In several of the recorded calls, Godinez discussed the couple’s efforts to secure Pando’s help. Godinez was even writing the script that he hoped Pando would use when she approached Levenson: “These people are friends of mine, and I was looking closely at this case, and I think it merits that you really look into this case,” he said on Nov. 1, referring to his lawyers’ request that Levenson declare Godinez not guilty. “That will surely get me home.”

There is no evidence that Pando ever attempted to discuss the case with Levenson, the trial judge. Levenson declined to speak about the investigation with a Miami Herald reporter. But Kathleen Pugh, a Broward courts administrator, said “to the best of our knowledge, no one ever contacted [Levenson].”

Eunice Sigler, a spokeswoman for the Miami-Dade courts, said Pando never reported any improper contact by friends of Godinez to Chief Judge Joel Brown or County Court civil administrative judges.

Godinez operated two of South Florida’s largest assisted living facilities before his Oct. 31 conviction, and the recorded calls suggest he may still control the homes, as well as a third ALF he said he sold years ago. Prosecutors said he was part of a network that sold diluted and black-market drugs to pharmacies that then passed the drugs off to unsuspecting consumers. Levenson sentenced him on Dec. 14 to nine years.

Godinez asked Levenson to grant him bail while he appealed the convictions. But, at his sentencing, Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Oscar Gelpi disclosed that Godinez had been tape recorded at the jail instructing a close friend, Yona Montero, in how to engage in “patient brokering” — the practice of paying kickbacks for the referral of patients into healthcare facilities, such as ALFs. Patient brokering is illegal under both state and federal law.

Recordings and transcripts of several of the calls show Godinez also had several conversations with his wife, mostly in Spanish and a mixture of Spanish and English, about soliciting help from powerful friends in an effort to convince Levenson to release him. Several other community leaders are mentioned in the tapes, including a retired state police agent and a senior bank vice president.

Pando, a former assistant Miami city attorney, also is facing allegations that she improperly wrote a letter — on her official judicial letterhead — on behalf of a chain of medical clinics that have scores of civil cases before her each year.

The controversy involves Florida Wellness & Rehabilitation, a medical clinic chain that provides care to victims of automobile accidents primarily through what is called PIP, or the personal injury protection provision of auto insurance policies. When car insurance companies decline to pay the medical bill for crash injuries, clinics like Florida Wellness often file claims in county court — PIP policies limit such coverage to $10,000 — to compel payment. Florida Wellness has filed hundreds of such suits in recent years, many of which were assigned to the Hialeah satellite courthouse, and Judge Pando.

On Oct. 14, 2011, Pando wrote a letter to the director of Florida’s Division of Corporations, Jay Kassees, asking him to reinstate Florida Wellness & Rehabilitation Center as a registered corporation, saying the company’s registration was “inadvertently closed” four months earlier. Through a “clerical error on the part of the [company’s] accountant,” Pando wrote, Florida Wellness was dissolved as a Florida corporation.