Glamorous Vegas judge is set to be banned from court over what she did to planned statue

A Las Vegas-area judge will be barred from the courtroom after being found guilty of using money raised for a statue honoring a slain police officer for personal use, including plastic surgery.

A jury convicted Michele Fiore, a former Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker who sits as a Pahrump judge about 60 miles away from Las Vegas, of six counts of federal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Each count carries a possible penalty of 20 years in prison.

The Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline had already suspended Fiore from judicial office with her $85,000 salary on July 24, but the commission now plans to suspend Fiore without pay during a hearing on Friday. CLASS reported.

Federal prosecutors said at trial that Fiore had raised more than $70,000 for the statue of a Las Vegas police officer who was shot and killed while on duty in 2014, but that he had instead spent the money on plastic surgery, rent and her daughter’s wedding.

“Michele Fiore used tragedy to line her pockets,” federal prosecutor Dahoud Askar said.

Fiore, who has been suspended without pay from her current elected position as a justice of the peace in rural Pahrump, Nevada, will be sentenced on January 6 but will remain at large while she awaits sentencing. Fiore’s term ends in January 2025.

Her attorney, Michael Sanft, said Fiore will appeal the conviction, which the jury handed down after less than two hours of deliberation.

The city was outraged when officers Alyn Beck, 41, and his colleague Igor Soldo, 31, were shot by a pair of white supremacists while having lunch at a pizza restaurant in June 2014.

Fiore was a Las Vegas city councilwoman when she spoke at the opening of a memorial park named after Beck in 2018, announcing her intention to raise money for a statue for the slain officer.

She then contracted a company to create the statue, falsely telling it that she had “appropriated discretionary funds through the City of Las Vegas” to pay for it.

Fiore set up a charity in July 2019 to solicit donations, claiming that “100 percent of contributions” would go to charity.

But none of the money was used for the statue and all of it went directly into bank accounts she controlled, prosecutors said.

“Fiore instructed potential donors to write a check to a bank account Fiore controlled at the Bank of Nevada,” they explained. “Fiore directed that the money not be spent on the requested charity, but on her own personal expenses.”

FBI agents subpoenaed records and searched Fiore’s northwest Las Vegas home in 2021 in connection with her campaign spending. Sanft told the jury that the FBI’s investigation was “shoddy.”

Fiore, a Republican who does not have a law degree, was appointed by lawmakers to be a judge in deep-red Nye County in 2022, shortly after losing her campaign for state treasurer.

She was elected in June to complete the unexpired term of a deceased judge.

She was a Las Vegas city councilwoman from 2017 to 2022 and an outspoken supporter of gun rights.

The 54-year-old served in the state Legislature from 2012 to 2016 and made headlines by posing with guns and her family for Christmas cards.

Fiore’s daughters, Sheena and Savanah, were prominently featured in a calendar she posed for in 2015, called “Michele Fiore’s Walk The Talk 2nd Amendment Calendar 2016.”

That year she sent an infamous Christmas card showing her family holding pistols and semi-automatic weapons, including her five-year-old grandson Jake holding a Walther p22.

She defended the image, saying, “If you look very closely, you can see his finger is not on the trigger.

‘That five-year-old grandson of mine has total control of the tractor.

“I think giving firearms as gifts and receiving firearms as gifts is a great gift, and I think that because Christmas is a family affair, it is our ultimate responsibility to protect and keep our family safe.”

Months earlier, she had made headlines after saying she would shoot Syrian refugees herself if asked whether Nevada should offer them asylum.

“What, are you kidding me? “I’m about to fly to Paris and shoot them in the head myself,” she told a local radio station.

‘I have no peace with Syrian refugees. I have no peace with terrorists. I’m fine with putting them down, blackening them up, just sticking a piece of copper in their eye socket and ending their miserable lives. I’m good at that.’

Fiore has also come under fire for pushing “Right to Try” laws to allow patients to choose experimental treatments, claiming that cancer is a fungus and can be cured by baking soda.

“If you have cancer, which I think is a fungus, we can put a PICC line in your body and flush through that line with something like salt water, baking soda, and flush out the fungus,” she said in 2015.

And she pushed for a bill that would allow students to carry guns on college campuses, suggesting it could reduce sexual violence.

“If these young, pretty girls on campus have a gun, I wonder how many men want to attack them,” she told the New York Times.

“The sexual assaults that are happening would decrease once these sexual predators get a bullet in the head.”

Her ties to rancher Clive Bundy and his family landed her in the media spotlight during armed clashes between civilian militia members and federal police in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014 and Malheur, Oregon, in 2016.

Fiore was credited with helping negotiate an end to the standoff and diffusing the situation.

According to the Washington Post, “she began performing a complex balancing act, calming the terrified occupiers, telling them she shared their outrage and also contacting the FBI to prevent a shootout.”

The FBI special agent in charge said afterwards that Fiore’s help had been important and thanked her for her “significant assistance.”