The $10 million that Broward County and Hollywood politicians aim to spend in the area’s most visible park to create an arts extravaganza will be wasted. Tossed in the toilet. Spent and forgotten. Though many suggest it will reenergize the shuttered downtown, it won’t. First, let’s dispense with the blather…
Remember the classic 1998 Texas documentary, Hands on a Hardbody, which described how 25 people tried to hold on to a new truck for the longest time to win it from a publicity-hungry dealership? This was the SoFla version. Here in the capital of senescence, it was the person who…
Cruising one of the dozens of canals that snake past multimillion-dollar homes in America’s Venice last week, Steve Pollock sipped a rum runner and scanned the deck of the small green-and-yellow boat in which he rode. A tan young mother from Chicago was drinking a beer and chiding her kids…
MEMORANDUM March 7, 2002 To: Michael Satz, Kathy Rundle, South Florida prosecutors, police officers From: CES Re: Misplaced priorities It has come to my attention recently that you law-enforcement types have lost respect for a little something called the truth. No, this isn’t 9/11-related. Cops have been hassling reporters and…
Attention, fellow animal lovers: With our unelected president pushing for more tax cuts, even in the face of $1.3 trillion in deficits projected between 2002 and 2012 (call it Reaganomics 2: Electric Boogaloo), we should all take a moment to thank the powers that be for maintaining the federal government’s…
Broward County School Board Chairperson Bob Parks, head man at the nation’s fifth-largest district, last week offered a novel solution to the old problem of classroom slovenliness: hire a private firm to train janitors. It’s not union busting, says Parks. Just a way to make the schools work better. Right…
‘Twas the day after Christmas in 1998 when John boarded the Robin’s Song at Fort Lauderdale’s storied Bahia Mar marina. The 51-year-old mate had plenty of experience in bagging big game fish, but he surely never expected what followed. After the boat left port, somebody hooked a wahoo. It was…
It seemed an ugly end to an even uglier dispute. “Controversial art to be moved,” read the headline on page 3B of the January 10 Sun-Sentinel. “Museum agrees to make location less prominent.” Leaders of the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, the paper reported, had decided to take down…
Fort Lauderdale’s Pulse Nightclub had it all. A woman wearing a spiked leash welcomed you at the door. Electronica and hip-hop sounded on two strobed dance floors while svelte, bikinied babes in space-age wigs danced on pedestals out by the pool, and black-suited pseudo-Mafiosi schmoozed everywhere. Owner Keith Miller spent…
Jeff Wright brings out the best in people. The 51-year-old Lake Worth resident calls himself “the most wanted handyman in Palm Beach County.” Cops and building inspectors term him a pain in the ass. Back in 1996, the Sun-Sentinel took seriously his claim that he was a Montana Freeman. And…
The December 10 news release from the Broward Sheriff’s Office and ensuing press coverage hinted at either a terrorist or a dangerous lunatic in our midst: 53-year-old Richardo Gonzalez, the agency reported, had been carrying a canvas bag stuffed with “destructive devices.” One blew up in Gonzalez’s hand. The county…
No sane reader could ignore the headline in the nether pages of November 20’s Sun-Sentinel: “Man dies after being hit by duck.” Thirty-one-year-old Leon Resnick, the paper reported, was testing a jet ski “at speeds up to about 55 miles per hour, [when he] was knocked from the vessel by…
Drive through South Florida any morning and you’ll see long lines. You’ll find ’em at courthouses, city halls, county halls, most any public building. Sometimes, it seems that Osama-inspired paranoia has turned our subtropical home into a box office when tickets for Britney or Madonna go on sale. For consumers,…
Terror is nothing new to Walid Phares. The 43-year-old Florida Atlantic University associate professor grew up in Beirut and survived the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990. A Maronite Christian, he recalls witnessing the detonation of the first car bomb in his hometown in 1977. Indeed he’s lucky to…
On the fifth floor of a squat, cream-color building just north of downtown Miami, an 8-by-11-inch color printout that reads “Fanatic” is taped to a maroon door. Inside the office Jorge Caligaris, editor of Soccer Fanatic, predicts a rosy future for his Spanish-language publication, which is printed in Miramar and…
In reply to a faxed list of questions seeking response to Ramirez¹s allegations, the INS media relations office in Miami issued the following statement: The law enforcement actions conducted by the Florida District of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) regarding Elián González were appropriate, have been appropriate, and will…
Ricardo Ramirez doesn’t seem like he would scare easily. A burly Mexican American with a barrel chest, forearms thick with ropelike muscle, and a full beard flecked with gray, he carries a .45-caliber semiautomatic Beretta pistol and speaks in quiet, measured tones. The 41-year-old Southwest Broward resident is a special…
Ben Waldman has a question for police: When are we going to talk? Waldman is president of SunCruz Casinos, the cruise-to-nowhere company founded by the now-deceased Gus Boulis. Before Boulis was gunned down in his car just off Federal Highway last month, SunCruz executives were embroiled in a bitter gambling-business…
The Sun-Sentinel’s new entry into the glossy-magazine market, City & Shore, has arrived, and it reads suspiciously like Sunshine, the daily newspaper’s defunct Sunday magazine. In February about 35,000 copies of the 140-page, bimonthly publication showed up on newsstands and in mailboxes, says editor Mark Gauert (formerly of Sunshine). The…
If you were disgusted by President Clinton’s farewell pardon for financier Marc Rich, you’ll be appalled by former Florida agriculture commissioner Bob Crawford’s good-bye kiss to his buddy and campaign supporter Ed Gregory. In December Crawford, who has overseen the pillage of South Florida’s orange and grapefruit trees, outraged homeowners…
It was the biggest local news events of 2001, and the hometown paper missed it. Worse, the Sun-Sentinel was scooped by archrival The Miami Heraldon the February 6 murder of Miami Subs founder and cruise-to-nowhere gambling magnate Gus Boulis. Boulis, you’ve surely read, jumped ship as a young Greek immigrant,…
