The scene outside Elian Gonzalez’s Little Havana home was rather subdued this past Saturday afternoon. A few network news crews staked out the house from a neighbor’s yard, huddled around a television set atop a milk crate, watching an NFL playoff game. In the street a stream of cars drove…
New Times Broward • Palm Beach Online – newtimesbpb.com | Letters | January 20 – 26, 2000 “; ad += “”; document.write(ad); } // function //–> function openElink() {window.open(‘/extra/elink/elink.html?link=www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2000-01-20/letters.html&head=Letters to the Editor&subhead= Letters for January 20, 2000′,’Elink’,’toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=yes,copyhistory=no,width=250,height=225′);} //–> ad(“bpb”,”nfc”,”c”,”letters”); ad(“bpb”,”nfc”,”a”,”letters”); Letters to the Editor Letters for January 20, 2000 Fiberglass…
Florida Congressman Bill McCollum is not a politician anyone ever accused of being nonpartisan. As one of the thirteen Republicans who argued the case for impeachment before the U.S. Senate last year, he was having the time of his life bashing President Clinton (and with those glasses and haircut, he…
Wednesday, December 29, 1:10 p.m. I spot the first obvious Phish fan in an aging Volvo with Quebec plates and a dancing bear sticker on the bumper just past the I-595/I-75 split. The car, smeared with road salt, is occupied by four young gentlemen in sweatshirts sporting serious car hair,…
The mission of the people who fought for district government in Hollywood was noble. The goal was to seat a minority on the city commission for the first time in the city’s 75-year history. The districting proponents also wanted to give residents the opportunity to elect a representative from their…
In the rather ritzy clubhouse of Calder Race Course sat Charlie Hustle (a.k.a. Pete Rose) on a recent Friday, doing what he’s now most famous for: gambling. Rose was calmly watching the ponies run on the dirt below, a stack of cash sitting in front of him on his table…
Bill Wetzel fidgeted in the waiting room of the Repository, a Fort Lauderdale sperm bank, while a technician retrieved his seed from the stainless steel vessel where it had languished in deep freeze for six years. In a scene straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the technician, garbed in…
At 3:24 a.m. the Howler makes his presence known. Out of the early December morning darkness, a nasal and unintelligible sound rises in pitch to a vitriolic keening. The verbal outburst is mercifully short — no more than 15 seconds. But it is followed closely by another nonsensical rant of…
The Last Supper can be yours for just $2498. Not da Vinci’s masterpiece or even a quick glimpse of the flesh-and-blood apostles via a little past-life regression therapy. This is a coffin. It sits next to numerous other coffins replete with names like Black Cherry ($2298), American Harvest ($2098), and…
The Herald street hawker was standing in the road selling papers along with the Sun-Sentinel salesperson and another Herald seller. Hey, wait a darn minute here. Why are there two street geeks selling the same rag on the same corner? Well, that’s because there are now two Heralds from which…
Angelo Dundee is both hungry and patient, a fight-game chef preparing a complex dish one painstaking step at a time. “You can’t rush this,” he says. “You have to bring ’em along right, let ’em learn first. They learn in the fights, and you can’t let ’em fight guys they…
Six years ago Marie Nonombre came to South Florida for one simple reason: to work. This was not an option in Haiti, her homeland. “You finish your school, and nobody hires you,” she says simply. Unfortunately the States haven’t been much kinder. At 26 years old, the single mother of…
An SEC judge in Washington has it all wrong. He actually contends that Broward county politicos would take advantage of a system in which it is whom you know (or whom you pay off) that runs the government, many times to the disadvantage of citizens. What an outrageous accusation. The…
Saturday the new nightclub Liquid Room opened on West Palm Beach’s Clematis Street. It was another success for 28-year-old Chris Paciello. He already owned two of the most decadently popular clubs on Miami Beach, Liquid and Bar Room, along with a permanently in-vogue restaurant there, Joia. He had become his…
The invitation sounded too good to pass up. “Head ’em up and move ’em out. The Turtle River Ranch, the Bowman Crew, and Miss Americow invite you to the Trailer Trash Party.” Sure it’s a Monday night, and it’s a long trek to Jupiter. But when you have an excuse…
You’d never guess Carol Steed is 67 years old if you watched her yanking chunks of dry wall from her Chevy Silverado. Her face flushes red from exertion, but she’s doggedly chipper. When she reaches the remains of the crumbling mass heaped behind the cab of the truck, she hops…
When the people at TDM Research of Austin, Texas called Charlotte Greenbarg of Hollywood, they obviously tried to push around the wrong woman. Greenbarg claims she was the victim of a questionable “push poll,” and her allegation has now led to a formal investigation by the Florida Elections Commission. Greenbarg…
Andre Fladell is losing, and he doesn’t like it at all. Under the hot midday sun, two lean twentysomethings, sporting tattoos and earrings, are pounding the middle-aged chiropractor and his partner, Bruno Garozzo, in a game of doubles volleyball on the sand in Delray Beach. Fladell and Garozzo keep making…
There’s a scene in the movie Beetlejuice that depicts purgatory as a place where the recently deceased listen to elevator music and wait interminably to learn their fates while bureaucrats already consigned to hell shuffle five-foot stacks of paper from one place to another. Every so often a guy hanging…
Given the presence of a man who may be the next President of the United States, the atmosphere in the small banquet room at the exclusive Tower Club in downtown Fort Lauderdale is surprisingly lacking in electricity. But it’s not lacking in the sizzle of campaign cash. Fifty people are…
When the chairman of the School Advisory Board climbed on the roof of Deerfield Beach Middle on November 29, he took photographs of what he thought looked like men who’d “just gotten off the landing ship.” The men were in space suits attached to respirators and were digging up voluminous…
On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, while the rest of Broward County was frolicking in the surf or paying homage to mammon at one of our many temples of consumerism, six men gather in a sterile back room at the Imperial Point branch library on Federal Highway. Some are wearing…
