Late at night September 20, when Davie Police officers arrived at the Apollo House, a residential group home for troubled kids, they found staff rushing around a fallen teen. The bleeding wouldn’t stop. A knife had poked through the boy’s side and punctured his lung. EMS rushed him to Memorial…
Like a game of a whack-a-mole, the Broward-spawned Felony Lane Gang just doesn’t go away. Made up of sneaky crews that work parking lots and bank drive-thus across America, the loose federation of criminals is more joined by area code and game plan than an actual organized hierarchy. As we…
Sex and death aren’t exactly concepts that sit comfortably in your thoughts. But according to a lawsuit filed this month by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there was a lot of sexual hanky panky going on at Fort Lauderdale’s McWhite Funeral Home. Unfortunately — and grossly — it was…
A shake-up in the support of a controversial and big dollar project in the Everglades has environmentalists cheering that the plan’s days are possibly numbered. But although the latest news on the River of Grass Greenway, a path that would link Naples to Miami, does seem to considerably alter the prospects,…
The Middle East — and specifically Iran — has probably been lodged in your news feed nonstop for the past couple of weeks. With Congress brawling over President Obama’s nuclear deal and the possibility of normalized relations with the Islamic Republic, old debates are being argued anew, geopolitical slights revived…
It’s been six years now since the Great Recession called it quits, although the economic aftershocks and damage continued all around the country. With that grim bit of socio-economic truth in mind, the good folks over at WalletHub decided to conduct a ranking of the cities that have best jumped…
For more than 30 years now, eager-beaver federal prosecutors caught up in drug war hysteria have been reaching for whatever laws they have on the books to punish drug offenders. Often that’s meant handing out harsh sentences to low-level offenders, resulting in law and order that’s way more stick than…
Blackstone Labs is a heavy hitter in the weight-room-supplement game. The company is fronted by two social-media-savvy beefcakes who often take to YouTube to hawk and explain their company’s wares. But Arizona-based Nutrition Distribution, a supplement company that competes with Blackstone, claimed in an April lawsu it (filed in California)…
Two hours before her redeye Greyhound was scheduled to snort out of the lot, Valerie Bozeman walked into the bus station in Oakland, California. She was traveling light: $93 in her pocket, a tote bag full of underwear and toothpaste courtesy of the Bureau of Prisons, and the blessings of…
One of the great wrongs in comic history has been made right, meaning one Broward woman will finally get to see her grandfather get the credit he deserves. Bill Finger was the shy genius who was the creative engine behind Batman. Along with illustrator Bob Kane, Finger cobbled together the…
This spring, we reported on a troubling trend breaking out in some protected waterways in Florida: manatee abuse. Now, everybody loves the not-so-little sea critters. That’s the problem. In waterways around the state, various “swim with manatee” tours are potentially interfering with the manatee’s habitat — a possibility highlighted most…
Back in June, organized labor notched an unlikely victory in perhaps the last place you’d expect: the strip club. A class action lawsuit organized by from savvy ex-dancers took on Scarlett’s, the popular gentleman’s club Hallandale. The club’s owners also had two other locations — Ybor City, Florida; and Toledo, Ohio —…
A federal judge finally put the brakes on a lawsuit that has been rumbling through the court system since 2010, a high-profile match-up between the Public Defender’s office and a former pro-wrestler-turned-psychologist who previously had been one of the office’s go-to courtroom experts. The ruling, issued by Federal Judge Donald…
The second felony kidnapping charge involving the case of an unhinged Broward mother who defied a court order and stole two-year-old Lilly Baumann away from her father has been dropped. Last week, New Times reported that the Broward State Attorney’s office had decided not to go forward with the kidnapping…
Boca Raton’s Blue Martini is the go-to spot for Palm Beach County’s raging middle-agers — sun-cured old dudes looking for their next ex-wife and Botox-boosted ladies riding Appletini binges to bad decisions. So you can imagine that the customers at the Town Center bar expect a certain level of class…
Last summer, New Times spent some time hanging with Rick Wilkerson Jr., the South Florida pastor then sitting in the eye of swirling media attention thanks to his role in the wedding of the century. The fresh-faced Miami-based man of God presided over the May 2014 union of Kanye West…
Lee Bacall noses his sleek two-seater Jag off Riverland Road in Fort Lauderdale. “The word ‘serene’ seems to bubble up from the ground,” the 71-year-old says with a conspiratorial nod, as if you’ll soon see what he means. He follows a ribbon of concrete, wide enough only for one car,…
Robert Baumann was slugging through the workday on a recent Monday, installing an air-conditioning unit in the slamming August heat, when his cell phone shook around 1 p.m. with an incoming call. He didn’t recognize the number. “I used to never answer random numbers,” the 27-year-old told New Times last…
Last week New Times opened a door on a little-seen part of the tax-payer-funded bureaucracy: the private group homes where Broward’s troubled and abandoned kids are housed once they end up in state care. The investigation dove into complaints that the contractors paid by the state to watchdog these kids were…
As we showed you in a recent New Times cover story, Florida’s group homes are in serious need of an overall. Due to the privatization of the state’s channels for placing and caring for trouble kids, there’s a serious lack of oversight among the ground floor service providers who are…
This week’s feature story in New Times takes a hard look at a usually hidden corner of the state’s bureaucracy — the group homes and foster care services that provide shelter for some of Florida’s most troubled kids. Allegations of lax supervision have dogged the system, leading to reports of drug…
There were raised voices and broken glass and the high-voltage emotions that pinball between a wild teen and her worried mom. In their Davie home, Bonnie had installed new locks on the windows to keep her 16-year-old daughter, Cathy, from sneaking out again. The fight ended with Cathy waving around…
