Ana Maria Pando, one of two Miami-Dade County Court judges based in Hialeah, has become implicated in an ongoing criminal investigation of a convicted Broward County racketeer.

Pando’s name surfaced repeatedly in a series of phone calls tape-recorded at the Broward County Jail between racketeer Arturo Godinez and his wife. A Broward jury found Godinez guilty of fraud and conspiracy on Oct. 31 in a case involving the sale of sometimes bogus cancer and AIDS drugs to unsuspecting pharmacies and consumers. The next day, Godinez held the first of several conversations about how to recruit influential leaders to advocate for his release. Pando was one of them.

But the Hialeah judge’s troubles do not end there.

Pando also has been accused in court pleadings of using her influence as a judge to aid the owner of a half-dozen medical clinics that litigate before her dozens of times each year.

And Pando was warned seven years ago by the Florida Supreme Court that if she appeared before the high court again for an ethical breach justices would view her actions “far more harshly.”

Pando declined to discuss both issues in detail, though she insisted she had done nothing wrong in the investigation involving Godinez.

“I spoke to law enforcement and there is a pending investigation,” the judge said. “So it would be improper for me to go into any more detail.”

Pando said that Godinez and her father share a mutual friend, and that Godinez ran into her once, before his conviction, at Caffe Abbracci, a Coral Gables eatery she frequents. “The guy saw me there, and he knows I’m a judge,” she said. “I can’t do anything about that…The guy was in jail, desperate. If you ask me who the [trial] judge is, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what he looks like.” Calling Godinez a “crazy criminal,” she added: “He can say whatever he wants from jail. He’s desperate.”

“All you need to know,” she added, “is that there is nothing to it. He was in jail mentioning all sorts of names of people that could help him with his sentence. I just happened to be one of those names.”

Records suggest, however, that Pando may have been more than just a name bandied about in telephone calls.

Beginning on Nov. 1, the day after a Broward jury convicted him, Godinez held a series of phone conversations with his wife, Judith, that were recorded at the Broward County Jail as part of a standard monitoring system. The recordings, provided to The Miami Herald under the state’s public records law, detail Godinez’s efforts to find community leaders who would “vouch” for him to the judge who was to sentence him six weeks later, Broward Circuit Judge Jeffrey Levenson. Levenson is a former federal prosecutor.

Judith Godinez told her husband in one recorded conversation that a meeting had been scheduled between Pando, Pando’s father, Esteban Bencomo — who is referred to throughout the conversations by his nickname, “Papito” — and someone they call only “El Leader.”

In one conversation, Judith Godinez told her husband that Pando was willing to meet with representatives of the couple — but wanted to control who was present. “She’s not going to be comfortable talking in front of me, because I wanted to be present,” Judith Godinez told her husband, though the “me” she was referring to may also have been a family friend named Martica. “Later, we’ll see what she says, how she can help.”