The uproar over Rush Limbaugh’s bungled bid to buy the St. Louis Rams wouldn’t be complete without a mention of his membership in Palm Beach’s oldest and most exclusive country club, the Everglades Club.Palm Beach’s infamous bloviater was kicked out of a group trying to buy the Rams after several…
More than 20 times in the past year, pranksters have shone a green laser beam into the cockpits of planes landing at Palm Beach International Airport, attempting to blind the pilots. No planes have crashed, but at least one pilot was injured, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.That…
The private, Fort Lauderdale-base consulting firm Calvin, Giordano & Associates plays a big role in providing essential government services in Broward County. As the Juice has reported, the firm has a monopoly in the City of West Park — doing everything from planning and engineering to running the city website…
One of Palm Beach billionaire Bill Koch’s main objections to a proposed offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound — which he has spent millions of dollars fighting — is that it will require tax breaks to succeed. As the Juice reported earlier today, Koch has claimed that the annual $100…
Yesterday, The Juice brought you the tale of Bill Koch, the Palm Beach billionaire energy mogul who has spent millions of dollars to oppose an offshore wind farm that will sully his view of Nantucket Sound. We speculated that Koch’s opposition might have something to do with the fact that…
You’d think Bill Koch might be a fan of wind energy. The billionaire Palm Beach energy magnate made some of his fortune off eco-friendly geo-thermal and natural gas power plants. He’s also an avid sailor who won the America’s Cup in 1992.But it appears that when he’s on dry land,…
The City of Hollywood rarely gets a chance to shine as a beacon of political sanity. But after a strange, months-long tussle between dragon boaters, a lone kayaker, and Broward County commissioners, the scrappy city now looks like a hero.A dragon boating team known as the Blazing Paddles was threatened…
This summer, the Juice raised ethical questions about the City of Pembroke Pines’ decision to outsource its building department to a private, Fort Lauderdale-based company, Calvin, Giordano & Associates. Because the firm also handles multimillion-dollar engineering projects for the city, it could face serious conflicts of interest when reviewing building…
Poor Palm Beach County. First West Palm was named one of the most depressing places in America. Now a new Gallup poll of West Palm, Boca, and Boynton Beach residents has revealed that those most emotionally attached to the area are older snowbirds. In other words, the biggest fans of…
If the governor’s wife holds a cancer-awareness event and no one is there to witness it, did it really happen?Yesterday, Carole Crist spoke at a luncheon at the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach. Her goal was to raise awareness about ovarian cancer. But only about a dozen people attended…
Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss has a small problem with political scandal. Four years ago he was scolded for missing an intelligence briefing on the Iraq war to golf with Tiger Woods. Then last fall he released an unfortunate campaign commercial in which he appeared to be groping the chest of…
A mysterious illness has infected the highly paid, privately contracted top administrators at the City of Pembroke Pines, causing them to become suddenly squeamish about their paychecks. First, City Manager Charlie Dodge volunteered to slice $20,000 off his company’s annual salary of $755,000. Then, Wednesday night, moments before the City…
Pembroke Pines City Manager Charlie Dodge, whose private company earns $755,000 a year from the city, has offered to take a 2.6 percent pay cut next year, in deference to the Broward suburb’s dire financial straits.That’s the word from Pines Mayor Frank Ortis and Vice Mayor Angelo Castillo, both of…
In case you missed the 28 billion pounds of ink that have been spilled on the topic, daily newspapers are dying. And as they gasp and sputter on their breathing tubes, many are reaching desperately for something, anything that will allow them to live another day. The results are often…
Pictured: This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the holiday when Jewish people dip apples in honey, repent their sins, and get tipsy toasting a sweet new year months before the rest of the world. One of the holiday’s traditional dishes is a noodle kugel — or casserole — sweetened with cinnamon,…
By the time the eviction notice appeared on the front door of Cafe Pisa, it was too late. Downtown office ladies with brown bags, paperback novels, and Tupperware had already descended on the shuttered restaurant’s outdoor wrought-iron tables. Ideally situated in the plaza area of the Wachovia Tower building in…
After losing a corporate job in the computer industry last year, Julie Murphy realized that the tanking economy gave her more time for loftier causes.The native South African, who now lives in Gulf Stream, discovered a business venture close to her heart: Jewelry that fights poverty, unemployment, and HIV/AIDS in…
The president of Calvin, Giordano & Associates, a private firm that provides building inspection, engineering, code enforcement, and other services to local cities, says his company pioneered local government outsourcing, and performs its work ethically.”We’re very careful not to have a conflict,” Dennis Giordano says. “We never do any work…
This summer, the Juice brought you the troubling tale of the City of Pembroke Pines’ decision to outsource its building department to a private consulting firm, Calvin, Giordano & Associates. At the time, this was worrisome because the Fort Lauderdale-based firm already does engineering work for Pembroke Pines. It was…
After a summer of dire predictions, Corus Bank’s failure late Friday was almost an after-thought. The Chicago-based bank gorged itself on condo loans during the real estate boom, then hemorrhaged cash as many of the projects it financed sat empty. But the bank’s demise has serious ramifications for condos in…
Did we mess up the bagels that badly? Did a reporter get mauled by an 85-year-old practicing parallel parking on I-95 last season? Why won’t the New York Times let South Florida suffer in peace?First, there was the video of a wrinkled Sunrise Lakes diva rapping about her health care…
Pack City Hall with more than 150 angry citizens and any governing body would get a bit anxious. But at Wednesday night’s budget hearing, the Pembroke Pines city commissioners appeared to be auditioning for Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? And it wasn’t going well.First, they faced the small…
