Robert Dow is doing “pretty darned good” today, and it’s not hard to see why: Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed the unpopular teacher’s merit pay bill on Thursday, ending the threat of no-tenure-hires and pay scales based on students’ standardized test performances. So if Dow, president of the Palm Beach County…
Three years after entrusting $30,000 to a nonprofit organization called Arlington Park Family, the City of Deerfield Beach has filed suit against that charity on grounds that it’s withholding financial records that would show how the charity spent the money.City Attorney Andy Maurodis, who has been threatening to sue for…
The Juice has obtained a copy of the 110-page civil suit filed yesterday in West Palm Beach Federal District Court on behalf of 242 Colombian plaintiffs against Chiquita Brands International (click here for a copy of the lawsuit). The suit, brought by Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, which has offices…
Dennis Beach, city manager of Pompano Beach, wants to put prospective volunteers through a more rigorous training course before allowing them to volunteer on city committees. He hopes that it will help to prevent arrests like the one that occurred Monday, when a member of a city development committee, Vicente…
Many people have wondered how Debra Villegas could fill two seemingly conflicting roles. How could she be the confident, right-hand woman to Scott Rothstein as he ran a massive Ponzi scheme out of his law office, yet go home every night to an allegedly abusive husband who beat her kids…
Last week, we brought you the sad tale of Darrin Podder, handcuffed and hauled to jail by Broward Sheriff’s deputies for “littering” a 20-foot tree on a construction site in Pompano Beach that he’d been hired to landscape by Butters Construction. Podder was in the middle of replacing a row…
When a corruption case strikes in North Broward, Woody Poitier has a peculiar way of being near the scene of the crime. He’s the Pompano Beach commissioner who appointed activist Vicente Thrower to an advisory committee of the city’s development agency. On Monday, Thrower was arrested on charges of unlawful…
On March 10, 2008 Plantation police detectives confronted Tony Villegas at the Florida East Coast Railway depot in Fort Lauderdale with a search warrant. He told them he had been expecting them. By this time, detectives had been quietly questioning people about the murder of Melissa Britt Lewis for four…
Christopher Thornton, a 27-year-old coach and child tutor who lived in Lauderhill, has been arrested in a Fort Lauderdale police sting and charged with child sex crimes. According to the department’s news release, investigators tracked Thornton’s IP address to downloaded child pornography. That was enough to get a search warrant…
A search has been launched for a 14-year-old girl, Jainy Santos-Ramos, who is said to be a “habitual runaway.” The girl’s father first reported that the girl disappeared on January 25. She returned on February 3, only to vanish again that night. Santos-Ramos, who lived in unincorporated Broward, hasn’t been…
The Sun-Sentinel is reporting another cop shooting this morning. A Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy evidently shot and killed a man, ***44-year-old Richard Montero ***, during a traffic stop at Summit Boulevard and Jog Road in West Palm Beach around 6:30 a.m.UPDATE: It now appears that as with the PBSO…
Six years ago Antonio Balta, a then-27-year-old horse groomer working at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, left his 9-month-old daughter, Veronika, in the car as he waited inside for his girlfriend to get off work. It was mid-March and the temperature was in the low 70s. He went out to…
On March 5, 2008, the day Melissa Britt Lewis was killed, her best friend, Debra Villegas, had scheduled a deposition in her divorce from her allegedly abusive husband, Tony Villegas.Debra had kicked Tony out of the house more than a year earlier, but their divorce proceedings had been progressing slowly…
On the night her best friend was murdered in March 2008, Debra Villegas was partying with friends at the Round Up Country Western Club in Davie.This wasn’t unusual for Debra, the former chief operating officer at the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. The native Texan enjoyed line dancing, and told…
A Chicago-based Private Investigator who owns a vacation home in Broward, Chris Bauer says he spends his leisure time when he comes to Florida “people watching” on Las Olas or at downtown art shows. In other words, Bauer’s always at least halfway on the job. He has said he can…
Lake Worth blogger Lynn Anderson has reported that slain Nova cancer researcher Joseph Morrissey was a Lake Worth high alumnus who graduated in 1981. Anderson quotes from Morrissey’s yearbook profile that his ambition was to “get rich quick and spend a lot of money.” She also notes that the 46-year-old…
Courtesy Chaz Stevens, that’s video from this week’s meeting of the Deerfield Beach City Commission in which Sylvia Poitier says that ethics oversight is “fluff.” Technically, it was fluff. It’s just not anymore, which is why Poitier may be in trouble over her ties to nonprofits that received tax dollars…
On the night that Yvonne Oulton was found dead in her minivan a few blocks from the Isle Casino in Pompano Beach, her husband, Robert, cooperated with investigators. But after reviewing video evidence, Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives learned that his story didn’t check out. And with that, Robert Oulton stopped…
Melissa Britt Lewis was a cautious woman. The 39-year-old, newly divorced attorney at Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler carried Mace in her purse, had two dogs and an alarm system at her Plantation home, and always kept her garage door locked to prevent burglaries.As the eldest child in her family, she grew…
Last month’s shooting outside Chances Nightclub in residential Lake Worth was startling, but it seems the incident — which left two young people in the hospital with life-threatening bullet wounds — is one more in a trend of nightclub shootings across South Florida.This week’s Cover Story in Miami New Times,…
Boynton Beach police are investigating a possible child abduction this morning. The girl, age 4 or 5, was wearing pink shorts and a white top with pink flowers. She was taken from a bus stop in the 1600 block of SW Eighth St. The suspect may be a white male…
[This is a corrected version of an earlier entry.]A year ago, Fort Lauderdale bail bondsman William “Cobra” Staubs nearly ended his 30-year career by searching for missing 5-year-old Haleigh Cummings. Cobra was slapped with a felony charge of false imprisonment when he tried to arrest accused child molester Daniel Snodgrass…
