state and local economic development organizations, rural regional economic development organization, utility partners, private sector businesses, local government, higher education institutions, workforce boards, and community leaders.

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Alex Sanchez winces noticeably as he rises from a chair to greet his visitor. He is tall and welcoming and affable, precisely as I remember him from my years spent working as a bank marketer.

Sanchez, since 1993, has been the executive director of the Florida Bankers Association. He is among the most recognizable spokespeople for the financial industry in the country, is often seen on cable news programs, and is a prolific writer of opinion pieces that land in Florida dailies and the Wall Street Journal.

Cuban born, he escaped the island with his mother at age 4 on a U.S.-sponsored Freedom Flight during the Kennedy administration and has always retained an immigrant’s perspective on the United States. A priest smuggled his father onto a freighter bound for Spain a year before Sanchez and his mother got out. The family set up housekeeping in the Bronx and later moved to Florida.

Sanchez is an effusive personality who uses the word, “wow,” a lot. Should a conversation lag for a moment, he is likely to insert his steadfast belief that “we are living in the greatest country on earth, you know.”

A military veteran, attorney, subject-matter expert, lecturer and lobbyist, Sanchez is nonetheless approachable. If you need a pick-me-up, an attitude adjustment, he’s your guy — unless, perhaps, you happen to be the CEO of a giant credit union. He refrains from jargon and, in the manner of one-time “explainer-in-chief” Bill Clinton, breaks down issues with comfortable hypotheticals and metaphors.

Someone, a long time ago, taught Sanchez to frequently say the name of whomever he might be speaking to. People like that.

“Steve, look, our country is the greatest country in the world, right?” Sanchez said. “My mother, she’s 90, I’m her caregiver, she asks me all the time, she says, ‘If we had to leave the United States, where would we go? Great question. Think about it. Where would you go? Netflix has a great documentary on Cuba. I’m watching it right now with my wife; it’s called The Cuba Libre Story. Five hundred years of history. I watch a lot more television these days than I did before COVID. But this series, it’s really good.”

Like Sanchez, his eventual wife Patsy also fled Fidel Castro’s tyranny. As a ı3-year-old, she boarded a small boat with 25 others, including her mother, brother, father and grandmother, during the Mariel boatlift in ı980. The boat failed in turbulent seas, and Patsy was lifted to safety by a 2ı-year-old Coastie who went by the nickname Rocky and was part of the crew on a reliance-class cutter, the USCGC Vigorous.

“Rocky squeezed orange juice into Patsy’s mouth and gave her apples, and she didn’t even know what they were,” Sanchez said. “He took a Polaroid picture of Patsy and himself and gave her his hat,” the kind with the ship name emblazoned on the crown.

Patsy would keep that photo and, 26 years later, would succeed — as the product of a coincidence, many phone calls and the advent of the internet — in locating Rocky as he was about to retire from the Coast Guard with the rank of captain.

“They spoke for an hour on the phone, and he invited her to attend his retirement ceremony on his ship on the Mississippi River in Kentucky,” Sanchez said. Rocky didn’t expect her to attend, but she did, and when she stepped away from the crowd at the event, he recognized her. “They hugged and had dinner.”

Today, Patsy, a breast cancer survivor, is a member of the Florida CareerSource State Board, having been appointed to her seat by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“You should write a story about her,” Sanchez said of his wife. “Much better story than me.”

An appetite for news

As a schoolboy growing up in New York, Sanchez bought the Daily News every morning to catch up on sports.

“There was no ESPN,” he said. “I couldn’t find out who won the game last night by turning on the TV. There was no sports until the local news came on at 6. In those days, we looked forward to the Game of the Week with Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek. I grew up on that. I started reading sports, and then I gravitated to the news section.”

He has been a newshound ever since.

“We moved to Miami, and I bought the Herald all the time,” Sanchez aid. “When I lived in Tampa Bay, I had both the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times delivered to my house. Up here, I wasn’t really a big Democrat guy, but I went to the Black Cat newsstand on Monroe Street and they had newspapers from all over the state. Lobbyists and everybody went there. I used to wait until about ı0 so I could buy the final edition of the Herald that they sold in Miami. I would buy three or four papers, the Tampa Bay Times, the Orlando Sentinel and others and read them all while riding a stationary bicycle at my house.”

Sanchez finds it remarkable that his two daughters, both successful professionals, have never bought a printed newspaper.

“We need strong papers, but I don’t think that is gonna happen,” he said. “The news media, to me, are the watchdog of our democracy. The average person doesn’t have the time to go to City Hall and find out what’s going on. It’s gotta be that beat reporter that writes a story and we find ourselves saying, ‘Oh my god, the commissioner said that!’ A commissioner from Tallahassee goes on a trip to Paris to learn about the Parisian train system and he spends $7,000, but if there is nobody to report it … .”

Well, you might have to wait until Dominic Calabro at Florida TaxWatch gets onto it.

With the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. Senate numbering 50 members and with 50 Republicans in the Senate, Sanchez was hopeful that a spirit of bi-partisanship not seen lately might take hold.

“Wow, I’m saying to myself, now they are both going to be forced to come to the table because neither side can do anything without the other,” Sanchez said. “You want vanilla, and I want chocolate, well, how ’bout a swirl ice cream? But you are insisting on vanilla, and you’ve got a one-person majority (with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote). It doesn’t make any sense. How ’bout if we have vanilla this month and chocolate next month? That’s the great art of compromise and our country isn’t there, but it needs to be.”

In any event, Sanchez, while he stops short of calling himself a libertarian — he’s more of a center-right guy — believes that government’s role should be limited. Throughout the Trump presidency, even conservatives didn’t talk much about the national debt, but Sanchez is growing increasingly concerned about it.

“In any society, you need rules and regulations,” Sanchez allows. “Government has a role to play. It should take care of the needy and the defense of this country, protective services, police and fire. But banks shouldn’t say I’m going to open up a bakery or a furniture company, and neither should government. You remember in the old Soviet Union when people would try to buy Wrangler and Levis jeans right off the backsides of Americans because Soviet-made jeans weren’t any good?”

Unlike Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, chairman of the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Sanchez says the government has no business being in the banking business.

“Public banks, that’s over the line,” Sanchez said. “Spain got out of the public banking business 35, 40 years ago. Why would we be getting into it now? The extreme positions of either party are best left alone. The banking industry is meeting the needs of the American people.”

Runaway train

Sanchez, as is his fashion, wades into talk of the national debt with a spontaneously manufactured scenario.

“What would you think if you were here interviewing me because you think I am someone important, and you learn that I owe Publix $800,000?” Sanchez began. “I buy all of my groceries on credit, I eat a lot and I buy the best and I haven’t paid any of it off in years. But I know the Publix CEO and he says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Alex, just put it on your Publix tab.’ But eventually he calls me and he says, ‘Man, it’s up to $800,000. How are you ever going to repay this?’ ”

Sanchez believes that Americans, like the grocer in his example, should be getting nervous.

“The national debt is at $28 trillion right now,” Sanchez said in April. “It will be $30 trillion once the money in the COVID relief bill is spent. I am not arguing that we didn’t need that bill, but what I want for people to realize is that this is all borrowed funds. Are you OK with that? Alex Sanchez passes a law that gives everyone a brand new car. Yippee! But we don’t have that money.

“Our national debt when President Clinton left office in 2000 was $5 trillion. Twenty-one years later, we are soon to be at $33 trillion once we get the infrastructure bill. Is this a runaway train? When will it stop, and what does it mean to our country? What does it mean to our grandchildren? We can’t just wipe out the debt. That means no one is going to buy our treasury notes. And then we’re going to have to really tighten the belt. Already, the interest payment on the debt is $400 billion on a $3.5 trillion federal budget.”

Sanchez pauses. Before him, neatly organized on the coffee table in the middle of the sitting area in his office, lie books about Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, a king of Spain, a chairman of Coca-Cola.

“Steve, this is the greatest country in the world, man,” Sanchez resumed. “I can say that as an immigrant. (And as a world traveler.) I have been the graduation speaker for Bangor University in Wales. I spoke to 200 bankers two weeks ago in Edinburgh, Scotland. That’s a country I go to a lot. I have lectured at the business school at the University of Edinburgh.

“They give me topics to address, but what the students really want to talk about is life in the United States,” Sanchez said. “They want to know how difficult it is to emigrate to our country. I tell them I’m not an immigration attorney, but if you get a U.S. job, the company will probably help you obtain a green card. People ask me that all the time.”

Sanchez, with Florida Bankers Association executive vice president/COO Pamela Ricco and executive vice president for government affairs Anthony DiMarco, have traveled to Tanzania as part of a Financial Services Volunteer Corps training program. At this writing, they are planning another such ı0-day trip to Tunisia.

The FSVC, created by President George H.W. Bush’s administration, is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership whose mission is to help build sound financial systems in transitional and developing countries. Based in New York City, it focuses on combating money laundering and financial crimes, strengthening commercial banking systems, building capital markets and developing central bank capabilities.

“There were a lot of Chinese interests in Tanzania, sucking the minerals out of that country,” Sanchez observed. “The Africans don’t interact with the Chinese. The Chinese go back to their living quarters at the end of the day, but we had dinner with our African hosts every night. They are fascinated by America; they love American football. You make trips like that, you feel like you are an American ambassador.”

Sanchez decries calls for more oversight and regulation of the banking industry in the U.S.

“The American banking system is the highest and best capitalized, strongest banking system in the world,” he said. “Right now, we have the optimal blend of banking regulation and operations. And we are in the greatest market in the world. Canadian banks are strong, too, but some of the European banks still have not fully recovered from the (2008) financial crisis.”

Sanchez listed federal agencies that oversee banking activity: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

“And then you have the Florida Department of Banking,” he pointed out. “We are well regulated. Let our bankers concentrate on hiring lenders, not compliance officers. That way, we can fulfill our mission, which is helping to make Americans’ dreams come true. Homeowners and business owners — we’re the ones that provide the capital that makes the economy go. Most people don’t have enough money to buy a home. They need a loan. We all did, and you pay it off. It’s a great adventure. You start a business that way. Our community banks do a great job of that because they fly lower to the ground.

“You see them at the Kiwanis Club meeting. You meet them for breakfast to talk about the business you’d like to start.”

Sanchez said governors Jeb Bush, Rick Scott and now Ron DeSantis have all helped make Florida “not only a great place for business, but also a great place to live.” Sanchez served as a member of DeSantis’ Re-Open Florida Task Force.

“I can tell you that in working with Gov. DeSantis and his team, he was very concerned about the medical data, and that’s why he reopened Florida gradually, step by step,” Sanchez said. “We took steps depending on what the medical data told us was happening in different regions of the state.”

Sanchez is satisfied that the approach worked well and that the state’s most vulnerable residents were well protected.

“Look at New York, look at California,” he said. “They lead the nation in COVID cases and they have been closed. If you are a small business owner in New York, I don’t know how you survive this. Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo has raised taxes again by another $5 billion. I think the exodus of people and businesses from New York and California is just going to continue. Florida is a beautiful state, and we still have room to grow. And we are growing up vertically now. For business, whether you are selling shoes, computer components or banking products, this is the state you want to be in.”

California, Sanchez said, is about to lose congressional seats due to declining population for the first time since it was made a state.

“People there are fed up with high taxes, high costs, and I think our future is bright and I thank Gov. DeSantis for his leadership,” he said.

Florida’s popularity and its attractiveness as a market extend to the banking industry. Big banks from elsewhere are buying Florida community banks in order to gain a presence in the state.

“Somebody approaches you and wants to know much would you would sell your community bank for and you say, ‘Oh, it’s not for sale,’ ” Sanchez began another hypothetical.

“But, Steve, you know how that goes. You’ve got that ’57 fire engine red Chevy convertible in your driveway. It’s got that cream-colored leather inside. People drive by it all the time. Finally, here comes someone who offers you seven times the Blue Book value, and you toss him the keys. That’s what’s happening with banks because people want very much to be in Florida.”

Sanchez, then, acknowledges consolidation in the banking system, but said, too, that he is encouraged by the number of new community banks that are being established in the state.

“People should have choices, and I am doing everything I can to encourage the formation of new community banks,” he said.

Popularity exacts a price

Florida’s popularity is also driving up land prices and making it less possible for young people to buy a home. Do banks have a role to play in increasing the supply of affordable housing?

“Yes, but only in conjunction with local governmental authorities, and maybe state authorities,” Sanchez said. “Banks are definitely a good partner, but we can’t do it by ourselves. It is an issue in Florida, especially when you get into our urban core areas and coastal cities.”

Everything, of course, is relative.

“New Yorkers come down and they see housing in Florida as highly affordable. The Europeans come in and buy that condo in South Florida. ‘You kidding me? I love the price, it’s great,’ they say. But housing is an issue for Floridians and one that municipalities are going to have to tackle. I mean where does a schoolteacher or a Publix employee find an affordable house in Destin or Palm Beach? They wind up driving 40 miles one way to work.”

Never will Sanchez exit a conversation with a journalist without bringing up what he considers to be an egregious fairness problem. For decades, he has been trying to undo the tax exemptions extended credit unions.

“Let’s say that 70 years ago, your grandfather and my grandfather were homebuilders,” Sanchez teed up another one. “Bornhoft Construction builds them for everybody, but Sanchez Construction builds them only for low-income Hispanics. The government decides to tax-exempt Sanchez because they build homes exclusively for low-income minority buyers. Your grandfather doesn’t have a problem with that because, hey, he’s operating in a different market.

“Our fathers play things the same way. They stay in their lanes. But I graduate from Harvard and I come back to Florida and I say, ‘This is silly, why am I restricted to low-income Hispanics? I should be able to build homes for everybody.’ And the regulators go along with me. They give me the cardinal blessing, and I get to keep my tax exemption.”

Suddenly, Sanchez can build the same homes that Bornhoft is building and sell them to whomever he wants at a distinct competitive advantage given the tax treatment that the business enjoys. Bornhoft may be inclined to cry foul.

“In ı925, Congress created financial cooperatives so people could borrow a little bit of money to get through until payday, maybe buy an icebox,” Sanchez said. “It was the St. Mary’s Catholic Church Credit Union. You had to be a member there. You need three bucks for the week? Here you go.

“Now you have a Navy Federal Credit Union. Have you seen their commercials? Ran during the Super Bowl, Steve. The Super Bowl! They made $2 billion in net income last year. After they paid for their campuses in Virginia and Pensacola, their car expenses for executives, incredible salaries for the senior executive team, after all that, they still made $2 billion. I was an enlisted guy. They’re not making that money off of enlisted guys. They’re not making it off of officers, either. Our troops don’t have that kind of money. They’re hiding behind the military and financing yachts.”

A tax exemption should be tied to a public purpose, Sanchez argues.

“That’s been lost, Steve. Come on, dude!”

Sanchez gets up to see me out, and there is the wince again.

“Sciatica,” he said. “But I’m working on making my back stronger. I do 88 laps of backstroke every morning. Great exercise.”

A little sciatica. Nothing to complain about. Just gotta work through it.

For Larry Keefe, page 51 of Vol. 1 of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” precipitated what he called a “firestorm.”

That page described efforts by the intelligence team of the general staff of the Russian army (GRU) to invade the computer systems of county governments in Florida.

In November 2016, the report notes, the GRU sent spearphishing (scam) emails to more than 120 county officials responsible for administering the 2016 general election. Attached to the emails was a Word document coded with malicious software.

And here, then, was the report’s firestorm accelerant: “We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”

Keefe had been on the job as U.S. attorney for the 23-county Northern District of Florida for just three months when a redacted version of the Mueller report was made public.

Speculation about which county’s system had been infiltrated developed immediately upon the report’s release.

“It was a lightning bolt,” Keefe said. In response, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community focused intense attention on Florida.

Rachel Rojas, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Field Office in Jacksonville, was named to lead a task force that also included Keefe and Florida Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee.

“Florida is a high-value target,” Keefe said in September. “We’re the third largest state, a state where national elections are decided. We need to have our game at its best.”

So it was that Keefe has found himself spending chunks of time in classified briefings about election security along with the “best and the brightest from Homeland Security and the FBI at the national level.”

“There is scant time remaining between now and the 2020 election,” Keefe said. “For me, there is no higher priority.”

It was not a priority that Keefe anticipated as he moved through confirmation proceedings leading up to his swearing-in ceremony in January.

Early in his 33-year career as an attorney in private practice, Keefe considered that his dream job might be that of assistant U.S. attorney.

The son of an Air Force fighter pilot who grew up immersed in Okaloosa County’s defense community, he was drawn to public service.

“I had encounters with people who were prosecutors, particularly federal prosecutors, incidentally, socially and occasionally professionally, and I always liked that concept,” Keefe said.

“It was the DOJ, not the DOD, and it was words and paper and justice, not bombs and bullets, but there was a cause, there was right and wrong, there was an opportunity to serve others. But I got married and we had four sons, and life overtakes you and you keep going forward and keep going faster.”

Keefe enjoyed private practice, but life eventually slowed down. His sons were out of the house, and he became willing to consider an off-ramp.

Among his sons, one is an attorney who, at this writing, is clerking for Judge Mark Walker, the chief U.S. District Court judge in the Northern District of Florida.

The others are a Secret Service agent, an Air Force special operations pararescueman scheduled for deployment to Iraq and a student on an athletic scholarship at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. 

The opportunity to apply for his “dream job” didn’t present itself, so Keefe sought out a congressman whom he had hired once upon a time as an attorney right out of law school.

“Do you think there is any chance that I could be put in for a U.S. attorney, any plausible chance at all?” Keefe asked U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Keefe had no government experience and had never worked as a prosecutor or as a criminal defense lawyer, for that matter. But, as an attorney, he was accomplished.

He had tried many cases in state and federal courts and had credibility as someone who had headed up a multi-office law firm.

Discussions developed.

On Aug. 16, 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Lawrence A. Keefe of Shalimar to fill a job that had been occupied by an acting U.S. attorney since 2015.

And at that, Keefe redoubled efforts to learn all that he could about the operations of a U.S. Attorney’s Office and the office in Florida’s Northern District, in particular.

“It’s difficult at the outset to figure out what’s going on,” Keefe discovered. “A U.S. Attorney’s Office is a very opaque organization.

For an outsider, there is not much to glean except for what’s on the office’s website and public filings such as indictments, pleas and sentences. It’s hard even to find out who the assistant U.S. attorneys are.”

Based on the public record, Keefe assumed that a U.S. attorney deals primarily with trafficking in people, guns and drugs.

And, he was aware of a pending public corruption investigation in Tallahassee involving a city commissioner, the one-time director of the Downtown Improvement Authority and a prominent developer.

As a nominee, Keefe responded in writing to generic questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He answered questions unique to him from Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Diane Feinstein of California. He had telephone conferences with counsel to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and counsel to the ranking minority committee member and their staffs.

Then U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions interviewed Keefe. So, too, did the deputy to Rod Rosenstein, who was assistant attorney general at the time.

As a U.S. attorney, Keefe is a departure from form not just as to his résumé, but also his age.

Typically, U.S. attorneys are in their 30s or early 40s and often view the job as a stepping stone to a judgeship or a run for elective public office.

“I am able to bring a lot of energy to the job even though I am 57,” Keefe said.

“I have a lot of desire, accumulated over three-plus decades, to do this. And I am able to do this as more of a sprint. I’m not looking at another 20-year career. And I am unencumbered to the point that I can move around the district pretty easily.

“I’m a circuit rider.”

Keefe has an apartment located just a couple of hundred feet from his office in the federal courthouse in Pensacola and a condo across Monroe Street from the federal courthouse in Tallahassee.

He makes frequent trips to Panama City and to Gainesville, where he went to the University Florida School of Law after playing football for coach Charley Pell as an undergraduate.

On weekends, he may go home to Shalimar or his wife Lynn, a pediatrician, may visit him in Tallahassee.

Cognizant that he was in many ways green, Keefe gave himself a month to assess U.S. Attorney’s Office personnel before installing his own leadership team.

“The covenant is that they are road warriors like I am,” Keefe said. “They have families and most live in Pensacola — when they are not operating out of hotels. But if you want to be an excellent leader, and they are, you have to be omnipresent in the district.”

Keefe is responsible for 85-90 employees “who benefit from my authority and my ability to make decisions and make things happen, and I benefit from their knowledge and experience, but just because we’ve always done it one way doesn’t mean we can’t do it another way.”

Under Keefe, the new way has come to include the establishment of a public trust unit (PTU) whose purview includes public corruption, economic espionage, intellectual property theft, election security and counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations.

The PTU’s role has less to do with arresting, indicting and convicting wrongdoers than disrupting and discouraging unlawful activity before harm is done.

Located on the third floor of the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, the PTU represents a collection of skill sets, including forensic accounting and intelligence analysis. Keefe has bolstered its ranks by hiring retired FBI agents.   

“In sleepy old North Florida, we have military bases that are doing all sorts of cutting-edge stuff,” Keefe said.

“They are not simple, low-level recruiting and training facilities. The level and extent of information collection by foreign actors that takes place at our universities had never occurred to me.”

As to terrorism, Keefe said, efforts to root out foreign cells continue, but there is an increasing emphasis on “white nationalism and white supremacy. A lot of this activity is inherently domestic, so you don’t have elaborate networks of communication linking foreign actors engaged in radicalization to domestic folks. Instead, you have discreet pockets of domestic terrorist groups, and they blend in rather well.”

In assembling his PTU, Keefe recognized that he had at his disposal counterterrorism specialists with limited experience or background in public corruption.

But the skill set required to be effective in either area is similar, he said.

What is needed, Keefe said, are “people who like to get together in rooms with white boards and sticky notes creating string-art connections between people. You are dealing with complex cases that involve taking in lots of information, organizing and sharing that information, and identifying relationships among people or organizations that move money or other assets around.”

Those assets can include knowledge.

“The communist Chinese government has an expectation of students who attend universities in the United States that they will bring back whatever they can,” Keefe said.

“Students have remarkable levels of access to million and millions of dollars of research and work product. The government’s directive to them is ‘Get whatever you can, bring it back in a pile, and we’ll sort it out and determine what’s useful.’  ”

How do you disrupt that?

“We’re working on that right now,” Keefe said. “Tools are being fashioned. The idea is not to pick off one student, or one professor, at a time as they leave or attempt to leave with material, but it’s getting to the enablers and the facilitators in the university environment.”

PUBLIC CORRUPTION

In a case that he inherited, Keefe and members of his team negotiated plea agreements from one-time Tallahassee mayor and city commissioner Scott Maddox and his business associate Paige Carter-Smith, who was the director of the Downtown Improvement Authority when indicted. In August, each pleaded guilty to two counts of honest services fraud and one count of tax fraud conspiracy.

“Public office is the highest form of public trust, and the pattern of criminal activity by these defendants violated the sacred trust of the people,” Keefe said after the pleas were accepted by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle. “When Maddox should have been looking out for the best interest of the citizens of Tallahassee, he was instead lining his own pocket with Carter-Smith’s help. This U.S. Attorney’s Office places the utmost priority on rooting out and pursuing public corruption and will continue to do so in order to restore the public’s trust in its government and elected officials.”

“Maddox admitted to having taken large sums of money in exchange for favorable actions on various issues that came before the City of Tallahassee,” Keefe’s office reported in a news release. “He participated in a scheme to defraud and deprive the City of Tallahassee and its citizens of its right to honest services through bribery. Carter-Smith admitted to participating with Maddox in these criminal acts.”

A federal grand jury indicted Maddox and Carter-Smith in December 2018, and a superseding indictment in May added developer J.T. Burnette in various counts. Maddox and Carter-Smith were scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 19. Burnette’s trial was due to commence on Nov. 4.

SEX TRAFFICKING

In August, Keefe announced that a Pensacola business owner, David C. Williams, had been arrested on a federal warrant and charged with using interstate facilities while engaged in racketeering, money laundering conspiracy, and the harboring of illegal aliens for financial gain.

Williams was arrested in connection with his operation of multiple Asian massage parlors in Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

According to a news release, more than a dozen search warrants were executed at massage parlors linked to Williams in locations including Pensacola, Gulf Breeze and Gainesville.

Cases like the one against Williams are not easily tried in court, Keefe said, owing to the unreliability, many times, of victims as witnesses.

“If the victim is a bank that was robbed or someone who was kidnapped, witnesses are available and stable and motivated to show up in court,” Keefe said.

“Sex trafficking is different. Victims are often subject to difficult circumstances in life, there may be substance-abuse issues involved, and a lot of victims are teenage runways. In the six or nine months between an arrest and trial, if the victims, who had been dependent on the perpetrator, have no place to eat or sleep, they take off.”

Keefe said he is working to establish relationships with social services agencies capable of transitioning victims to a new life and helping to make sure they are around when it comes time to testify.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Keefe said the Northern District finds itself dealing with illegal immigration cases, but not nearly to the extent that jurisdictions in the Southwest do. He said his district primarily sees cases involving repeated unlawful entries associated with criminal activity, usually drug running.

“Drugs used to come up to our area from the Caribbean,” Keefe said.

“Now, they tend to originate in China, move through Mexico, cross the Texas border onto I-10, go from Mobile to Atlanta and then down I-75 into North Florida. Some of our largest drug-related takedowns occur in rural counties, like Gadsden, with small populations and a limited law enforcement presence. They are out of the way, but still, there is quick access to interstates.” 

Election interference, then, comes as a growing concern on top of many other moles to whack.

“We don’t want to wait until after 2020 and have Mueller 2.0,” Keefe said.

“The PTU works to be preemptive and proactive. To protect the integrity of elections, we are concerned about cyber activity, of course. But we also have to be attuned to the potential for old school interference — fraudulent registrations, improper voter roll purges, irregularities associated with absentee balloting.”

Is Keefe confident about safeguarding the 2020 election?

“In terms of what we learn and know, every day is a different snapshot.” Keefe said.

“And there are limits to what the federal government can do. The feds do not play a significant role in the curating and certification of an election. We can provide the Florida secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of elections with information about activity we suspect, and then we largely have to go away. We can’t intrude upon their role.” 

Six years ago, Phillip Stutts was diagnosed with achalasia, a rare and degenerative autoimmune disease that disables the esophagus, eventually making eating impossible.

For years, he took doctors at their word when they said the disease was incurable, that it could be slowed, perhaps, but not stopped. He took prescription medicines as recommended despite knowing that they have been linked to dementia as a side effect.

He was, as he writes in Fire Them Now, a “bystander to his own disease,” paralyzed by fear. That is, until he was told that a feeding tube was an inevitability that he should plan for.

Life as he knew it was on the line, and Stutts would be passive no longer.

Today, he is confident that “we will find a cure. I am going to cure my incurable disease.”

As a product of relentless online networking, Stutts was introduced to an achalasia researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and he is now poised to become a “clinical trial of one.”

The treatment involves an injection of stem cells into the esophagus in hopes that it will regenerate muscles and nerves.

For Stutts, a business and political marketer who lives in South Walton County, achalasia is to him as change is to many CEOs around the country.

“They know that disruptions are coming, and they don’t know how the marketing world works anymore, but they are choosing to bury their heads in the sand,” Stutts said in an interview conducted at The Henderson Beach Resort in Destin where he hosted a book signing.

“The CEO who operates from his gut and wants to continue doing the same things that made him successful in the first place years ago — the world doesn’t work that way today,” Stutts said.

With his book, Stutts is trying to rattle executives much as he was shaken by the prospect of a feeding tube.

“They need to know that they can win in a world of disruptions by reversing their fears and taking charge,” he said.

A key step can be hiring the right marketing firm. Stutts finds that too many businesses enter into long-term contracts with marketers who place their own interests above those of their clients.

Customers recognize that they need help navigating today’s digital marketing environment and, “all of a sudden you have an unbreakable long-term contract. The agency’s campaign may not work, but the customer is left holding the bag.”

Fire Them Now (Lioncrest Publishing, 2018) is largely about avoiding such pitfalls. Stutts lists “You Must Sign a Long-term Contract” as Lie #1 among several he says marketers often tell and sell.

“Some agencies even demand an upfront signing bonus for the ‘privilege’ of hiring them,” he writes. “That’s bulls—.”

There are other lies, Stutts has found, namely:

• You have to spend big to discover what works.
• Paying your marketing firm by the hour saves you money.
• Campaigns should be built around the confidence that your product or service is amazing.
• Your firm will work hard to make you stand out from the crowd.
• Your outcome takes priority over the agency’s payday.
• If you brand it, they will come.

Many businesses fundamentally need to change their outlook if they are to avoid traps laid by self-serving marketers.

“It’s about switching your primary question from, ‘Why don’t my customers want my amazing product or service?’ to, ‘What do my customers want?’” Stutts writes.

Agencies find it far easier to stroke business leaders’ egos than to do the more difficult work of exploring customer outlooks and desires.

And, they are perfectly content to take the easy route whenever their clients will let them, cautions Stutts, adding that businesses are vulnerable to flattering approaches and willing to pay for what they want to hear — validation.

To illustrate his point, Stutts writes about a company that his business approached, impressed that the potential client had a great story to tell, an outstanding product, the capacity to market itself well and a more than ample marketing budget.

“Some marketing firm had talked the company into creating an app for their product,” Stutts recalls. “The company spent $65,000 on developing the app. It was a free download, and it had been downloaded a measly 1,200 times.”

The company’s first question of Stutts’s firm: “How can we get more people to use the app?”

They were uninterested in any other strategy, so consumed were they by making their app investment pay off.

Writes Stutts:

“Finally we got real with them. ‘No one wants to use the app,’ we told them. ‘Meanwhile, you have a hugely marketable, high-profile business. Forget the app. Your audience voted on the app and the app lost. Focus on what your customers want.’

“They replied by again telling us that they had spent $65,000 on the app. They were so hung up on their investment and the idea of having a cool app that they were completely deaf and blind to the fact that their customers didn’t want what they were selling.”

The company that changes its mindset as Stutts suggests moves from a hang-up on validation to exploration, outlined as a five-step process in Stutts’s book.

1. Research. Assess customer wants and determine if they line up with what your company is passionate about.
2. Data. Establish which customer subsets will consume your message and act upon it.
3. Testing. Identify which media/communication channels can most effectively be used to reach the target consumers.
4. Launch. Disseminate your message via multiple channels to maximize chances for hitting the target.
5. Convert. Win over customers by positively distinguishing yourself from your competitors.

The process flows from start to finish with a consistent message and an unwavering focus on customers. Is it foolproof? No.

“If you’re hoping to accomplish anything of substance in this world, you will experience failure,” Stutts writes. “It’s unavoidable, and it’s a good thing.”

Quoting author and public speaker Tim Ferriss, Stutts stresses, “Failure is feedback,” or, as everyone’s mom always said, “Learn from your mistakes.”

The people who never succeed tend to be those who gave up early, Stutts writes, noting that Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all lost major elections before becoming president.

Clinton, for example, lost his bid for a seat in the Arkansas House of Representatives in 1974. Four years later, he became the youngest governor in history.

Two years after that, he became the youngest ex-governor in history upon failing to win re-election.

“Get up off the mat and innovate,” Stutts advises. “Success is born out of being on the bottom and wanting nothing more than to claw your way to the top.”

As to politics, how did a man with more than 20 years of election campaign experience handicap Florida’s marquee races?

“Had Gwen Graham won on the Democratic side, she easily would have defeated (Ron) DeSantis,” Stutts said just after primary elections were concluded.

“But now in (Andrew) Gillum and DeSantis, you have two candidates for governor operating at the poles, and DeSantis has a chance.”

In the race for a U.S. Senate seat, Stutts expected Rick Scott to prevail over incumbent Bill Nelson.

“Practically speaking, Scott has unlimited money,” Stutts said, “and Nelson is having a hard time getting out of his own way.”

Given the way the elections played out, Stutts appears to have been rather prescient.

He’s not an ego guy, but there is some validation there.