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.”

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.

“I see no reason not to reinstate” Florida Wellness, Pando wrote.

Kassees’ agency viewed the judge’s letter, which attached a sworn statement from Florida Wellness’ accountant, as a court order, and reactivated the company for “no fee” two weeks later, records show.

Two weeks after the company was reactivated, four separate Florida Wellness clinics contributed a combined $2,000 to Pando’s re-election campaign , which so far has collected more than $67,000 in a war chest.

In response to Pando’s actions, the staff attorney for GEICO Insurance, Richard M. Nelson, filed a series of motions asking Pando to recuse herself, or step down, from disputes that involve Florida Wellness, saying the judge “lent the prestige of her judicial office to advance the private interests” of the clinic chain.

Pando’s letter to the corporations division, Nelson wrote, “appears to speak for, and on behalf of” Florida Wellness’s president, Mark Cereceda. In an attached sworn statement, a GEICO executive wrote that Pando “appears to vouch for [Florida Wellness] in stating that its president “was not involved in the decision [to dissolve the company] in any fashion.”

GEICO, Nelson added, “reasonably fears that, due to judicial bias, it will not receive a fair trial or hearing before this court.” Nelson declined to discuss the disqualification motions with The Herald.

Through a lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Atlee Wampler, Florida Wellness’ president, Cereceda, issued a short statement praising Pando: “I have the highest respect for Judge Pando,” he said. “I am a regular contributor to her election campaigns. I believe she has an excellent judicial temperament. I strongly support Judge Pando’s re-election.”

In recent weeks, other insurance companies have joined GEICO in moving to disqualify Pando, and at least 54 recusal motions have been filed — some involving medical clinics other than Florida Wellness.

Pando has not yet ruled on the motions that she disqualify herself, and several of the cases were in the judge’s chambers under review when The Herald sought to examine the documents recently.

The judge declined to discuss the recusal motions, but did say the letter she wrote to the corporations division was “a mistake, and I will rectify it.”

Pando’s troubles could be particularly significant because state judicial watchdogs already have warned her to avoid future transgressions.

In 2004, Pando was charged by the state Judicial Qualifications Commission with accepting “numerous” improper loans from her mother and father, Millie and Esteban Bencomo, during her unsuccessful 1998 campaign, and the 2000 campaign in which she won office. The loans included one for $25,000, — well beyond the $500 statutory limit, records show. Investigators also accused Pando of lying about the sources of some of the money. The next year, the Florida Supreme Court agreed with the commission, slapping the judge with a public reprimand and a $25,000 fine.

One of the seven justices, Fred Lewis from Miami, argued in a concurring opinion that Pando should have been removed from the bench.

“If conduct is so egregious as to require enormous monetary fines,” Lewis wrote, “the judicial office itself has been soiled and damaged. If we continue down this path, in my view, we undermine trust and confidence in the judicial system.”