When you see Daisy Deadpetals in action — spouting out caustic jokes, laying down some wily dance moves, and looking better than any Boca bitch — it's hard to believe that men who dress up as women were ever considered weird. When Daisy hosts events like dance parties at Camelot and "new meat contests" at Boardwalk or when she simply roams the streets of Wilton Manors, it is with nuclear levels of ferocity. Wish we had a fraction of the confidence.
Readers' Choice: Daisy Deadpetals
Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein is a hedge-fund manager who in the early 2000s was accused of paying underaged girls for sex in his beachside mansion. His sordid tale of hunting for happy endings among mall rats took on new life this past year when his victims turned around and named members of the British and Ivy League aristocracy as the perv's co-debauchees. Multiple allegations of solicitation of minors had been whittled down to a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal for Epstein in 2008, but that arrangement prompted a federal civil suit; the victims sued the government, alleging they hadn't been made aware of the plea-deal negotiations. As part of legal filings in that case, it was alleged that Epstein passed at least one teen girl around like a party favor to his high and mighty friends, including Prince Andrew and Harvard prof and renowned litigator Alan Dershowitz (who helped broker Epstein's plea deal). The two have denied it, but the civil suit drags on.
Get a hanky ready, 'cause this one is a tearjerker. Usually, publicity stunts are just craven attempts to snag the media's attention. Sometimes, however, they actually are for a good purpose. Broward was lucky enough to see the latter in 2014. Last June, Make-A-Wish Southern Florida and TooJay's in Coral Springs granted the wishes of 9-year-old leukemia patient Jaylen Hyde. The local little boy wanted to become Striker Boy, a superhero he cooked up on his own. Various do-gooders not only hooked Jaylen up with a costume and logo for Striker Boy but, along with the Broward Sheriff's Office, planned a whole day of adventures for the pint-sized crime fighter. This included a helicopter ride, a Lamborghini, a damsel in distress, and an arch-evildoer named Sneaky Pete. Striker Boy's day in the spotlight eventually went viral.
Incumbent West Palm Beach Mayor Jeri Muoio suffered many a bruising battle in her first term in office, and when City Commissioner Kim Mitchell — following years in which she seemed to be the real straw that stirred the West Palm Beach drink — threw her hat in the ring last year against Muoio, it promised to be a close contest. Both sides were well-connected to the local business community, and Mitchell had the support of three key weapons: a political machine strong in the gated communities of suburbia; her über-lobbyist ex-husband, Richard Pinsky; and her mom, Anita Mitchell, a GOP bigwig. Despite the slinging of enough mud to raise a mountain, Mitchell went down in March in a 63 percent to 37 percent shellacking, dashing the hopes of a would-be Republican Party rising star.
Let's get this out of the way: Marco Rubio is terrible — a high-voiced, bootlicking opportunist who has tried to gallop atop a (partly bullshit) origin story, painting himself as a refugee from Communist Cuba who's risen as a Tea Party gunslinger. But the best part about watching Rubio leave Florida: It leaves his U.S. Senate seat unprotected. (Rubio is running for president, though he first must trek a campaign trail whereupon Republican candidates will use each other for toothpicks.) Enter from stage left Patrick Murphy, the Palm Beach-based congressional rep with a fresh face, strong track record, and — and we actually consider this a plus — a mug shot from a drunken college night that's already all over the internet. Because really, who among us wasn't booted from a South Beach club when we were 18? It's relatable. Really, though, Murphy is already something of a monster-slayer. He took down Allen West, an evil scientist's lab creation of the most vile politician possible.
The suburban Daniel Boones of the Palm Beach County Tea Party leaped to the fringe of local right-wing circles this year with their serial hosting of crackpot "scientist" John Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corp. and cofounder and chairman of the International Earthquake and Volcano Prediction Center, both outfits conveniently located in Orlando, where magical thinking meets the Magic Kingdom. Casey preached "global cooling" to the Tea Partiers in a trio of presentations last fall and again this spring and foresees "decades of potentially dangerous cold weather" ahead. He says his studies have never been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal because of "bias." (University of Miami climate scientist Dr. Ben Kirtman has one word for Casey's theories: "Nonsense.")
As if trying to turn "no good deed goes unpunished" into the city motto, Fort Lauderdale Police arrested Arnold Abbott last November for the shocking crime of offering free food to the homeless. It was not a Halloween prank when last October 31, the city made it against the law for groups to feed the homeless outdoors without providing port-a-potties and sinks. The then-90-year-old Abbott, however, continued to do what he had done for decades with the organization he founded, Love Thy Neighbor: He strove to feed those who were going unfed. This was not Abbott's first rodeo against overjudiciousness. Love Thy Neighbor has won five previous court cases in Palm Beach for breaking similar regulations. Abbott continues to fight back both passively — by continuing his weekly feedings — and actively — by suing Fort Lauderdale in hopes of overturning the law.
One of the nation's most aggressive and effective, though little-known, human rights organizations spent two decades operating out of locations in the Pacific Northwest and New England before setting up shop in Lake Worth in late 2013. Given the scandalous state of Florida's prison system, especially under the privatization initiative pushed so mightily by the state's GOP leadership, Prison Legal News and its nonprofit parent, the Human Rights Defense Center, have been welcome additions to the state's criminal justice reform movement, getting the word out about prisoner abuse and abusive prison conditions — to the general public and to inmates themselves. The publication was founded and is edited by Paul Wright, a former army policeman who was convicted of murder after he killed a drug dealer he was trying to rob. Once in prison, he was appalled at how prisoners are treated. Now he and the group's battery of attorneys, who have sued prison systems in Florida and a good dozen other states, go tooth-and-nail to enable distribution inside prisons so inmates know that conviction doesn't void the Bill of Rights.
Ungodly rich from his years of clogging the book racks of airports and drug stores from coast to coast (an estimated 300 million books sold), author James Patterson never has to lift a finger to peel a grape till the end of his days if he so chooses. But Jimmy Jim has a heart and soul, it appears, as evidenced by his latest project, the PBS documentary Murder of a Small Town, which is about crime, punishment, and the hardscrabble lives of the residents of the far other end of Palm Beach County. In Belle Glade, Pahokee, and the other towns around Lake Okeechobee, agricultural labor (when there is any to be found — unemployment rates are staggering) is most folks' bread and butter. Patterson grew interested in those lives during visits to the area as he distributed books to school kids. Now he wants the world to put down his novels for a while and absorb some hard truths.
The Sun Sentinel's Brittany Wallman is an intrepid reporter, as evidenced right there in the paper or on her Twitter feed, @BrittanyWallman, where she spends her days actively chronicling all the news you can use throughout Broward County. She primarily reports on county government, but if a car flips on the Turnpike? Wallman's there taking photos of rescue officials helping the victims. Commissioners are about to vote on a new law? Wallman is there to live-tweet the action. She's fearless, inquisitive, and, somehow, everywhere at the same time. Her reports — found mainly on the Sun Sentinel's Broward Politics page — are fast, thorough, and accurate. So if you're a lobbyist, a politician with ulterior motives, or a flakka smoker about to strip down, keep your eye out and beware: There's Wallman and her laptop, ready to feed the masses the truth.
