Four months removed from a tour of duty in Iraq, Air Force Airman John Thomas was back in South Florida. Of all people, Thomas thought, he had earned the right to enjoy some of those American liberties he and his fellow servicemen and women had fought for in the Middle…
After nightfall, western Hollywood goes dark and an otherwise featureless horizon comes to be dominated, suddenly, by the Hollywood Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, the phosphorescent glow of its turrets visible for miles in every direction. It’s around nightfall too that traffic begins to snarl around the main entrance at…
Mayor Lois Frankel delivers a threat the way other people deliver a kiss. She glides in close, into the personal space normally known only to lovers. Her voice assumes those same low, intimate tones, so quiet that you dare not step back, for fear of missing a word. If you…
Face it, Hollywood. Compared with the other beaches that line the South Florida coast, you’re the ugly duckling. Your beachfront condos look like military barracks. Your shops are all chipped paint, faded awnings, and kitsch merchandise. Hell, even your sunbathers are eyesores — oblivious, it seems, to The South Beach…
Based on his solemn bearing, his unblinking, unsmiling demeanor, one might guess Bryan Caletka to be the director of a funeral home rather than what he really is: the biology teacher at Davie’s Western High School and the young, gun-slinging rookie on the Davie Town Council. He’s not bombastic, and…
Sometimes, all it takes is a single, seemingly benign question to disturb the balance of a deeply complacent town. So it is in Sunrise, a community that from all its outward appearances is just another sprawling west Broward County suburb where nothing as interesting as political scandal ever seems to…
Sometimes, all it takes is a single, seemingly benign question to disturb the balance of a deeply complacent town. So it is in Sunrise, a community that from all its outward appearances is just another sprawling west Broward County suburb where nothing as interesting as political scandal ever seems to…
Florida’s Hollywood is the unglamorous one. Sure, the city has a lively little downtown entertainment district, where on most evenings the scent of Argentine grilled beef shares the air with pizza, where reggae jostles against blaring salsa and the rhythmic thump of electronic beats. But, though Hollywood calls itself “the…
For the past eight years, Lamont Snyder could be found toiling on the football field at Hallandale High School, his intense expression shaded from the late-afternoon sun by a broad-brimmed straw hat, which comes off only when a point must be made — emphatically. Thanks to the hat, as well…
On the evening of February 16, 2004, gunshots rang out from a home in the 1800 block of Scott Street in Hollywood. Before long, the street erupted in police lights, including those from the squad car of Sgt. Frank Hogan. This was his call. He directed the other cars into…
