South Florida Lobbyist Pleads Guilty To Tax Evasion Dating To 2005

A West Palm Beach resident with decades of lobbying experience in South Florida has pleaded guilty to tax evasion that dated back to 2005, totaling $1.7 million over the years.

Eston Eurel Melton III, known as “Dusty,” was the owner of Global Projects, Inc., a lobbying business that primarily operated in Miami-Dade County.

Starting with the 2005 tax year and continuing through 2014, Melton’s debt amassed to $1.2 million, prosecutors said. In that time period, Melton had paid about $62,000 of what he owed, according to the plea agreement in his case. The total increased to $1.7 million with penalties and interest by 2019.

Melton tried to prevent his Miami-Dade County home, where he lived until 2018, from being seized by representing to the IRS “that he was attempting to sell the residence himself, but then undermined his realtor’s efforts to make the sale,” prosecutors said in a news release Thursday.

Revenue officers placed liens on the home starting in 2008. In 2011 and 2012, revenue officers warned Melton that the IRS might seize the home if he did not sell it voluntarily, the plea agreement said. A realtor listed Melton’s home in December 2012 for $1.75 million, but Melton directed the realtor to increase the price to $2.4 million.

Shortly after the government petitioned to seize the home in 2015, Melton entered a contract to sell it, according to the agreement. He wrote in a letter to the IRS that the home being seized would “needlessly delay the closing transaction and payment of my debt.”

A judge in March 2015 granted the petition to seize the home, but the IRS did not. For the next year, Melton entered five contracts to sell the home, but it was never sold, the agreement said.

For several years after that, Melton signed tens of thousands of dollars worth of checks to himself from Global Projects and cashed them, then deposited the same amounts or similar amounts of money in a bank account of a family member he lived with, the plea agreement said.

Melton filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017. He sold his home a year later for nearly $1.4 million. All of the proceeds were used to pay two prior liens, the total he owed from his 2005 taxes and part of his 2006 taxes, the agreement said.

Federal prosecutors said the “close family member” who Melton lived with then opened a separate lobbying business called Gryphon Partners, Inc. in 2017 that operated in Miami-Dade County and Palm Beach County. Melton said he was as an employee of the business who had “no ownership interest,” according to the plea agreement.

By 2019, Gryphon Partners started earning a significant amount of revenue from Global Projects’ former clients, while Global Projects’ revenue dropped off, according to the agreement. The IRS about that same time had sent Melton a letter that they were still seeking to collect his debts from 2006 through 2014.

“Although Melton continued to provide almost all the lobbying services, Global Projects and Gryphon Partners paid him almost nothing after 2019, instead making all distributions to his family member,” prosecutors said in the news release.

After receiving the letter from the IRS, Melton notified three clients: “I will continue to be your primary political asset and point of communication, but [Individual 2]’s company will become your client relationship….”

The family member also purchased in cash a new home in West Palm Beach in 2018 and told the closing agent that Melton’s name would not be on the deed because she was buying the home with her own money. Of the $175,000 the family member paid to close on the home, the majority of it was proceeds from the two lobbying companies, according to the agreement.

In February 2020, Melton received a summons at his West Palm Beach home to attend an upcoming interview at an IRS office. A week later, he had transferred ownership of multiple life insurance policies to the family member and titles to two cars, the agreement said.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled in May.