Jan.09, 2010, 10:49 AM EST

The usual fancy words, smooth talk, and tears -- and even the addition of a PowerPoint presentation -- couldn't save Phil Davis this time around.

Perhaps if he'd escalated to interpretive dance?

The ex-Miami Circuit Court who cried and back-snorted his way out of federal bribery charges in the famous 1991 federal sting "Operation Court Broom" has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for using his second chance to steal $82,825.30 from public grant funds.

The case stems from a sham corporation called Workforce Management that Davis set up to pay workers at his non-profit Miami-Dade Resident College, a program he set up in 1997 after being disbarred before his first trial. The College purported to provide impoverished inner-city residents life skills and job training, but sure didn't teach Davis any: together with former assistant Joan Headley, he siphoned payroll funds right into his own pocket through inflated salaries and bogus invoices.

"A bald-faced lie and a fraud," said Judge Beatrice Butchko at the sentencing two floors above the courtroom over which Davis used to preside. "You were Workforce!"

Judge Butchko was having none of the 56-year-old Davis' theatrics during the sentencing on nine felony fraud and money-laundering charges. When he stood to explain his theft, and started out with, "When the grass-roots program began, we had no procedures in place; we were asking the people, the poor and underprivileged, to run the people," Butchko shook her head at the mumbo-jumbo.

"What on earth are you getting at?" she asked.

Later, as his family begged for a lenient sentence, Davis turned on the waterworks. But while Judge Butchko wished his family well, the tears may have reminded her all to much of Davis' last courtroom jaunt.

That's when, in a sweeping sting that saw one judge arrested for giving up the name of a criminal information he thought would be killed in exchange for cash, Davis was caught agreeing to take a $20,000 bribe from a lawyer. At his trial in 1993, he blamed this on having snorted coke in his chambers, burst into tears, and did his best Marlon Brando: "I could have been somebody!"

It surprisingly worked. Despite a mountain of evidence and the convictions of everyone else involved, Davis was shockingly acquitted. Butchko expressed her dismay at how Davis squandered his second chance, saying all his good work at the College was "tarnished by greed."

"Every single cent earmarked for the community has to go to the poor...That money was not your money."