FBI targets child care agency

Broward foster children often rode in potentially unsafe cars and vans because an auto repair shop paid kickbacks to an employee of the county's child welfare agency to avoid making repairs.
And dozens of the foster care agency's employees stole donated toys intended for foster kids last Christmas.
These are among the allegations in a March 30 report by two private investigators hired to look into irregularities at ChildNet, one of 20 privately run child welfare agencies across Florida. The state Department of Children and Families will pay ChildNet $65 million this budget year to supervise 1,043 children in state care in Broward.
Troubles at ChildNet mounted Friday as federal agents swarmed the agency's Fort Lauderdale offices, state administrators threatened to cancel the agency's current contract, and board members voted to fire the group's founding president.
Ousted Friday afternoon was Peter Balitsaris, a longtime South Florida child advocate who helped create ChildNet about five years ago. The lone board member who fought Balitsaris' firing, Virginia Miller, resigned.
But a five-page summary of ChildNet's own investigation -- performed partly by a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent turned private eye -- included a host of startling allegations and findings. Among them:
• Two men in charge of facilities management and security at ChildNet, Steven Williams, 47, of Fort Lauderdale and Brady Grant, 35, of Coral Springs, were convicted felons with lengthy criminal histories. Williams' convictions included burglary in 1988 and battery in 1992, both in Tampa, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Grant was sentenced to prison in 1995 for manslaughter and again in 2001 on a cocaine conviction, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
• ''Vehicles used to transport children are possibly unsafe,'' the report said, because the auto repair shop hired to fix them instead paid kickbacks to Williams to ignore the needed repairs.
• Cars and vans used to cart children ''may not be repaired properly, or at all.'' Moss, DCF's top administrator in South Florida, said the vehicles since have been inspected to ensure they're safe.
• ChildNet had no inventory system for ''high-value items'' like computers and furniture.