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Sheriff: Cohen not a target in Aisenberg investigation

Fox News
July 28, 2008

TAMPA—The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office released a statement Sunday confirming detectives are following leads in the Sabrina Aisenberg case. The statement also says that high-profile attorney Barry Cohen is not a target of their investigation.

"We feel compelled to deny the implication that our investigation has ever viewed Mr. Barry Cohen as a subject, target, suspect or person of interest," the statement reads.

Sabrina Aisenberg disappeared from her Valrico home in 1997.Her parents, Marlene and Steve Aisenberg, say the 5-month-old infant was abducted.

But no one was ever convicted, and the baby was never found.

Prosecutors indicted the Aisenbergs back in 1999 for giving false statements and conspiracy. But the case collapsed.

Attorney Barry Cohen sued for malicious prosecution, and won.

Cohen will speak publicly about the case Monday morning.

Here is the entire text of the statement from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office:

"On November 24, 1997, the parents of Sabrina Paige Aisenberg called 911 and reported that she had been kidnapped from her home in Valrico. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office (HCSO), as well as other law enforcement entities, responded. Our office immediately opened a criminal investigation. HCSO continues to investigate to this day.

When she disappeared, Sabrina was 5 months old. There is no legitimate or lawful explanation for her disappearance. All possible explanations for this phenomenon involve serious criminal conduct. As the first responders and the primary state agency with jurisdiction for all of the state offenses, HCSO has an obligation to investigate this most distressing matter. Consequently, we continue to try to resolve the mystery of Sabrina's disappearance, but only in a lawful manner.

In the last eleven years, HCSO has followed and resolved thousands of leads. Many leads remain open. Some of these leads are more promising than others. Since the investigation is open and ongoing, we will not further discuss the nature of these leads, or provide any details about who may be implicated as a result.

HCSO detectives and employees treat all of these leads in a professional and scientific manner, gathering facts and allowing the facts to direct our actions, conclusions and decisions. Lead information comes to the HCSO from a variety of sources. Obviously, some of our informants are more reliable and trustworthy than others.

Nonetheless, regardless of the source, we are honor bound to lawfully investigate every viable lead, no matter whose feathers it might ultimately ruffle.

There is no political, personal or other improper agenda associated with the investigation into the disappearance of Sabrina Paige Aisenberg.

While we are not going to illuminate the parameters of the investigation for the media, nor are we going to confirm or deny our interest in any specific individual, based upon statements made in the various media outlets, we feel compelled to deny the implication that our investigation has ever viewed Mr. Barry Cohen as a subject, target, suspect or person of interest. Assertions to the contrary are simply wrong, baseless and designed to distract from the legitimate endeavor in which we are engaged."

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Jail Chatter Provides Lead in Aisenberg Case

BY Colleen Jenkins, Rebecca Catalanello, Jan Wesner & John Martin
St. Petersburg Times
July 28,2008

TAMPA | Detectives are pursuing new leads in the 1997 disappearance of baby Sabrina Aisenberg, armed with jailhouse chatter secretly recorded by an inmate who wore a wire.

Sheriff's investigators for the first time have shown mug shots to residents of the Aisenbergs' old Valrico neighborhood and have inquired about boats for sale at the time of the crime. They are asking other people about a long-haired felon known to frequent Tampa Bay by boat.

The disappearance of 5-month-old Sabrina was followed by years of drama, as prosecutors brought criminal charges against her parents, only to see their case collapse after embarrassing errors and tactical flaws.

The investigation's new focus included a man wearing a listening device at the behest of Hillsborough sheriff's detectives and providing them with information from a jailmate, Scott D. Overbeck, according to court transcripts.

Overbeck, a 6-foot-tall biker described by friends as an adrenaline junkie who loved boats, is currently in custody, facing federal charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and an explosive device.

Authorities have not named Overbeck, 44, as a suspect, but his friends say detectives have questioned them in recent months. Investigators asked one man whether he knew of any connection between Overbeck and Marlene Aisenberg, the baby's mother.

Detectives showed the friend a photo of a small boat that he recognized as having sat idle in Overbeck's driveway and garage for many years.

Some former Aisenberg neighbors got the sense that investigators had made significant progress in the case.

"They said they were real close to solving it," said neighbor Charles Jones.

Tony Peluso, the sheriff's lawyer in charge of the investigation, declined Friday to answer any questions.

'VERY PROMISING LEADS'

The Hillsborough Sheriff's Office has followed some 2,000 tips since Sabrina vanished from a crib in her family's home on Nov. 24, 1997. Last December, after the 10-year anniversary passed, Peluso said more investigators had been added to the case to chase down "some very promising leads."

That same month, court records show, detectives returned a man to Hillsborough County who had been serving a three-year prison sentence for battering a police officer.

The man, Dennis Byron, was a friend of Overbeck's. Records show he once was in two car crashes in one day while driving Overbeck's Dodge Ram.

Detectives had visited him in prison to learn what he knew about the Aisenberg case, Byron said.

After his Dec. 20 return to the Orient Road Jail, Byron wore a wire to obtain information from Overbeck, he later told a judge.

The two men were in jail together for 50 days. At a court hearing later, Byron said his recorded conversation with Overbeck had confirmed everything that Byron previously told detectives about Sabrina's disappearance. He also said he passed a polygraph test.

In court, Byron did not offer specifics of that information. But authorities rewarded his cooperation. In January, Hillsborough Circuit Judge Wayne Timmerman reduced Byron's three-year mandatory-minimum prison sentence to 24 months of community control.

Karen Stanley, second-in-command to Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober, attended the hearing and did not object.

On Friday, she told the St. Petersburg Times that at Peluso's request she did not challenge the resentencing. Citing the pending investigation, she declined to elaborate.

"Karen is entitled to say whatever she wants," Peluso said. "I'm not going to comment on an active and ongoing investigation."

Byron was rearrested Feb. 8 after fleeing his residential drug treatment program. He tried to get leniency from a new judge, based on his previous assistance to the Sheriff's Office, but a prosecutor said detectives had severed ties.

The judge sentenced Byron to more than five years in prison. He is now at Gainesville Correctional Institution.

BOAT IN THE DRIVEWAY

During the past five or six months, detectives have focused attention on the people who know Overbeck.

They talked to John Doyle, 60, who cared for Overbeck's father at his Dana Shores home while Clark Overbeck was ailing from cancer. The elder Overbeck, who owned a successful construction company that built apartment complexes around the Tampa Bay area, died in 1999.

Doyle said this week that he recognized Dennis Byron from a pack of photographs shown by sheriff's detectives.

"He was a mess," Doyle said, characterizing Byron as the kind of guy who always invited trouble.

Doyle said he also recognized a picture of Scott Overbeck's boat, a narrow, white, "miniature cigarette boat," with two seats, and a red stripe.

Most of the time Doyle saw the boat, it was sitting with a broken motor in the driveway of the Overbeck home at 3903 E Eden Roc Circle. Early on, Doyle said, Scott and a girlfriend used the boat on canals and in the bay near the Courtney Campbell Parkway.

For years, the boat sat in a driveway already cluttered with dune buggies, a refrigerator, a Corvette and more. "It looked like a junkyard," Doyle said.

He figures detectives have the boat now, given the photo they showed him.

"What I heard," Doyle said, is "Scott said he bought that boat off one of the Aisenbergs. I don't know if that's true."

CALL HIM 'TOMBSTONE'

Overbeck's arrest history dates to 1987. In March 2007, he was sentenced to two years of house arrest on a cocaine possession charge. He has served probation for resisting an officer with violence, driving under the influence, fleeing and eluding at high speeds and battery. Detectives once described his home as a "distribution point and supply house for crack cocaine."

According to Overbeck's neighbors and acquaintances, Overbeck kept company with fellow drug users and Willie Crain, a crab fisherman awaiting execution for the murder of 7-year-old Amanda Brown.

"Scott knew Crain enough to stop and speak to him if he saw him on the water tending to his traps," said Thomas J. Obenski, a 40-year-old construction superintendent who once lived and partied with Scott Overbeck.

Amanda disappeared on Sept. 9, 1998 less than 10 months after Sabrina Aisenberg vanished from her parents' home. The second-grader's body has never been found, but prosecutors alleged that Crain snatched Amanda from her bed, murdered her and disposed of her body in one of his crab traps in Old Tampa Bay.

Overbeck, who used the nickname "Tombstone'' as a biker, sometimes gave chilling accounts of his own activities, Obenski said, leaving friends to wonder whether the tales were flights of fancy or terrible truth.

"Scott was a very demented and twisted person," Obenski said.

Obenski recalled Overbeck owning boats, including one like the boat in the sheriff's photo a scaled-down cigarette boat with no title or registration. Obenski always wondered whether it had been stolen.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Several of the Aisenbergs' former neighbors have been questioned recently by investigators who showed them pictures. None of the neighbors recognized any faces.

Charles Jones, who lived next door to the Aisenbergs, said detectives asked whether he had seen a boat parked in their driveway the night Sabrina disappeared. Not then or ever, Jones said.

Mary and Peter McDonald, who live a few blocks up the street, didn't remember the Aisenbergs having a boat or water scooters either.

The Hillsborough County detectives told the couple they were starting from scratch on the case.

Tampa defense lawyer Barry Cohen, who represents Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, had no comment Friday. Federal prosecutors indicted the couple in 1999, accusing them of lying about their daughter's disappearance. But the charges were dropped after a federal judge called parts of the indictment "trivial," "gratuitous" and "misleading" and called the secretly recorded audiotapes from the Aisenbergs' home largely unintelligible.

Interim U.S. Attorney Robert O'Neill said his office has stopped investigating the Aisenberg case.

"We closed out any case that may have ever been open," O'Neill said Friday. "I don't foresee it ever being reopened. "

Prosecutor Stanley said the Sheriff's Office sometimes consulted the State Attorney's Office about their investigation, but "it's been a while since I've heard anything about the case."

A man who inherited Overbeck's father's construction business and has known the younger Overbeck since they were teens thinks that detectives are wasting their time with him.

"They are trying to connect him to some larger realm," Jeff Johnson said. "There is no larger realm. He's a druggie. That's all he is."

[Admin]

Aisenberg Attorney Targeted, He Says, Despite Gee's Denial

Josh Poltilove
The Tampa Tribune
July 28, 2008

TAMPA - Attorney Barry Cohen says the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office was trying to frame him.

He said deputies made him a target in their investigation into the 1997 disappearance of 5-month-old Sabrina Paige Aisenberg. Cohen represented Sabrina's parents, Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, on federal charges of lying to investigators. He said he still is their attorney.

At a news conference this morning at his Tampa law office, he said the sheriff's office tried to work the system to get information against him, the Aisenbergs and his investigator, Johnny Tranquillo.

"They're trying to frame me because I zealously defended the Aisenbergs," he said.

In a text message to The Tampa Tribune on Sunday, Sheriff David Gee said Cohen "is not, nor ever has been" the subject of an investigation into Sabrina's disappearance.

A prisoner named Dennis Byron used his role as an informant to say in a recorded statement that Cohen and Tranquillo conspired to cover up Sabrina's disappearance, according Byron's attorney, John Trevena.

Trevena said sheriff's office attorney Tony Peluso told him he had a "rock-solid case." Peluso, a former federal prosecutor who argued against awarding the Aisenbergs hefty legal fees after the charges against them were dismissed, denied saying that to Trevena.

Byron was approached by two detectives while at a Lake Butler processing center and asked about Sabrina's disappearance, according to court transcripts. Sheriff's deputies transferred Byron to the Orient Road Jail in December 2007. He wore a wire and received information from his cellmate, Scott D. Overbeck, according to the transcripts. Cohen said the two were friends and had partied together before.

In exchange for helping law enforcement, Byron was promised benefits including calling cards and money to spend at a canteen in jail, and when he asked for a reduced sentence, they gave it to him, Trevena said.

Trevena has spoken with Byron for several hours about the investigation and said "it was abundantly clear throughout that the sheriff's office was targeting Mr. Cohen, Mr. Tranquillo and the Aisenbergs and that was never an issue in his mind." Trevena said it was "bizarre" that the sheriff's office would claim otherwise.

Overbeck said he bought a boat from a woman in Valrico a week before Sabrina disappeared and "had a hunch" after seeing media coverage of the case that the woman was Marlene Aisenberg, according to sworn statements Cohen took last week from the two men.

Byron told Cohen that Overbeck "apparently" was hired by Tranquillo to get the boat from the Aisenbergs' home and that there had been a dead baby inside it. Tranquillo "apparently" contacted Overbeck, who told Byron he had chopped up the baby and put her remains in crab pots along the Courtney Campbell Parkway, according to Byron's statement.

There is no record of any watercraft being registered in the Aisenbergs' name.

Cohen said he learned about two weeks ago that he was being targeted.

He spoke with Overbeck and Byron and said that both men told him the sheriff's office targeted him. He said, however, that they told him they didn't have any evidence he was involved in Sabrina's death or disappearance.

Overbeck wouldn't tell deputies that Cohen was involved, Cohen said.

Cohen said it wouldn't have been possible for Tranquillo to have been involved. Tranquillo was in St. Joseph's Hospital having heart surgery, he said.

The sheriff's office says Cohen has never been a target, subject or person of interest in the case.

The office and Peluso issued the following statement Sunday afternoon:

"HCSO detectives and employees treat all of these leads in a professional and scientific manner, gathering facts and allowing the facts to direct our actions, conclusions and decisions. Lead information comes to the HCSO from a variety of sources. Obviously, some of our informants are more reliable and trustworthy than others. Nonetheless, regardless of the source, we are honor bound to lawfully investigate every viable lead, no matter whose feathers it might ultimately ruffle.

"There is no political, personal or other improper agenda associated with the investigation into the disappearance of Sabrina Paige Aisenberg."

The sheriff's office has no additional comment, sheriff's spokeswoman Debbie Carter said today.

Cohen said he didn't call the media to his office to discuss his feathers being ruffled. Instead, he said, he wanted to discuss truth and what goes on behind the scenes.

"Most people who come through the system don't have the money – don't have the legal team to expose what we have going on today," he said. "This system needs to get fixed. We can't have the continuation of the lack of scrutiny and the lack of honesty in our system."

He wants Gov. Charlie Crist to appoint a commission of people who have been through the system, convicts.

He said change is needed because informants often lie to get lighter sentences.

Sabrina disappeared from her crib 11 years ago, when the family lived in Valrico. Her parents, who now live in Maryland, were charged in federal court with lying to investigators about their daughter's disappearance.

The charges were dropped in 2003 after key evidence - recordings of bugged conversations - was thrown out because investigators lied to keep the listening devices in place. A judge also ruled that the tapes were inaudible. Eventually, the U.S. government paid $1.5 million in legal fees.

Cohen said his gut feeling is that Sabrina is alive. He doesn't think the sheriff's office willfollow the right leads, which means the department finding her is unlikely. He does think, however, that she will be found alive. "It could be years. It could be decades."

[Admin]

Informant shares tactics used in Aisenberg case

Michael Van Sickler
St. Peterburg Times
July 29, 2008

TAMPA — The January meeting involved a briefcase stuffed with cash.

It would all be Scott Overbeck's if he promised to keep quiet about his alleged role in the 1997 disappearance of baby Sabrina Aisenberg.

But the man with the cash, pretending to be an associate of the Aisenberg family, was actually a Hillsborough sheriff's deputy who wore a wire, allowing detectives to eavesdrop, according to a sworn statement from an informant in the case.

The covert recording was one of several tactics investigators used in their inquiry into Overbeck, said the informant, Dennis Byron.

But in a 310-page sworn statement taken last week, Byron said investigators were interested in others as well, including defense attorney Barry Cohen, who became the Aisenbergs' attorney just days after their daughter disappeared.

In Byron's statement, taken by Cohen himself, Byron described an investigation he said relied on wires, fake identities and phony payoffs to coax confessions and possibly other tips from Overbeck. Byron says Overbeck told him he was asked, apparently at the behest of one of Cohen's investigators, to pick up a boat from the Aisenbergs' home containing the dead body of Sabrina. He then told Byron he disposed of the remains in crab traps in Tampa Bay.

Byron's account provides an inside peek — though one possibly skewed by his self-interest — into how sheriff's deputies are investigating one of the county's most high-profile cold cases.

It is also a case in which the role of investigators has been an issue in the past. Years ago, when the Aisenbergs were charged with lying about their daughter's disappearance, the case collapsed. A special prosecutor in 2001 called some investigators' actions "cursory," "irresponsible" and "reckless."

After Byron described the most recent methods in his statement, Cohen and Byron's attorney, John Trevena, denounced investigators once more. Trevena called the tactics "outrageous" and unlike anything he has seen in his career.

Hillsborough sheriff's officials declined to comment beyond a statement issued Sunday saying Cohen wasn't a target of the investigation, and they wouldn't discuss details of the investigation.

Byron got involved in the case last year, when investigators learned of his recollections of a 2005 conversation in which he talked with his friend Overbeck about the Aisenberg case.

From the Gainesville Correctional Institution, Byron told Cohen he agreed to cooperate with investigators to reduce his sentence for battery on a law enforcement officer. He said detectives showed him photos of his newborn daughter, who was in foster care.

"They came to talk to me about getting me out of prison to get with my daughter," Byron told Cohen. "Kind of like, 'Let's show him some pie, and then pull it back a little and see if we can draw some information out of him.' "

On Dec. 19, Byron was given a radio and headphones that doubled as a recording device and was put in the same Hillsborough jail cell as Overbeck.

Byron said deputies encouraged him to cooperate by treating him to lunches, buying him thousands of dollars in phone calls and paying off about $300 in jail fees. On Dec. 22, detectives gave him an immunity agreement signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Trezevant that they said gave him protection, Byron claimed.

Byron said he persuaded Overbeck to write a letter extorting $500,000 from the baby's father, Steve Aisenberg, claiming he still had the boat that once contained Sabrina's remains. Although detectives intended to intercept the letter, they needed to provide a plausible way for Overbeck to get an address so he could mail the letter to the Aisenbergs, who had moved to Maryland. So Byron volunteered his sister to get the address in her job as a paralegal.

Detectives had the sister write an address and cell phone number for Aisenberg and mail it to Byron so he could give it to Overbeck. The plan was to have Overbeck call the cell phone number, dummied with a Maryland area code. A detective posing as Steve Aisenberg would answer, Byron said, hoping to hear clues from Overbeck about the baby's whereabouts. But it didn't pan out because detectives didn't pick up the phone when Overbeck finally called, Byron said.

"They dropped the ball," Byron told Cohen in his statement. "So I called the detectives and I'm like, 'Dude, what are you all doing man?' "

He said detectives told him: "Oh, man, we left the phone in another room, we couldn't get to it."

Byron said he helped write the letter from Overbeck to Aisenberg. In it, they wrote lines like "the white boat, you want your little white boat back" and "I need a half-million dollars, I'm in some trouble." He said detectives then videotaped him dropping the letter into a U.S. postal box. They had a warrant to intercept the letter.

Days later, a man carrying a briefcase and posing as an Aisenberg representative arrived at the Hillsborough County jail to meet with Overbeck. During the meeting, Byron called detectives, who told him they were listening in to the conversation. After 45 minutes, Overbeck returned to his cell and told Byron that the briefcase was "full of money," Byron said.

Byron explained to Cohen that the briefcase was a message to "let him know they got the money" for the boat.

[Admin]

Sheriff's litigator in Aisenberg case known for not giving up

Rebecca Catalanello, Kevin Graham and Michael Van Sickler
St. Peterburg Times
July 30, 2008

TAMPA — Growing up in Phoenix, Tony Peluso knew he wanted to be a lawyer or a paratrooper.

He found out he could be both.

In 1967 he joined the paratroopers and headed off to Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star. Then he pursued a law degree, re-enlisting in 1975 and serving as a judge advocate.

In 1992 he left the Army, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and went to work with the U.S. Attorney's Office, a post he held for nearly 15 years.

Peluso said he followed the example set by his dad's best friend, an attorney.

"He a was decent, honorable, loyal, do-the-right-thing kind of guy," Peluso said. "Something I always wanted to be."

Now he finds himself under fire as the attorney advising the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office investigation about the 1997 disappearance of 5-month-old Sabrina Aisenberg.

A high-powered defense attorney representing Sabrina's parents has singled out Peluso, blasting the 61-year-old for trying to frame him. The lawyer says Peluso is using secretly taped jailhouse chatter between inmates to implicate him in the baby's disappearance. Those accusations have reverberated across shock jock radio and nightly newscasts in recent days, thrusting Peluso into the spotlight.

"If his integrity is called into question, that's his life," said his wife, Kathy Peluso, who is an assistant U.S. attorney. "That's what bothers him the most."

Defense attorney Barry Cohen said Peluso's investigation is payback because he defended Sabrina's parents, Steve and Marlene Aisenberg. In 2001, federal prosecutors dropped charges against the couple over making false statements. Cohen sued and won about $1.3-million in legal fees.

Cohen said Peluso is now trying to tie him to Scott Overbeck, a convicted felon, who allegedly told a cellmate that he disposed of Sabrina's body.

In a sworn statement, Overbeck has been described as acting at the direction of John E. Tranquillo, an investigator in Cohen's office who died in 2006.

The Sheriff's Office has repeatedly denied Cohen's claim.

"I try to be professional at every moment," Peluso said, declining to comment on the Aisenberg investigation.

An Arizona State graduate, Peluso developed a reputation as a zealous litigator during his military career, his wife said. He worked tough cases in the procurement fraud division in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Office in Washington.

A big, career-making case helped him reach his dream of becoming a federal prosecutor. Yet that same case raised questions about his fairness.

It involved a Lakeland munitions company that folded in 1988. Peluso worked out of the Tampa U.S. Attorney's Office preparing a case against the company, which was accused of bilking millions from the feds.

Ultimately, 10 out of 13 executives pleaded guilty or were convicted of other charges.

"That was a big case. It required a lot of investigation,'' said Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Hansen.

But Wallace Nutting, a four-star general who was acquitted in that case, said Peluso went too far. He and his attorney, Sandy Weinberg, said that the evidence against Nutting was weak and that Peluso just included him to grab headlines.

"In all the battlefields, I never saw anyone as truly evil as Peluso," Nutting told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993.

Peluso stood by his prosecution of Nutting. "Being assistant U.S. attorney is not a popularity contest," he said Tuesday.

The case established Peluso at the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Michael Seigel, a former second in command at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa who once supervised Peluso, called him a "go-to guy."

"Not only at the U.S. Attorney's Office, but in my nearly 30 years out of law school, I have met no person or prosecutor more honorable than Tony Peluso," Seigel said. "He gives 150 percent."

Seigel said when a case seemed close, his office gave it to Peluso.

"Tony has very, very good judgment," Seigel said. "He would be the right person to examine a case very carefully and decide whether we should move forward."

He got national notice for helping prosecute HCA, the Healthcare Co., in a 1999 Medicare fraud case. Two executives were convicted, but their sentences were later overturned on appeal. Still, HCA subsidiaries paid millions in damages.

"Aggressive is an accurate description, but tenacious is a better way to describe him," said Stephen Meagher, a San Francisco lawyer who represented the whistle blower in the HCA case. "But he was always fair."

Not everyone in the local legal community has good things to say. Several defense attorneys declined to speak publicly about Peluso because they said they only had negative comments.

He represented the government as an assistant U.S. attorney when the Aisenbergs and Cohen sued investigators.

Peluso argued that Cohen should receive only $250,000 in legal fees. A federal judge awarded $2.9-million, but an appeals court later reduced it.

Like Seigel, Tampa defense attorney Stephen Crawford doesn't view Peluso as one to seek legal revenge because of a personal grudge.

"Some attorneys always want to make it personal. They just need to understand everybody is doing their job," Crawford said of the allegations against Peluso. "If certain attorneys have problems with Peluso, I would tell them go look in the mirror."

[Admin]

Informant is transferred and isolated

Rebecca Catalanello
St. Peterburg Times
July 30, 2008

TAMPA — A self-described informant in the Sabrina Aisenberg investigation awoke Tuesday in a new prison, locked in confinement, his attorney says.

Dennis Byron, 34, refused to go into protective confinement after authorities moved him from the Gainesville Correctional Institution to the Columbia Correctional Institution in Lake City on Monday, Largo lawyer John Trevena said.

"They said, 'That's not your decision,' " Trevena said. He said his client was transferred because the Department of Corrections thought the Gainesville facility lacked the security Byron needs.

The development came three days after the St. Petersburg Times first reported Byron's role at the center of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office's investigation into the 1997 disappearance of Sabrina Aisenberg, a 5-month-old Valrico girl.

Trevena said he plans to write to the governor's office today to ask that a special prosecutor be named to investigate the sheriff's dealings in the case.

Byron agreed to wear a wire in jail and record conversations with a friend and cell mate while trying to get information on how the baby vanished.

"My client has suffered greatly trying to help them and now he's in protective custody and he's suffering more," Trevena said.

Byron told attorneys last week that he wore the wire for sheriff's detectives, recording jail cell conversations with 44-year-old Scott Overbeck. Overbeck told Byron he disposed of Sabrina's body by chopping it up and dumping the pieces in crab traps in waters near the Courtney Campbell Parkway, according to a sworn statement Byron gave investigators.

Also Tuesday, a woman who gave her name only as "Rhonda" appeared on the Bubba the Love Sponge morning radio show in an effort to validate the stories coming out about Overbeck.

Her attorney, Kevin Hayslett, said Overbeck told the woman when they were roommates that although he didn't kill Sabrina, he did dispose of the baby's body in crab traps.

Trevena identified the woman as Carrie Leece, Bryon's girlfriend.

Hillsborough Sheriff David Gee said Tuesday that the allegations were thoroughly investigated over the course of a year. "These names came to us, we pulled out all the stops," he said. "We ran this thing down."

But Gee appeared to try to rein in expectations about the status of the case in light of a recent media firestorm.

While the Aisenberg investigation overall is still "very much active," this part is "pretty much done" for now pending further investigation, he said.

"There's nothing I know that we can do to run it down right now," he said. But he also added: "There's still some people in our office who believe this guy might have something. . . . Right now, there's not a lot we can do with that particular lead."

Trevena called the characterization farcical. The Largo lawyer says he was told last week by a Sheriff's Office attorney that the agency had "rock solid evidence" in the case.

Both Trevena and Barry Cohen, attorney for the parents of Sabrina Aisenberg, criticized the Sheriff's Office this week, saying detectives tried to implicate Cohen in the baby's disappearance.

The Sheriff's Office maintains it has never targeted Cohen, attorney for Steve and Marlene Aisenberg.

Overbeck, the son of a Dana Shores construction company owner, is being held at the Pinellas County Jail on unrelated federal charges.

Also Tuesday, Trevena filed a motion asking a judge to correct the "illegal sentence" imposed on Byron, who expected that in return for his cooperation in obtaining information about the Aisenberg case, prosecutors would agree to allow a judge to reduce his sentence, according to his sworn statements.

But all of that went afoul, according to public records.

At the time that Byron says he was approached by detectives, he was serving a minimum mandatory sentence on charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer. Three months later, the court reconsidered that sentence, giving him 24 months of community control — a form of house arrest — with the condition that he complete a residential drug treatment program at Operation PAR in Pinellas County.

But Byron fled the program and was rearrested Feb. 8.

When he tried to get leniency from a new judge, based on his previous efforts for the Sheriff's Office, a prosecutor said detectives had severed ties. The judge instead revoked the community control and sentenced Byron to five years in prison — a sentence Trevena says is illegal.

"It is null and void because the court lacked jurisdiction to impose it," Trevena wrote in his motion Tuesday, calling for a 36-month prison sentence.

[Admin]

Mystery boat central to Aisenberg case

Colleen Jenkins and Kevin Graham
St. Peterburg Times
July 31, 2008

TAMPA — Scott D. Overbeck, the focus of an investigation into the disappearance of 5-month-old Sabrina Aisenberg, says detectives told him that they found blood in his boat.

They didn't tell him whose blood, he said in a sworn statement last week. Overbeck, who lived in a waterfront home and has owned many boats, didn't think much of the claim.

"Well, all boats got blood in it, I think," he said. "Every boat I ever had does. Somebody either cuts their foot or you catch a fish."

But the boat in question is one Overbeck believes he bought from the baby's mother.

In recent months, Hillsborough sheriff's detectives have been chasing down an informant's contention that Overbeck retrieved a small white boat with the dead baby inside from the Aisenbergs' home in Valrico on Nov. 24, 1997, the day Sabrina was reported missing. The informant said Overbeck then used the boat to dispose of the body in crab traps near the Courtney Campbell Parkway.

If that story proves true, the boat and DNA rumored to have been found on it could prove vital in cracking the decade-old case.

But Barry Cohen, the Aisenbergs' attorney, said his clients never owned a boat, and no neighbors ever saw them with one. State records do not appear to link a boat to the parents.

"That would have been a huge focus of the investigation," he said.

Cohen calls the rumors of DNA "bulls---."

Authorities, Cohen said, "leaked it out there to let someone think they had a good case."

But experts say it is possible for genetic material to exist after all this time — even if the crime scene has been disturbed.

"People still go back and get DNA that's hundreds or thousands of years old," said David Foran, director of the forensic science program at Michigan State University.

The Sheriff's Office has refused to comment on whether it found DNA on Overbeck's boat, citing the continuing investigation.

But it seems pretty certain that the agency has the watercraft.

Overbeck, who talked to Cohen in a jailhouse interview last week, said he unknowingly sold it to an undercover detective last year.

The 12-foot miniature cigarette boat had been sitting in his driveway in Dana Shores with a broken motor. An undercover detective drove up in a white Suburban, he said, and posed as a man looking to buy a boat that would bring back good memories for his dying father.

Overbeck sold it for about $2,200 or $2,300, according to his sworn statement. He thought it was a bit strange that the man hadn't asked for a title. Not that Overbeck had one.

He said he never got a title when he bought the boat for $1,500 some time in the week before Sabrina disappeared. Overbeck said he found the boat in Boat Trader and bought it from a woman in Valrico who told him that her husband was too tall to comfortably ride in it.

As years passed and the mystery went unsolved, Overbeck said he started to wonder aloud to friends about whether his boat might have been linked to the crime. He said the boat had new carpeting when he got it and seemed like it had room enough to hide an infant.

In his sworn statement, Overbeck denied having any personal involvement in the baby's disappearance. Overbeck, a felon, is being held in jail on unrelated federal explosives charges.

The informant, Dennis Byron, said he vaguely recalled that Overbeck and a friend changed the carpet so that there wouldn't be any evidence.

That friend, John Doyle, told the Times that neither he nor Overbeck ever cleaned the boat.

Cleaning a particular area of a crime scene would remove a genetic sample, said David Lazer, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about the use of DNA in criminal investigations. If carpet had been replaced inside a boat, for example, the DNA may have been tossed out with the old carpet, Lazer said. He said investigators then might look for samples in other areas, such as the walls of the boat. "If it was a location that was relatively safe, sheltered in some sense, DNA can be quite durable," he said.

"This isn't a pristine crime scene," said David Kaye, a professor on science and the law at Arizona State University. "It's going to be more complicated. Certainly it's worth investigating and seeing how much can be found there."

DNA experts say that if a location has been cleaned in an attempt to hide a crime investigators can spray chemicals to identify where they should look for blood to extract DNA.

One such chemical is luminol. When sprayed on even minute amounts of blood, luminol reacts with the iron in the blood and causes the spot to glow neon blue. But luminol only indicates that blood might be in the area. Other substances, such as bleach, react the same way.

When this reaction occurs, investigators swab the area and test the sample in a laboratory to distinguish human DNA from other specimens.

"You couldn't accidentally mistake fish DNA for the baby's," Lazer said. "More importantly, you would need to be able to distinguish the DNA from the crime scene from any other human being."

The ability to do that, he said, would depend upon the quality of the material collected.

"A match does not mean guilty, just as a general proposition," Lazer said. However, he added, "a match combined with other facts can equal guilt."

[Admin]

Their two accounts differ
Friends: Overbeck, Byron not reliable

Colleen Jenkins and Rebecca Catalanello
St. Petersburg Times
August 2, 2008

TAMPA — Before they became the focus of a notorious unsolved mystery, Dennis Byron and Scott D. Overbeck were known for disrupting their upscale waterfront community with revolving parties that drew police hundreds of times. Cocaine was plentiful. They had so many women at their home that one friend likened it to a brothel.

Then Byron told detectives that Overbeck was responsible for disposing of 5-month-old Sabrina Aisenberg's body in crab traps in Tampa Bay in 1997. The allegation figures in new inquiries in an investigation that has never answered what happened to the Valrico infant.

Most of the people who know both men seem disinclined to believe Byron's claim. They describe him as a scam artist and Overbeck as a big talker known to boast of terrible crimes.

"I think he's just running his mouth," friend Rory Kline said of Overbeck, "and Byron's trying to get out of jail free."

Some acquaintances, however, believe Overbeck could be capable of such behavior. Hillsborough sheriff's detectives aren't talking, but have spent months chasing the allegation. Byron's attorney says the sheriff's official leading the investigation told him there is independent corroboration of Byron's claim.

What is publicly known so far suggests the latest thrust of the investigation may hinge on the credibility of two school dropouts whose own friends call into question their truthfulness. Both men are addicts whose memories could be hazy from drug use. Both are felons with reasons to lie.

Can either be believed?

• • •

Acquaintances of Overbeck describe him as "demented" and an adrenaline junkie drawn to trouble by too much time and money.

He was friendly with Willie Crain, a fisherman now awaiting execution for the 1998 murder of a 7-year-old girl, said a former friend. Prosecutors believe Crain disposed of the girl's body in one of his crab traps in Tampa Bay.

Overbeck denies having anything to do with Sabrina's body. In a sworn jailhouse statement last month to the Aisenbergs' attorneys, he said he merely has a hunch that he bought a boat from Marlene Aisenberg the week before she reported her daughter missing. At one point, he calls the baby "Christina."

Detectives floated their own theory to him, he said, suggesting that he had an affair with Marlene and sold cocaine to her and her husband, Steve.

Overbeck, 44, admits he had several girlfriends at a time but says Marlene wasn't one of them. He has been convicted of possessing cocaine but never of selling it.

He inherited his Dana Shores home from his father, a construction company owner who bequeathed him property, two Harley Davidsons, a Rolex, a boat and a hefty supply of cash. Scott Overbeck, already considered the rich kid who drove a Corvette at 19, drained his windfall on women, drugs, friends and the Outlaw biker gang, friends said.

"It was out of control, man," Kline said. "The guy had stupid money. And when you have stupid money, you have a lot of friends."

Alba Achin, who lives two doors down, said her yard man found a woman lying in her driveway last year, begging for help. The woman said she had been kept inside the Overbeck home too long and offered the yard man sexual favors in exchange for a ride.

Byron also said Overbeck, whose biker nickname is "Tombstone," was a "money man" for the Outlaws, buying them bikes and a house in Daytona or sometimes giving them cash.

Overbeck, who has been arrested in Florida at least 17 times since 1987, bragged about crimes that never appeared on his record. His demolished Oldsmobile Cutlass disappeared after Overbeck claimed he killed a man in a hit-and-run in the late 1980s, according to former friend Thomas Obenski.

Kline said Overbeck took credit for the 1989 murder of an Ohio woman and her two daughters in Tampa Bay, even though another man is sitting on death row for the crime.

Byron said in a sworn statement that in 2005 at their house, Overbeck told him he picked up a boat with Sabrina's body inside from the Aisenberg home and disposed of the baby.

Byron believed it was at the request of Overbeck's father, who was doing a favor for a man named John E. Tranquillo. He was a friend of the Overbecks who lived around the bend on Eden Roc Circle. He also worked as an investigator for Barry Cohen, who would become the Aisenbergs' attorney.

But Byron also said in his sworn statement that Overbeck never told him outright of his father's or Tranquillo's involvement.

Instead, Byron claimed that Overbeck said, "I did things for my dad nobody else would do. When there was a situation, and it needed to be handled for friends of my father's, nobody else did what I did."

Jeff Johnson of Odessa inherited Overbeck's father's business and has known Scott Overbeck since they were teens. He thinks Overbeck is just looking for "his moment of fame."

"Scott," he said, "wants to be somebody."

• • •

According to friend Rory Kline, "Bopper is a scammer."

Nicknamed by a mother who loved the music of early rock 'n' roller Big Bopper, Byron, 33, now evokes strong opinions from people who know him.

Kline says he first met Byron more than five years ago in Daytona. They were doing landscaping work after a storm rolled across the coast. But when Kline heard talk that Byron took deposits for jobs he never completed, Kline said he wanted nothing to do with him.

John Doyle, 60, a longtime friend of Overbeck's father, said Byron used to borrow his garden tools and never return them.

"Not a character I'd want to hang around … ," Doyle said. "If he's in jail, that's where he needs to be."

Byron knows the inside of a jail. He has been arrested at least 31 times going back to age 19, state records show. Cocaine possession. Aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer. Burglary.

"I've been a lifetime addict myself, okay?" Byron said in a sworn statement last month.

His mother, Josephine Byron, 70, said she doesn't know what happened to her boy. The second youngest of five, Byron is a sixth-grade dropout and the only child with a lengthy criminal record.

"We've all given him chances," said Josephine Byron, a slight, white-haired widow.

She ended all communication with her son in the winter, after she said he squandered yet another chance.

That chance came in November, and it started with a photograph of a baby.

Byron was in prison, sentenced to three years for aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer. Hillsborough sheriff's detectives heard from an inmate that Byron might have details on the Aisenberg case. He wouldn't talk without an attorney.

Eventually, Byron said detectives came waving a picture of his newborn daughter and only child. Born Aug. 3, 2007, this baby represented hope.

"My daughter changed my life," Byron said.

Though in prison, he was eager to have some contact with his daughter, now in foster care.

Detectives seemed to offer him what he wanted. He told attorneys last week he had the impression "that they could possibly help me get my daughter back."

Byron recounted what he knew. Detectives would move him to a jail cell, where he would wear a wire for 34 days and talk with Overbeck about the Aisenberg case. In exchange, his sentence would be reduced.

And that's how it went.

His three-year prison sentence became two years of house arrest, as long as he lived at a drug treatment program.

But a day after his release, he took off. Rearrested, he was sent back to prison.

"You don't understand what a big letdown that was," his mother said this week, tearing up as she talked. "I was so excited and they were going to keep the baby. I wanted them to do well. … There were too many heartbreaks and too many letdowns."

Kline has little good to say about Byron, so he finds it hard to believe Byron could be motivated by love for his daughter.

But he does think Byron is capable of retelling Overbeck's wild stories for his own gain: "Get out of jail free card, turn in a murderer, even if he ain't a murderer. You think you're going to get out of a three-year sentence on some house arrest, you'd at least conform."

But the mother of Byron's child, Carrie Leece, backed Byron's account in a radio interview this week.

"I'm very scared of Scott," Leece said on the Bubba the Love Sponge show.

• • •

Byron made a sworn statement on July 23 from the Gainesville Correctional Institution. Overbeck made a sworn statement on July 25 from a jail in Pinellas County, where he is being held on federal weapons and explosives charges.

Both men gave their accounts after hours of questioning by Barry Cohen, attorney for Steve and Marlene Aisenberg. During those interviews, both men said they had no firm knowledge of any involvement by the attorney or his investigator Tranquillo.

John Doyle, the friend of Overbeck's father, is surprised anyone is giving credence to anything either of them has to say.

"I wouldn't believe a drug addict with anything," Doyle said. "With these people, I wouldn't trust 'em. I think Dennis Byron is looking for a deal like Mr. Cohen said on TV. And I think that is what it's all about."

______

Scott Overbeck and Dennis Byron give differing accounts about how a small white boat and an investigator for a high-profile law firm figure in the disappearance of Sabrina Aisenberg. Here's what they've said:

How Overbeck got the boat

Byron: Overbeck was sent to pick up the boat from the Aisenberg home the day the baby was reported missing. Overbeck said he would make up a story about first seeing the boat advertised in a flier.

Overbeck: He saw the boat advertised in Boat Trader and bought it for $1,500 from a woman in Valrico sometime during the week before the baby was reported missing.

What happened to Sabrina

Byron: The baby was dead and stuffed in the bow of the boat when Overbeck picked it up. At some point, he chopped her up and dumped the remains in crab traps in Tampa Bay.

Overbeck: He never saw the baby. After years went by without her disappearance being solved, he began to wonder if she had once been hidden in the boat he bought.

Investigator Tranquillo's role

Byron: He said Overbeck led him to believe that Overbeck retrieved the baby and the boat under orders from his father and at the behest of Tranquillo, who worked for the Aisenbergs' attorney. Byron then said he never heard Overbeck directly say that Tranquillo was involved.

Overbeck: He said he once mentioned to Tranquillo, his neighbor, his hunch about the boat being connected to Sabrina's disappearance. Tranquillo, he said, told him he was crazy.

[Admin]

In Sabrina case, there's no evading mystery, suspicion

Thomas Lake
St. Peterburg Times
August 3, 2008

BETHESDA, Md. — They came here nine years ago, to the soft hills above the Potomac, as the search became a prosecution. They were four-fifths of a family.

This place has an Aramaic name. It means house of mercy. They moved into a house of brick. They bought a security system and locked the doors.

Bethesda is a safe place, 10 miles from Washington, a haven of old money and old stone. Narrow roads wind through the hardwoods, and the leaves form a high, green ceiling. It has been called the smartest town in America, because nearly 80 percent of its adults have graduated from college and nearly half hold advanced degrees.

The national naval hospital is here, and so are the National Institutes of Health. People mind their own business because they have so much to mind.

Here, 920 miles from Tampa Bay, where late last month they fell under fresh suspicion, Steve and Marlene Aisenberg began again.

Their story is one of Florida's great unsolved mysteries. On Nov. 24, 1997, the Aisenbergs, who lived east of Tampa in Valrico, said their 5-month-old daughter, Sabrina, had been stolen from her crib in the dead of night.

The report set off one of the largest missing-persons searches in state history. But authorities came to doubt their story. They wondered how a kidnapper could have gotten in the house without waking anyone up or making the dog bark. They began to suspect that Sabrina was dead and that the parents had something to do with it.

The parents took the Fifth before a grand jury. Deputies bugged their house, to listen in on more than 2,600 conversations in 79 days. Those taped conversations gave rise to a federal indictment on charges of lying to the authorities. Investigators said they heard Steve admitting he had hurt Sabrina while under the influence of cocaine. They quoted Marlene saying, "The baby's dead and buried! It was found dead because you did it!"

By then the Aisenbergs were already here in Maryland. When the indictment came down, the agents came to Steve's workplace and took him away in handcuffs. They came to the house for Marlene and smashed the door.

But the case dissolved after a federal judge declared the tapes largely inaudible. He said detectives transcribing the audio had taken statements out of context or changed their meaning. In February 2001, the government dropped the charges.

The case remained open. No one could find a trace of Sabrina.

• • •

In Bethesda, the Aisenbergs took out their trash without detectives sifting through it. They walked outside without seeing satellite trucks in the street. Their smiles were no longer converted into televised evidence of guilt.

They talked in the kitchen and bedroom without spies on the fringe. If they talked about salad and table-setting, no one claimed they had been discussing cocaine. There were no more disputed transcripts.

Their children, William and Monica, left toys on the floor and no one saw it as a sign of child neglect, as they had in Tampa.

They all lived in the house, the same place Steve grew up, surrounded by lawyers and bankers and analysts. Steve's father, Irwin, had bought the house in 1967, for $45,000. When he heard about the trouble in Florida he called Steve and offered to move out so his son's family could move in. And that's what happened. If the indictment was meant to pry them apart, to turn them against each other, it did not work. They fixed the door and put a basketball hoop in the driveway.

But the story wouldn't stay in Florida, and Steve had trouble finding a job.

"There was an attitude of, anyone who did away with their daughter, we don't want them," said the father, Irwin Aisenberg, a retired patent lawyer who now lives in a senior community a short drive away.

Finally, Steve's old friend Lanny Plotkin approached his own boss and asked him to hire Steve.

"If you're positive he's okay," the boss said, as Plotkin recalled last week.

"Yes," Plotkin said. And with that, Steve, 44, got a job delivering and operating high-tech equipment for eye doctors. After enough time passed, he was allowed to coach Monica's rec-league soccer team.

Steve Levy, a retired government analyst who lives around the corner from the Aisenbergs, estimates that a quarter of the people in the neighborhood have heard the story. When Marlene asked his wife about carpooling to Hebrew school, she thought about it and then agreed. Now they are friends.

"You have to give people the benefit of the doubt," Levy said.

Marlene, 45, found customer-service work with an airline. She recently got her real estate license and is listed in state records as a salesperson for Coldwell Banker. Bethesda is a good place to sell real estate. Values have held better here than they have elsewhere. The Aisenbergs' home, a split-level built in 1963, is assessed at nearly $758,000.

The children bought into Harry Potter and attended some of the best public schools in the country. They both went to Walt Whitman High School, home of the Vikings, where they found friendship and respect. Monica was an officer in the freshman class last year. William is headed for college.

If it is a charade, as the authorities said, it has been long and elaborate. They turned Steve's old room into Sabrina's room and set up a row of 2-foot teddy bears. They went on national television, pleading for her return. A few months ago, they sent out a mass e-mail with her latest age-progressed photo from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She is grinning in the photo, with grown-up front teeth.

Friends and relatives are convinced of their innocence.

"The best thing would be to find her somehow," Plotkin said.

"Their hope is that she'll come back," Irwin Aisenberg said.

"It's just criminal how they were persecuted," Levy said.

But last week, none of them had heard of the latest development in the case: In a sworn statement, an informant said a friend of his had admitted retrieving Sabrina's body from the Aisenbergs' house and dumping it in the bay.

Authorities won't talk about their investigation, but they have been following up on the informant's details.

No one answered the door at the Aisenbergs' house last week. Newspapers piled up outside, and a chipmunk scurried up the drainpipe. A sign in front said Protected By Brinks Home Security.

The family left town the previous Friday, Plotkin said. They packed their bags and headed south. Florida is still good for something. They were going to Disney World.