Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary has used sheriff's office employees to help boost his income from a second job teaching at a local career school, calling on them to substitute teach for him -- sometimes while the substitute is being paid his sheriff’s salary, according to a Local 6 investigation.

Asked if he was personally benefiting from using his employees, Beary claimed he's "always paid" those substitutes out of his own pocket, but the substitutes tell Local 6 that is not the case.

Beary, who earns about $140,000 a year as sheriff, has made an additional $45,000 over the last three years from the teaching job, thousands of it for days he has had sheriff’s office employees substitute for him.

Whether he shows up or not, Beary said he is paid nearly $200 for each four-hour class he's scheduled to teach at the career school, called Florida Metropolitan University. Neither he nor FMU would reveal exactly how often he fails to show, but Local 6 confirmed more than a dozen absences. And when the professor is absent, he often calls on his own employees to fill in.

Asked whether he was using sheriff's employees to boost his own personal income, Beary replied, "I don't think so because, I'll be very honest with you, one, I'm paying the people to do it … The ones I've used, I've always paid."

But our investigation found that is just not true.

Beary claimed he paid his substitutes $100 -- about half what he grosses per class. But when we asked the employees Beary said he always paid, we heard a different story.

"If we have someone who's telling us they didn't get paid by you, are they not telling us the truth?" we asked Beary.

"I don't even know who'd be talking to you," he replied.

Before that interview, we had already been told by sheriff’s spokesman Cpl. Carlos Torres that Beary never paid him for teaching his class. After the interview, Torres met with Beary and changed his answer, saying he misunderstood the previous question.

Torres now claims Beary has both not paid him and paid him as little as $50 cash for filling in on occasion.

Asked how often Beary's paid him, Torres said, "I don't remember. A couple of times." He said he was not paid at all "several times."

Chief Steve Jones, one of the highest-ranking employees in the sheriff’s office, says he substituted for Beary at least eight times and was never paid.

Asked whether it was proper for Beary to get paid for up to 32 hours Jones spent teaching Beary’s class since January 2004, Jones replied, "Well, he's also offered to pay me, too, and I just said I didn't want it."

Both Jones and Torres say Beary always offered to pay them and neither had any complaints about being asked to help out their boss. Both said they never felt intimidated to do so, despite the inherent power Beary wields over their careers.

Jones is paid about $90,000 in sheriff’s salary for being on duty 24 hours a day and is not eligible for overtime -- thus he technically was being paid his sheriff’s salary while teaching classes for which an absent Beary was being paid in full by FMU.

Torres, who makes about $41,000 a year, is eligible for overtime, but says he never asked for it or any other pay for the time he taught Beary’s classes. Torres could not provide the exact dates he substituted, so his time sheets could not be checked to confirm his recollection. For a sheriff who claims “ethics is everything,” Beary is spending a lot of time defending his ethics lately.

He is already under investigation for taking $43,000 from a homeland security company he used sheriff’s resources and personnel to set up.

Beary had told Local 6 last year he would not take a penny from the homeland security venture, but pocketed the $43,000 after winning reelection last November. He has since vowed to return the money.

"We found his ethics were just at the bottom of the pit," said John Tegg, a former sheriff’s chief who lost to Beary in last fall's Republican primary. "Certainly, honesty and truthfulness is the core material under ethics and I have a question about that."

As for FMU, it refused to allow our cameras access to either of the two four-hour classes Beary currently teaches each week and declined our request to interview a school official. FMU also refused to provide any detailed information documenting Beary’s attendance and use of substitutes.

But FMU did issue a statement claiming Beary has -- over the six years he's taught there -- been one of its most popular instructors and it has no problem with his attendance record.

Contact Tony Pipitone at tpipitone@local6.com or by calling (407) 521-1291.