Last November it looked as if jazz musician Turk Mauro’s life couldn’t get worse. His dad was dying, his career was sinking, he had gambled away what money he had, his marriage was in jeopardy, his health was failing. What else could go wrong? Plenty. Fate seems to have taken…
One day soon little Elián will be ripped from our collective bosom and sent back to the clutches of El Jefe — it is in the wind. Our lives will drag on without the Divine Child, denied the playful spirit he embodies and the smoldering lust for freedom he represents…
Phil Snaith is dying. But at the moment he has more pressing problems. With the help of his girlfriend, Pennie Wildermuth, he manages to dress himself in a conservative gray suit, crisp white shirt, and light blue tie. He navigates his faded Mercury Grand Marquis through an afternoon downpour, making…
Between forkfuls of homemade cheesecake and sips of coffee served on the Sunday china, the seven men gathered around the dining room table of Bill Bettelli’s Davie home tell their divorce horror stories. Nothing unusual about that — thousands of men in Broward County could rattle off something similar. What’s…
It was more than 40 years ago now, but Gelding has no trouble recalling the day his life took a very odd turn. He was 12 years old, riding the school bus. It was crowded and there was no place to sit, so he stood. The bus hit a bump…
Hold your thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart: That’s how close Plantation inventor-entrepreneur Jeff Kaplan has come to making it big. Time and time again. Let’s see. There was the time 20 years ago when Kaplan, now 40 years old, got into the video-rental business. This was before billionaire…
Juan Jose Reyes sits quietly in a conference room on the first floor of A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes cast down. His gaunt face, partially hidden by a baseball cap, is expressionless. When he does speak, his voice is…
As a self-appointed court-watcher in Broward County, Eleanor Mendlein has spent the last seven years observing an endless procession of divorces and custody battles. She’s scribbled hundreds of pages of notes and gathered thousands of pages of transcripts, which she keeps in boxes at her daughter’s house in Plantation. This…
Robert “Brother Rob” Christensen began trading in foreign currency in February 1998, and it didn’t take long before he was making a killing. Or so it seemed. By his own reckoning the $135,000 he had invested with a South Florida trading firm had ballooned in value to more than a…
Two words of advice for anyone planning to purchase a boat in the Venice of America: Caveat emptor. You could run into the likes of yacht broker Antonio Aguiar. By all accounts Aguiar is the kind of salesman who could talk an Eskimo into buying an air conditioner. He’s a…
Wednesday, December 29, 1:10 p.m. I spot the first obvious Phish fan in an aging Volvo with Quebec plates and a dancing bear sticker on the bumper just past the I-595/I-75 split. The car, smeared with road salt, is occupied by four young gentlemen in sweatshirts sporting serious car hair,…
There’s a scene in the movie Beetlejuice that depicts purgatory as a place where the recently deceased listen to elevator music and wait interminably to learn their fates while bureaucrats already consigned to hell shuffle five-foot stacks of paper from one place to another. Every so often a guy hanging…
On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, while the rest of Broward County was frolicking in the surf or paying homage to mammon at one of our many temples of consumerism, six men gather in a sterile back room at the Imperial Point branch library on Federal Highway. Some are wearing…
So often do the words politically powerful precede references to Miami’s Latin Builders Association that they’ve become something of a standard prefix in news reports. There are good reasons for this. The 900-member-plus association of builders, lenders, contractors, and developers is legendary in its ability to funnel money to candidates…
There’s a pile of 34 shoes just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell’s comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the 17 people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell’s living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall…
If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Gloria Thomas’ two-year wrangle with Fort Lauderdale’s code-enforcement department, it’s that having your heart in the right place isn’t enough. Even if you want to help others, you’ll still have to navigate the morass of city bureaucracy. Thomas had good intentions when…
At first glance a trawler doesn’t look like anything to get excited about. It’s not one of those monolithic, 80-foot-plus motor yachts that ooze and burble down the New River all sleek lines, glistening white hulls, and black-tinted windows. Nor is it a sublime, multimasted sailboat, the kind that appears…
You may believe South Floridians were spared the wrath of Hurricane Floyd. If you watch a lot of TV news and therefore tend to think in clichés and mixed metaphors, you may be “thanking your lucky stars that we dodged this bullet.” Perhaps you joined the entire South Florida “community”…
It’s been 16 years since Paul and Betty Sears moved into their trailer behind South Plantation High School. And they’ve been good years. Paul’s commute is among the shortest in all of South Florida — he’s the head facilities person at the high school — and the living arrangement has…
A conversation with Carole Demesmin is like a fugue. Themes run in, out, over and under, and just when your ears start to tire and your eyes start to wander, Demesmin gets to a point that, as often as not, is poignant and insightful. It’s quickly apparent that careful listening…
Teressa Cawley is a smart, energetic young woman, an astute manager, and a whiz in the field of municipal bonds. She’s good enough to have been hired as a financial adviser for Broward County. Simply put, she’s a player. She’s also a liar, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission…
Fort Lauderdale resident Stephen Zebrowski, Sr. died in excruciating pain in a Jamaican jail cell. He was 47 years old. How he became imprisoned and what his family is doing about his untimely death create one of those strange and mysterious tales that seem to flourish in the South Floridasun…
