The plea leaves former DTU President Terrie Brady, a longtime figure in labor and Democratic Party circles, preparing to face a jury alone.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Facing an impending trial, former Duval Teachers United Executive Vice President Ruby George admitted guilt on Aug. 4 to federal fraud allegations involving $1.2 million in the sale of leave time.
The plea leaves former DTU President Terrie Brady, a longtime figure in labor and Democratic Party circles, preparing to face a jury alone.
Teams for both the prosecution and defense asked Aug.1 to delay that trial from September to November, however.
George and Brady, who co-led the 6,500-member union for a span of 24 years and were its highest-ranking staff, were jointly indicted in December 2024 for selling back substantial amounts of vacation time to DTU that they hadn’t actually accumulated.
At 82, George conceded to three out of the seven charges specifically naming her, acknowledging involvement in conspiracy, wire fraud, and mail fraud, each of which carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years imprisonment.
Sitting in a wheelchair, George rested her head on her hands before the proceedings began, yet during the hearing, she responded to U.S. Magistrate Judge Samuel Horovitz’s inquiries with distinct and composed clarity.
“Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?” asked Horovitz, who received a matter-of-fact “yes” in reply.
The plea agreement specifying a “factual basis” for the accusations indicated that both women initiated the sale of leave to the union during the 2000s, involving transactions of leave balances that would have been exceedingly difficult to amass.
The union provided its staff — not the teachers, paraprofessionals, and others who are DTU members — with 42 days of leave annually, which they could use or retain to build up a reserve of available time off from year to year.
But the agreement said George sold more leave than she’d ever earned, giving as one example sales in 2013 of 2,872 hours of leave, the equivalent of 359 days of time off.
The agreement said George and Brady signed each other’s checks (part of the conspiracy) to authorize the payments into bank accounts (the wire fraud) and didn’t circulate information about their leave balances to the union’s governing board, made up of volunteers who usually met monthly.
The board did hire an auditor in 2017 to review union finances, the agreement said, but there was an effort to mislead the auditor about leave data and no time was ever allotted for the auditor to report findings to the board.
DTU had to send yearly financial reports with Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission, but the reports were doctored (the mail fraud) to hide information that could have derailed the leave scam, the report said.
George could be sentenced as early as about 75 days from now, Horowitz told her.
George’s plea included language about the potential for offering “substantial assistance” to authorities, but it’s not clear whether that will include testifying at Brady’s trial.
This report was first published by the Florida Times-Union.
