Fort Lauderdale developer Sean Michaels is implicated in a corruption scandal in sleepy southern Levy County, Florida that has already led to several indictments, including W.S. "Sammy" Yearty, the dean of the county commission.
A federal indictment shows that Michaels, who managed a Broward County company called Gideon Development at the palindromic address of 15751 Sheridan Street, was involved in numerous corrupt deals that have brought down commissioners and other public officials.
The catch is that Michaels probably doesn't exist, as the St. Petersburg Times' Craig Pittman heavily hints at in his very fine article on the scandal. Michaels, along with his partner "Alan Steinberg," are almost surely undercover FBI agents.
As if we didn't have enough real corrupt developers here, the FBI is creating fake ones. You can't blame the feds, though. An underhanded developer from Fort Lauderdale? Talk about instant believability. No wonder so many officials took the bait.
There might have been clues. On the state corporation website, the address for Gideon says it's in Fort Lauderdale, but Sheridan Street, of course, isn't in Fort Lauderdale. The actual builidng is way out in the hinterlands, west of I-75. Looks like it was just a mail drop.
-- I mentioned yesterday that today's Pulp fodder is tomorrow's headlines in the daily newspapers. Well, it happened again this morning, as the Miami Herald picked up my stories on Michael Bienes, the Fort Lauderdale "philanthopist" who has longstanding (and at one time illegal) ties to epic swindler Bernie Madoff. Easy work; basically they just strung together my two posts on the guy. But at least they picked up the story. The Sun-Sentinel is still AWOL.
That's all. Gonna watch football. I've been on a tear lately in the NFL won three bets on four Wild Card games last weekend and didn't bet on the other (couldn't bear to wager against Miami, who I figured would lose). Don't want to jinx it, because every time I put picks on this damn blog, my bets go south. But what the hell. Here they are:
Baltimore (+3) Philadelphia (+4) San Diego (+6) Carolina (-9.5). .
