CFO Blaise Ingoglia<\/a> with the brief message: \u201cYou lack values.\u201d<\/p>\nIt was a scary \u201cbig red flag moment\u201d for the O\u2019Garas, a retired couple who are politically active supporters of progressive candidates, vocal critics of President Trump\u2019s immigration policies, and helped to organize a local No Kings anti-Trump demonstration in June.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnything is possible, if you can send a postcard and have this happen,\u201d Cathy O\u2019Gara, 69, said.<\/p>\n
Days after the visit \u2013 with the help of the Largo Police Department \u2013 they learned that the officers were investigators with the criminal division of the state\u2019s Department of Financial Services, which is overseen by Ingoglia.<\/p>\n
The visit was a precautionary measure given the current political climate, said a spokesperson for Ingoglia.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn light of recent events and with political violence on the rise, ensuring the security of public figures and maintaining public safety is increasingly important,\u201d said Sydney Booker, his communications director. \u201cWhile it is unfortunate that law enforcement must sometimes go the extra mile to ensure public safety, let it be known that it is a direct result of an increasingly hostile political environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said Ingoglia was unaware of the postcard and did not \u201chave any involvement in the threat assessment.\u201d Ingoglia did not return a call seeking comment.<\/p>\n
Booker did not explain how the postcard constituted a threat or how many other people the agency has investigated because their letters, postcards or emails appeared threatening. Nor did she respond to questions about what training the agents had for threat assessments, or how much it cost to send the agents to the O\u2019Gara\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
The incident comes at a time of heightened tension between conservatives and liberals over the direction the country is headed, which has brought added concern about the safety of public officials. It also comes at a time when groups opposing the Trump administration are being []labeled as \u201ccommunists\u201d and \u201cterrorists\u201d and subjected to law enforcement scrutiny.<\/p>\n
In the two months since Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Ingoglia to replace Jimmy Patronis as CFO after Patronis\u2019 election to Congress, Ingoglia has become the public face of the governor\u2019s crackdown on alleged wasteful spending and spiraling property taxes, barnstorming the state with charts demonstrating how much county governments have raised taxes on homeowners. Ingoglia was in Sanford for such an event on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The O\u2019Garas, who have been critical of those efforts, sent the postcard to Ingoglia after a press conference he held in St. Petersburg in August.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expected them to show up eventually because I\u2019m an organizer, and it follows the state of play these days,\u201d said Cathy O\u2019Gara.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve also sent emails to state Attorney General James Uthmeier and Gov. Ron DeSantis, criticizing their support of President Trump\u2019s mass deportation policy, calling it \u201cunlawful\u201d and \u201cun-American.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s visit, though they expected it, was still disturbing for the entire family.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey started right off with \u2018Did you send a postcard?\u2019 They showed a picture of it, asked if this was it. They didn\u2019t give a reason why they were there. They just showed the picture of the postcard,\u201d James O\u2019Gara said of Wednesday\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n
His granddaughter was saying, \u201c \u2018Oh my God. Why are the police talking to pop-pop?\u2019,\u201d Cathy O\u2019Gara said.<\/p>\n
After some small talk, one of the officers remarked that O\u2019Gara had been in the infantry during Vietnam, James O\u2019Gara said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was literally scared at that point,\u201d he said. They obviously didn\u2019t just check his name in the white pages or voter rolls, he continued, but had dived deep enough to find his military records. After a few more minutes of idle chatter, they left, he said.<\/p>\n
When Cathy O\u2019Gara drove her granddaughter to school moments later, she saw two unmarked Black Ford Broncos parked down the street, which led her to believe more than two agents were sent to their house.<\/p>\n
Feeling compelled to explain what happened to her neighbors, Cathy printed out a letter and showed it to 40 of her neighbors. \u201cI am trying to get people to see what is happening,\u201d she said. \u201cThey could have easily taken him away under false pretenses.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Largo Police Department gave the O\u2019Garas the contact number for DFS agents\u2019 supervisor, based in the south central regional office in Lake Wales.<\/p>\n
The supervisor, Captain Cynthia Campina, returned O\u2019Gara\u2019s message and talked with him on the phone about the visit . She seemed pleasant, he said, and explained that she was just responding to a request from the executive office in Tallahassee. She was almost apologetic, he added, and said she hadn\u2019t actually seen the postcard, chuckling when he told her the message was simply, \u201cYou lack values.\u201d<\/p>\n
Campina did not return a call from the Orlando Sentinel seeking comment.<\/p>\n
But O\u2019Gara said he wasn\u2019t satisfied with the explanation, and plans to take the issue up the chain of command. \u201cI am going to have conversations as far up as I can go and say, \u2018Why are you doing this? This is not appropriate. This is not the way we expect our elected officials to act.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally Published: October 7, 2025 at 1:36 PM EDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two armed men wearing bulletproof vests with the word \u201cpolice\u201d stenciled on them showed up Wednesday at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29,114,115,99,109],"class_list":{"0":"post-6289","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-florida","8":"tag-florida","9":"tag-florida-headlines","10":"tag-florida-news","11":"tag-latest-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-social"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}