LIMAN ST. LUCIE, Fla. – St. Louis, including a critical internal affairs report compiled nearly 10 years ago. I looked at over 100 pages of personnel records for St. Lucie County sheriff candidate Steven Giordano.

The Democratic candidate for county sheriff says nearly all of his findings are wrong.

Steven Giordano served in St. Louis from 2005 until he resigned in 2015 following an internal affairs investigation. He worked as a jail deputy for the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office.

“Many false claims have been made,” Giordano said. “And I’m here to make sure this never happens to anyone again.”

He is now running to head the department he left.

Giordano agreed to sit down with me to talk about allegations in an internal affairs report that he had “associations with criminals.”

Specifically, to engage with a man the report said was “…involved in the sale of cocaine and prescription pills.”

I checked this man’s background and found out that he was convicted of 10 drug-related crimes; the last one was in 2016. I pressed Giordano about this relationship.

“We grew up in this community, there’s a lot of people here who know a lot of people who know a lot of people, I don’t know everyone’s background,” Giordano said.

I asked her why she didn’t know about the criminal history of the man she grew up with and was involved with.

“I didn’t say I grew up with it, we grew up in the community.”

This IA report mentions another man who lived in Giordano’s home for “several months” with “approximately 20 criminal charges.”

I researched this individual’s record and learned that he was convicted of misdemeanors, DUI, and traffic charges between 1999 and 2007.

“I think he painted my house. He was a friend of a friend,” Giordano said of the man sheriff’s investigators lived with for “a few months.”

“I think he might have spent two nights painting the house,” Giordano said.

The report also stated that Giordano “assisted a local bail bondsman locate a fugitive while off duty.”

The IA report revealed that Giordano admitted that “he was paid $100 for his assistance.”

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Giordano, who denied even being paid, said: “I never helped catch anyone who was avoiding bail.” “I was never on duty. I was never in uniform. This was also a false allegation.”

Giordano submitted his resignation letter the day after the sheriff released his internal affairs report.

I asked him why he resigned and did not dispute the findings.

“I gave them 10 years of my living, from 23 to 33, the best years of my life, to this agency,” Giordano said. “I felt mistreated and disrespected by the institution because of all these ridiculous allegations.”

Giordano’s personnel records also show that he received high marks in performance evaluations.

And praise like this one he gave to the prison’s crisis intervention team in 2010, which led to “increased officer safety and decreased incidents involving mentally ill people in our prison.”

Giordano recently visited St. He worked as a security guard at the FPL nuclear power plant in St. Lucie County and said he left that job to run for sheriff.