It was a clear, cool evening in the hills above Port-au-Prince when Gregoire-Ronald Chery got the last phone call of his life. Ronald, as his family called him, was on vacation in Haiti, visiting the house of his cousins, Dominique and Chantal Charlot. They kept the side door open while…
Now that Rick Scott has nixed the state Office of Drug Control, which was instrumental in getting anti-pill-mill legislation passed, the duty to try to curb the illegal pill-mill industry falls on whoever will take it.Enter Pam Bondi, your new Republican attorney general: After campaigning on a platform of cutting…
Now that President Obama has named Bill Daley, a JPMorgan Chase chairman whose loudest pronouncements over the past months have been to ridicule Obama’s signature accomplishments — as his chief of staff, it should be perfectly clear: Washington and big business go together like bread and butter.People often speak of…
What do the people in charge of your property taxes do in their free time? One Broward property appraiser likes to tweet right-wing talking points, including his love for Allen West and Ronald Reagan.Juice reader Seth Platt noticed that some of Deputy Property Appraiser Bob Wolfe’s tweets were appearing during…
For $3 million in hard-earned corporate money, you better throw a hell of a party, and Rick Scott’s inauguration bash this week turned out to be the most extravagant in recent history. Event planners said it would bring $4.5 million in economic activity to the Tallahassee area, boosting jobs and…
Bruce D. Grant is the director of the governor’s Office of Drug Control, and he found out by email last month that Rick Scott’s transition team had decided to eliminate his four-person office to save half a million dollars a year. Meanwhile, the state is still struggling to finalize the…
There’s a serious disconnect in how we Americans think about weather. On the one hand, we love crazy weather stories and the intense, irrational panic they cause. On the other hand, we’re absolutely unwilling to consider that those extreme weather patterns are a result of our own stupid behavior (i.e.,…
You can’t say the guy’s not trying. Florida’s favorite baldheaded former fraudster, Gov.-elect Rick Scott, has been tossing off bits of a new economic plan. Not surprisingly, most of his talking points involve limiting government involvement and letting us little guys pull like mad on our bootstraps.Scott may be eliminating…
Nobody takes more sectarian pride in county lines than Florida — where you would normally find city rivalries and geographic landmarks, we have a patchwork quilt of little sovereign empires dividing up the swamps. Heck, we even named our paper after some counties.So when the latest data from the U.S…
Marianne Moran is a lawyer in West Palm Beach and a member of Tea Party in Action and Balance Our Budget Now. Through her work on the Florida Senate, she met Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor who is credited with developing the argument that Obama’s nationwide health-insurance mandate is…
South Florida may be the nation’s capital for sex, sun, and artificial breasts, but apparently some people are still too prude to handle naked sculptures. Last week, city employees at Boca Raton’s Patch Reef Park decided that two naked-lady torsos by local sculptor Mary Eiland were too provocative to be…
When is child neglect not actually child neglect?On Monday evening, Romilus Duvelsaint left his house on Whitehall Drive in Boynton Beach to run some errands. He left his four-year-old son with his two aunts, Mirlande and Piercina Duvelsaint. Before he shut the door, he shouted to Piercina that he was…
“Criminal Alien.” That’s the phrase that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses for anyone who has come into the country illegally and committed a crime, be it a DUI or aggravated murder. ICE makes it a top priority to remove “those who come to the United States to prey…
Early this year, the Broward State Attorney’s office sent Detective Joe Roubicek out to find families who had rented homes from Mark Guerette. The homes had been left empty and neglected by foreclosures, and Guerette didn’t own them.Instead, he filed claims of “adverse possession,” a form of squatter’s rights. But…
Update: Aaand… he’s out! Details after the jump.In April 2008, New Times profiled Robert “Chas” Brady, who was facing fraud charges for passing himself off as a lawyer and Harvard grad when, in fact, he hadn’t even gone to college. The six-foot-two, well-spoken 27-year-old even managed to con some of…
Sometimes people make life too complicated. Used to be, if you want to see a hockey game, you paid money and got a seat. Simple.Then we have promotions, where you get a special rate, see a hockey game, and get some free crap thrown in. All in good fun, right?…
Bike sharing can be a wonderful thing. The Parisian Velib’ program has bikes all over the city to grab and ride for a nominal fee, all maintained at great expense by a private advertising company. The concept has taken off in a few American cities as well, most successfully in…
The State Attorney’s Office has wrapped up its case against Mark Guerette, the guy written about in the New York Times and here on the Juice for his work leasing empty, foreclosed homes to families in need by way of an antiquated squatter’s-rights law.Guerette found around 100 foreclosed homes that…
Dushaun Smith doesn’t want you to think he’s a criminal.”You don’t feed milk to a stray cat,” says the longtime Fort Lauderdale resident. “I’m careful how I feed the media milk. They keep coming back for more.”It started out with a feel-good story like this, about the summer camp for…
The techniques may be straight out of Dexter, but there’s nothing fictional about a number of recent discoveries of severed or chopped-up body parts in South Florida’s murky waterways.On November 6, a melange of chopped-up body parts cast in cement in a bucket was discovered behind the Egg N You…
Al Gore and George W. Bush riding hand-in-hand down Okeechobee Boulevard in November 2000 to protest hanging chads. Something in that vein happened in yesterday’s Haitian election, which went just about as badly as anyone could have expected. Elections in Haiti have often been disorganized, and South Florida feels some of the…
So you made it home for Thanksgiving, and you’re flying back to the Sunshine State. Only problem? Mom loaded you down with leftover pies, cakes and other comestibles to bring on the plane (where, if you’re flying Delta, you can stock up on the world’s best cookies). Will traveling with…
