The night air was crisp as Undercurrents loitered in the Pine Lake Plaza parking lot listening to trumpeters play “Greensleeves.” Ensconced in a crowd of sartorially splendid gentlemen and surgically enhanced ladies, we felt the electricity in the air. The beautiful people hugged and kiss-kissed as if this were South…

With the touch of a button on a key-chain remote, Sue Carolyn Wise pops open the door locks of her 1988 Rolls-Royce Silver Spur and slides into the tan, glove-leather driver’s seat. Then she slides out again, walks around the car, and opens the passenger door with the key. The…

This past September the Sun-Sentinel got a license from the Cuban government to open a bureau in Havana. Permission to operate down there is something of a coup for the paper, particularly because its biggest competitor, The Herald, is likely to receive permission for an office on the island only…

It isn’t often one sees a newspaper publish a correction on the front page above the fold, complete with a color photo of the person who was wronged. That’s because editors are like doctors — they like to bury their mistakes. So what kind of colossal screwup would necessitate such…

Had you just fallen off a turnip truck or driven in from Quebec, you would have thought last November’s battle between Hollywood and Dania Beach for a 307-acre chunk of unincorporated land was a no-brainer: Hollywood by a landslide. After all, Broward’s second-largest city has more cultural clout, cops, and…

Al Goldstein’s 10,000-square-foot Pompano Beach home holds many wonderful things: probably the largest collection of pre-Castro Cuban cigars in the country, a media room lit by the glow of four TVs stacked atop one another and tuned to different channels, a collection of nine-foot-tall decorative robots, an Olympic-size swimming pool…..

At age 55 Shelley Rozolsky has experienced more medical crises than most people do in a lifetime. When she was 18 years old, doctors noticed a lump in her breast. They told her it was nothing to worry about unless the lump got bigger. It eventually did. The growth proved…

Article 10 of the Constitution of the State of Florida deals with all the legislative initiatives that don’t fit anywhere else. It’s the “Miscellaneous” section, and it’s where lawmakers put regulations about the militia, lotteries, marine net fishing, and the census. The newest addition to this slush pile arrived November…

Hollywood politics is notoriously ugly, and thus enormously entertaining to watch. As long as you’re not one of the poor saps down there in the arena/cesspool, it’s all just good, dirty, sometimes offensive fun. As proof, Undercurrents points to last spring’s elections, particularly the tussle for incumbent Cathy Anderson’s city…

What happens when you mix a First Amendment­quoting photographer on a deadline, a hotheaded cop, an armed federal agent, and a lot of chest-thumping? You get trouble, right here in the Venice of America. This scenario will be familiar to the dozen or so loyal Undercurrents readers. We’re speaking, of…

Joe Schneider is a Hollywood lawyer. But he’s a cool guy nonetheless, judging by the ’79 Fender Stratocaster plugged into a Marshall amp that he keeps in his office on the 18th floor of the Home Tower on Young Circle. Then there’s his handmade knife collection hanging on the wall…

There probably isn’t a square foot of the Florida Keys that hasn’t been trod upon by someone at one time or another. As far as terra firma is concerned, the Keys are about as undiscovered as I-95. But when you’re talking shells, both living and long dead, the island chain…

There’s Andre Fladell in front of local TV cameras explaining how he mistakenly cast his vote for Pat Buchanan and why he’s taking the matter to court. Note his blue-and-white­checked shirt. Casual yet working-class. There’s Fladell quoted in the pages of prominent daily newspapers such as London’s The Guardian, the…

In a small courtroom on the second floor of the Broward County Southern Regional Courthouse in Hollywood, a giant corporation is fighting claims that it has crippled the economy of a small South American country. But you’d never know it from the sleepy setting. There is no TV camera, no…

Over on the other coast, in the Collier County commission council chambers in Naples, the troops are girding for battle. The soldiers are white men in their forties, fifties, and sixties, with ample bellies and deep tans. They wear baseball caps, boots, short-sleeve shirts, and blue jeans. Their leather belts…

Kathleen Ulsrud was someone you could trust, according to those with whom she worked. That was important because, as a professional, court-appointed guardian for the elderly, trust was her stock-in-trade. When state workers came across seniors they deemed unable to care for themselves, Ulsrud often got the call. “She would…

Twenty people, eight men and twelve women, lie sprawled in a conference room tucked deep inside the tony Boca Raton Resort & Club. Some are in their mid twenties, others on the backside of sixty. Some are coiffed, perfumed, and sporting business casual wear; others look like hockey fans right…

At 2:10 a.m. on July 12, 1995, 24-year-old Lee Crompton’s life changed forever and for the worse. Crompton was riding in the back seat of a rented 1995 Ford Taurus that sailed through a line of flashing markers denoting a road-construction site and crashed into the rear of a parked…

Amid the glad-handing, backslapping, speechifying, and pamphleteering that is the monthly meeting of the Pembroke Pines Democratic Club sits Lionel Stewart, candidate for Broward County sheriff, muttering under his breath. Every candidate who showed up tonight is allotted two minutes of podium time to preach to the choir about why…