Gerlyn Cadet is a driver in the ground war, and he has the feeling his side is going to win. It is Election Day, and the word in Broward County is that people are coming out in record numbers to vote for Vice President Al Gore. Not all the news…
Jim Naugle began his political life in elementary school, when he campaigned for Barry Goldwater for President. Today the Fort Lauderdale mayor is aligned with the Christian right. He’s ultraconservative on the death penalty, abortion, affirmative action, and gun control. Although the city’s gay population is both large and politically…
He’s a Plantation councilman, a right-wing Christian activist, an abortion protester, and a man who rails against the movie industry, which he believes is destroying the nation’s moral fiber. But now Jerry Fadgen is preparing for his Tinsel Town debut. The councilman warned September 27 of dire consequences following the…
As the afternoon sun wanes, F. Lee Bailey squints his light blue eyes and peers from his back yard onto the dazzling Intracoastal Waterway. Seeing him there in his trademark cowboy boots, you understand why he is often described as a legal lion. A short, potbellied man with a large,…
Texas-based author Jim Schutze knew what he was looking for: a murder story involving affluent white people, the younger the better. The more sex in it, the merrier his contract would be. Shutze’s literary agent had said if he found a story with these elements, Hollywood would likely come knocking…
There’s David Lottes, the golf king, surrounded by Hollywood officials and politicians, with a shovel in his hand for an official groundbreaking. He smiles wide for the photographers. There’s Lottes, who has contributed thousands to city commission and mayoral campaigns, in Mexico, vacationing with his good friend Alan Koslow, the…
Lori Parrish is a woman who likes to use the phone. So much so, in fact, that her cellular phone bills alone might bankrupt a person of lesser means than the long-time Broward County commissioner and Swap Shop executive. On her pair of omnipresent cellular phones alone, she routinely racks…
Felicia Armstrong knew her son Wesley was a troubled kid. He’d been that way for most of his ten years. At age three Wesley was kicked out of a day care center for biting other children. Two years later he went on Ritalin after a therapist diagnosed him with attention…
There’s a feud brewing at the School Board of Broward County and, naturally, it has almost nothing to do with the education of children. Rather it concerns the usual stuff: lobbyists, real estate, millions of taxpayer dollars, developers, and political infighting. The twist is that it involves a surprising fit…
The architectural firm of Pierce Goodwin Alexander & Linville (PGAL) has never seemed to have a difficult time getting public contracts. In Houston, where the company is based, and in Florida, PGAL has profited from designing everything from airports to colleges to courthouses.But PGAL never could crack one of the…
On H Street, Tiffany often sits on an old blue rusted Camaro and watches life pass by. Most days are the same here in Osborne, a predominantly black section of Lake Worth wedged between the railroad tracks and Dixie Highway. The streets are cracked and potholed, and the dull beat…
It was just before 7 a.m. when Inmate #BS98-5144 started pushing the speaker button used to alert jail deputies. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeep! The obnoxious sound woke up the other inmates in Broward County’s North Bureau jail. While they tossed about angrily, Deputy Albert Tacher would smile, rise from his post…
HIP Health Plan of Florida is a nonprofit health-maintenance organization that relies largely on tax dollars and has hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts in Broward County alone. It might be assumed that employees of such a company would be staid and frugal, but that’s not the picture…
Donato Dalrymple calls Elián Gonzalez his “spiritual son,” and he plans to play an ongoing role in the boy’s life even if Elián is returned to Cuba. Dalrymple says he’s entitled to it: He was, after all, chosen by God to be Elián’s savior, to find the boy drifting at…
The morning before her first wedding anniversary, Donna Weaver drove to Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport. Her husband was finally coming home. Just the day before, Gary Weaver called from Nassau and said, “Donna Mae, I’m coming home tomorrow.” Excited by the news, she told him that one of their twin…
Wilbert “Nica” Cuadra sat in his Chevy Caprice with four of his boys. It was a typical Friday night; Nica was drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 and infused with a familiar rage. Across University Boulevard he could see the enemy — members of a West Broward gang called La Familia…
He sits on Hollywood Beach all day, and on the really slow days, there’s no one there to guard. So he just watches the green seawater roll up and smack the beach, over and over again. Ankle-slappers, he calls the waves, and they slap on while he sits in the…
Back in the ’50s, the peach-color building at the corner of Broward Boulevard and East Acre Drive could claim the distinction of being Plantation’s first strip mall. These days the strip looks like any number of other aging retail outlets that have overrun South Florida: a crumbling façade, piles of…
Something wasn’t right in the Winn-Dixie store in Dania Beach that day. Anger was building among store employees under the supermarket’s white fluorescent lights. The animosity would soon turn to violence, with a customer’s blood spilling on the hard, shiny tile near the checkout counter. The unlikely cause of the…
Rory McMahon grew up in the classic law-and-order family. His father hit for the cycle in crime-fighting in New York, serving in his long career as a prosecutor, a police commissioner, a sheriff, and finally a judge. A picture of longtime FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover hung in the den…
Hyman Kantofsky knew he was going to die. At 84 years old, the Deerfield Beach retiree was already in the advanced stages of pancreatic cancer and getting sicker every day. Kantofsky knew about the tolls of a prolonged death — he’d cared for his own dying mother and father –…
It’s one award bestowed on the city that you’ll never hear Mayor Jim Naugle boasting about in his upcoming campaign speeches: Best Tourist Destination of the Year. Naugle would be proud if the honor had been presented by, say, a national coalition of churches or a chamber of commerce. But…
