Matt Morgan financial documents show series of debts, expenditures adjacent to Joel Greenberg payments
Public records show pattern of mortgages, financing, & spending around key payments that the pro wrestler turned Longwood, FL City Commissioner received from public funds via Joel Greenberg's office.
Further public records stemming from transactions that have to be on file with Florida’s Seminole County Clerk give additional insight to the news broken last week by the Orlando Sentinel about Longwood City Commissioner Matt Morgan. Last Tuesday, the former pro wrestler was linked by the Sentinel to disgraced Seminole County Tax Collector and accused child sex trafficker Joel Greenberg via payments that Greenberg’s office made to Morgan’s LLC, Blueprint Enterprises for an apparent no-show job. Those payments, from October 30, 2019 to July 6, 2020, totaled $40,500, with the Sentinel noting that they started exactly three weeks after Morgan was released from a $36.803.94 tax lien; he had formed his LLC two days before the release.
(As reported here on Thursday, Morgan deleted a tweet showing him meeting Gaetz a few days before the Sentinel reached out to him for comment on the impending story.)
There’s a lot more where that came from, though. Further examination of public records involving Morgan and his family shows a series of new debts and home repair spending in close proximity to key payments from Greenberg’s office.
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On September 27, 2019, just nine days before Morgan formed Blueprint Enterprises, he filed a Notice of Commencement with the county about replacing the windows in his home. That’s minor on its face, but it’s the start of a pattern of spending and/or new debts showing up in public filings adjacent to key payments from the Tax Collector. On October 28, 2019, just two days before the first payment from the county posted, Matt and Larissa Morgan took out a $100,000 mortgage on their home. Real estate aggregation websites like Zillow and RedFin show the house as last being sold for $197,000 on January 17, 2013, which is supported by a deed transfer (to Morgan’s wife and mother) filed on that date. (It would be transferred to Matt and his wife in early 2015.)
The county clerk website, though, has no mortgages on file for any of the Morgans at that address before the 2019 one, suggesting that their home was a cash purchase. The next public record hit came from July 7, 2020, just one day after the final payment from Joel Greenberg’s office, when the Morgans took out another mortgage on the same home, this time for $105,000. The previous $100,000 mortgage from the prior October, which they had 30 years to pay, would be fully satisfied just 10 days after that, on July 17. About a month after that, on August 19, the Morgans filed a Notice of Commencement for a solar panel installation at their home.
That was the last public filing available for the Morgans…until a few weeks ago. Larissa Morgan filed paperwork on March 26, 2021 for financing of some kind using the solar panels as collateral. That just happens to be four days before the New York Times first reported on federal investigators looking into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his ties to Joel Greenberg.
These records, taken together, are open to interpretation, Nonetheless, there is evidence of a pattern that suggests the possibility of a bleak financial situation for the Morgans, one where they may have relied on the series of Greenberg payments and similarly timed debts to cover home improvement expenses and other, existing debts.
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