Five years ago Walter “Dan” Cadman left South Florida in disgrace. The former director of Florida operations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been caught deceiving a Congressional task force and then trying to cover up his actions. The Justice Department, after an investigation into what became known as…

If the Immigration and Naturalization Service had its way, we’d all just shut up about Mohamed Atta’s January 10 entry into the United States through Miami International Airport. In response to last week’s New Times story about Atta’s questionable return to the country, the INS issued a statement on October…

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had terror ringleader Mohamed Atta in its grasp before the September 11 attacks. Then the agency, which stands on the domestic frontline in the war on terrorism, let him go. The 34-year-old Egyptian arrived at Miami International Airport earlier this year on a flight…

They say we were taken completely off guard. Since suicide hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, government officials have repeated in media reports that the country had been caught completely by surprise. U.S. intelligence officials have declared that they knew terror was planned but expected assaults…

Inside the palatial Palm Beach County Courthouse on March 29, 2000, Melvin Donald Ruth pleaded for his freedom, trying to convince the judge he wouldn’t run if he were let go. Ruth, who had been jailed on a probation violation stemming from a 1996 fraud conviction, had reason to feel…

When Joe Cox was born 17 years ago, his umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck and nearly strangled him. He survived, but his brain was permanently damaged. Today he has an IQ of 68, suffers from impulsive behavior, and is unable to care for himself. His father, the Rev…

When the subject of Vanella Plaza came up at a July 9 code-enforcement-board hearing in Plantation, chairman Tom Scalfani, sitting on the dais, asked the $1.4 million question: “Tell us what the deal is here. What’s the story?” City building manager Tom Hanrahan, who stood before the board, could only…

Richard Scheff has long been known in courthouse circles as an excellent trial witness — smooth, confident, authoritative, and credible. As a result of his eloquence, a stack of laudatory letters from prosecutors in the Broward Sheriff’s Office fills the captain’s personnel file. Scheff, a homicide detective during the ’80s…

Siobhan Browne adored her life as a stockbroker in Boca Raton. At 34 years old, she drove a new silver Mercedes, had a personal trainer, rented a 2000-square-foot apartment close to the beach, vacationed in Cancún and Aspen, and regularly visited her beloved beauty parlor. Such high living was a…

When Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne apologized to Jerry Frank Townsend on June 7 in the county jail, it was a media event. Jenne had what he called a “warm conversation” with Townsend, who is mildly retarded and spent 22 years in prison after sheriff’s investigators cajoled him into confessing…

Sitting behind steel and glass in a cramped room on Florida’s Death Row, Michael Rivera is unable to answer this question to save his life: What can he do to prove he’s innocent of killing a little girl? “If I could do that I would have done it already,” says…

Jesse Gaddis has been a gambler since his grade school days in Indiana, when he shot craps and played poker in a pool hall. For much of his early adult life, he was a professional cardsharp on merchant marine ships and anywhere else he could get a game. In 1960,…

Broward County Judge Joel T. Lazarus pulls out a big black binder full of newspaper clippings and lays it on the large desk in his courthouse office. The killers, rapists, and child molesters who fill the plastic pages have one thing in common: Lazarus prosecuted all of them before winning…

With two buds of marijuana cupped in his right hand and a black, one-hit pipe in his pocket, 18-year-old Christopher Caulfield strolls up the broad sidewalk along Fort Lauderdale beach. Wearing black pants and a white tank top over his fair skin, the tall, thin kid is looking for some…

Editor’s Note: This is the second and final installment of a series on a group of Coral Springs teenagers who make up Extreme Fuckin’ Wrestling. The first part focused on 16-year-old John Ulloa, who started the enterprise and whose back yard was the setting for the February 24 show featured…

The sickly sweet smell of blood fills the dimly lit bathroom where John Ulloa sits dazed on a closed toilet. The silky red fluid gushes from a gash in his forehead, creating a stream that flows over his cheekbone, past his mouth, and drips like a leaky faucet from his…

Harry Murphy’s living room is more a mausoleum than a place to live. Nothing with a heartbeat sets foot there except for Murphy, and then only to water his plants. The room isn’t for human beings; it’s for toys. Dozens of dolls, stuffed animals, and action figures are stacked on…

Almost immediately after Greek tycoon Gus Boulis was gunned down in his BMW on February 6, Fort Lauderdale police investigators began scrutinizing SunCruz Casinos. But a look at the short list of owners of the cruise-to-nowhere company that Boulis founded turns up nothing resembling violent thugs or organized crime figures…

In a smoke-filled back dining room in Grady’s restaurant in Plantation, Emery “Fuzzy” Fazzini hunkers over a cheese-slathered, Mexican-style dish and plots his next move. A burly, gray-haired man who looks like a less-cuddly version of Burl Ives, Fazzini says his used-car dealership on State Road 7 in Plantation is…

While the world roosts outside the state capitol in Tallahassee, Democrats huddle on the third floor just trying to cope. Roughly 30 representatives, most hailing from South Florida, sit around a long table in what they call the caucus room, the largest space in the House minority’s suite of offices…

Detectives watched Frank Galgano for years, but they didn’t nail him until August 25. That was when Galgano, co-owner of the Bobby Rubino’s rib-restaurant chain, was booked into jail. The state Department of Revenue charged him with stealing nearly $250,000 in sales tax. If convicted, the long-time Fort Lauderdale businessman…

It started as morbid curiosity, like rubbernecking a car crash. The Broward County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), where the manual recount for the presidential election was going on, is just two miles away from my house, and I kept seeing the place all over the national news. So, on November…