With a confident grin, Mark Gold strides into a Broward County courtroom and waltzes up to a podium. Dressed in a dark suit and silver striped tie, the five-foot-five attorney tells Chief Magistrate Brenda Di Ioia that his client, a man caught speeding in his mother’s 1995 Saturn, will not…
With his trusty German shepherd in tow, Rodney Irwin drives past a state mental hospital at the edge of the Everglades and pulls into the brush. A machete rests on the floorboard beneath his feet, and a gallon of his favorite drink — Walmart-brand black-cherry soda mixed with orange Gatorade…
Inside a small guest cabin on the Carnival Victory, 6-year-old Qwentyn Hunter and his 10-year-old brother, Jermaine, begged their parents to order peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from room service. It was the last day of the family’s four-day trip from Miami to Mexico in October 2013, and the ship…
As crowds stumble along South Beach’s most iconic strip of art deco hotels and restaurants on a hot Saturday in July, the chipper sidewalk hostesses do a quick mental calculation, looking for a phrase that might lure passersby. “Table for two?” they hawk. “Happy hour!” “Two-for-one drinks!” It’s 5:45 p.m…
Two men burst into a suburban Delray Beach office park on a muggy weekday in August 2014, demanding to talk to the CEO. They were there to get answers. In a beige office lobby decorated with abstract IKEA-style art, their target crossed his arms and smiled nervously. Dressed in an…
On a Sunday afternoon one week before Easter 1999, Mark Williams pulled his SUV into the parking lot outside his estranged wife’s West Palm Beach apartment with his 11-year-old son Lamatra riding shotgun. For most of his life, Lamatra had shuffled between his mother and his grandmother, but this week…
Todd Glaser steps onto the Sea Tabby, a wood-trimmed 1938 Mathis Trumpy yacht docked off Allison Island, a spit of land in Biscayne Bay just north of the Fontainebleau hotel. As he sits at a table toward the back, he calls out for a Johnnie Walker. An older, fully uniformed…
