Cesar Carasa was quite the talker when he was mayor of West Miami, but he couldn't sweet talk a Miami-Dade jury, who convicted him of exploiting his official position after Carasa accumulated some pretty hefty overage charges on his city cell phone.
Carasa racked up more than $70,000 in cell phone charges on his phone, most of which were international calls to friends and family in the Dominican Republic and China.
The former mayor claims he thought his phone had unlimited minutes, but that didn't explain the explicit use of city equipment for personal issues. Carasa really got in trouble when he tried to get city officials to force Sprint to waive the charges.
Carasa will be sentenced Sept. 2 and could face 30 days in jail for his cell phone binge.
If a judge really wanted to get creative, force Carasa to use a landline phone for a month or carry one of those antique, 50-pound cell phone packs with no text messaging capabilities. That should teach him.
