Aaron Sanchez, sitting in his office on the second floor of the Miami FBI office, ordered Supervisory Special Agent Jerry Sullivan to show him the money. All $129,324 of it, along with the records detailing where it had been. Nine months had passed since the cash was seized from a…
Picture this: Greek millionaire Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis sneaking into the home of his estranged girlfriend and mother of two of his children. When he’s spotted he dashes away, though not before leaving behind an envelope full of cash for the family from which he’d been court-ordered to stay away. This…
The two black men say they found the jokes repulsive and regarded the man who was telling them as a ridiculous racist, but they laughed anyway. Laughed when they heard their white boss tell jokes that portrayed black men as deadbeat, diseased whoremongers and rapists. Charles Hite and Gregory Andrews…
The Frisbee soared over Eric Rebenkoff’s head in the crowded park, landing some 30 yards behind him, in the shallow outfield of a nearby softball diamond. Frank McDonough Park in Lighthouse Point was teeming with children and adults on that Tuesday evening in May 1995. The plastic platter happened to…
With a month left before Election Day, Kristin Jacobs rode the elevator to the top floor of the white stone and stucco building at 888 SE Third Ave. Once at the top, in Suite 501, a secretary led the Broward County Commission candidate into the office of Austin Forman, Fort…
Scott Cowan’s dilemma was one most politicians could only wish to have. After winning his fifth consecutive term on the Broward County Commission when no one ran against him, Cowan was faced with deciding how to spend in excess of $130,000 that was sitting in his campaign fund. Florida’s campaign…
Ken Jenne, the recently elected sheriff of Broward County, has never been a lawman. He’s never gone through a law-enforcement academy, never arrested anyone, never so much as issued a traffic citation. Instead, during his quarter century in public life, he’s been a lawyer, a dubious businessman, and a prodigious…
Neil Townsend waited in Nassau, Bahamas, for the call from a woman he knew only as “Viola.” Townsend, a young Jamaican man, didn’t know her, but he’d paid her $2500 and was counting on the mystery woman to make it possible for him to start a new life in the…
Elizabeth Huizenga Buntrock sits in the cramped office behind her Las Olas Boulevard flower shop smoking Carlton cigarettes and answering questions that lead to money, of which she confesses to having a lot. The middle name is no coincidence. Decades ago, her cousin, H. Wayne Huizenga, lived in her Chicago…
The image of a rather uncomfortable-looking Janet Folger was beamed by satellite from South Florida onto TV screens across the country. Her controversial ad campaign, aimed at “healing” gays and lesbians, had landed her on on ABC’s Nightline. But Folger, the director of an outreach program of the Fort Lauderdale-based…
After an hour of casting various ballots and failing to figure out a foolproof formula to fill the most powerful nonelected position in the city of Fort Lauderdale, the commission decided to give up on math and hash it out with words. They would go around the table, and each…
It’s a clear, sunny summer morning in a cul-de-sac in a middle-class section of Pompano Beach. Kids are quiet. Everybody is quiet, except the hired workers who trim trees and cut grass. Shiny cars sit in driveways. Suburban perfection — nothing out of place… except that black, heavily tinted pickup…
Fred Shotz keeps a tape measure in the bag dangling from the back of his wheelchair for precisely this kind of situation. The long-haired 49-year-old reaches down and, with the tape sliding out, measures the distance from the floor to the bottom of a water fountain in the concourse at…
The City of Coconut Creek has battled the Seminole Tribe of Florida for months now, trying to gain some semblance of control over the tribe’s planned gambling house before it’s built in the fair and tidy little suburb. But if the politicians of Coconut Creek really fear poorly regulated gambling,…
Depictions of the next monument to beach redevelopment are filed away in the city’s planning and zoning department, but the towering resort, which resembles a giant staircase, doesn’t actually exist yet. The city commission recently took it a step closer to reality when they approved it, by a four to…
Separated from his wife and daughter and holed up in a Deerfield Beach hotel room with two women he dispassionately refers to as “crack whores,” Michael Kleiman says he was living his “second childhood.” But the 41-year-old used car salesman had more than the usual trappings (hideaway, women, illicit drugs)…
On prime-time national TV, John Nicholas, Jr. steps proudly out of his Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office patrol car and helps Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen decipher the “Sweetheart Swindle.” The scam is nothing new, just slick and slippery Gypsy women making old men fall in love with them before taking…
It took just three minutes for two city employees to make a dumb decision that will likely cost Fort Lauderdale’s taxpayers more than $1 million. On February 8, 1995, at precisely 11:25 a.m., city staff assistant Lori Milano sent assistant city attorney David Feldheim an e-mail asking for the go-ahead…
Norman Ganz didn’t wait for an introduction before launching into an exasperated monologue on the phone. All he knew was that a news reporter was on the other end of the line. “I am not a bad person! I work for a living and I help people. I don’t steal…
When the phone hadn’t sounded by 9 a.m., Gail Krasnow expected the worst. It was a practiced ritual, this daily phone call, born of a life-and-death struggle between mother and son that had continued for fourteen years. She could have given up on Michael years before. She could have tried…
