What if Fort Lauderdale Police mapped the city’s gun owners and increased patrols only in those neighborhoods where guns were concentrated? And if those neighborhoods were mostly black? Or Hispanic? Or white? How about if cops, taking advantage of a smart partnership with big data experts IBM, targeted crime-heavy neighborhoods…
Let’s just get this out of the way first. OK, that’s better. Now, last week, a familiar face on the Boca Raton party scene was taken into police custody after allegations of sexual assault arose. When we say party scene, we’re not talking about nightclubs. Jesse Coursey is a dance…
Anthony “Little Tony” Ferrari, who had been accused of having Miami Subs founder Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis rubbed out in a Mob-style hit, has been found guilty of murder and murder conspiracy. The jury handed down its verdict after seven hours of deliberation. Ferrari and Anthony “Big Tony” Moscatiello were accused…
Henry “Bud” Read III, an 84-year-old Fort Lauderdale community leader, is facing child molestation accusations, police say. Read was arrested after the two young girls he allegedly fondled last November came forward. The victims say this wasn’t the only time Read did this…
Six West Palm Beach men loaded with an arsenal of weapons and led by a dude who went by the name “Black Jesus” were arrested by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives after a sting operation that set them up to rob $450,000 worth of “pure Colombian cocaine.”…
Last week, two inmates were able to escape the Florida prison system by having some papers forged that allowed them early release. And while the two men were eventually caught, authorities have found themselves with a kind of conundrum: These aren’t the only guys trying to get out of prison…
Three men who manufactured and then sold phony body armor at gun shows in Florida have been arrested, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Orlando Regional Operations Center. According to ballistics tests done on the fake armor, the jackets offered no ballistics protection. So, if someone purchased one…
A Boynton Beach woman hated her husband so much that she wanted to have him killed. So she gave a couple of cops credit cards to give to a potential hit man. The cops said they were cops. They were wearing tactical vests that said POLICE on them. They were…
A Fort Lauderdale man walked over to his grandmother’s house with a shotgun, said “he had something for Grandma,” and then shot her German shepherd mix. The dog was hospitalized but eventually died from her wounds. Police have no motive for the shooting, other than the man saying he had…
For years now, it’s been easy to see if a sex offender lives near you — an online database of registered offenders addresses has been publicly available since 1997. Now, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has also made it easy to see if a sex offender is going to…
It feels like we’re living in a Cocaine Cowboys installment this week in South Florida. Why, just yesterday we had news of a yacht captain ferrying 600 pounds of coke from the Bahamas. Today, we have $700 K worth of yeyo just floating in a burlap sack…
There are criminals and con men and Ponzi schemers. And there are dudes like David N. Branfman of Delray Beach, who managed to use his con-man powers to swindle a lonely 84-year-old widow out of more than $12,000. Branfman exploited the woman’s desire for companionship and took her bank account…
Life was in a tailspin for a Connecticut real estate investor named Stacy. Once married, she was now divorced. Once the owner of a beautiful $6 million mansion, she now bounced from rental to rental. She still paid the bills — but made only a fraction of her old salary…
Back in June, a 15-year-old Boca Raton teen collapsed on the beach after downing some type of psychedelic. The speculation that snowballed after Zach Denaro’s sad end included a lot of dud info, confusion, and anxiety. One of the more believable rumors floating online was that the teen had swallowed…
A Boca teen and a couple of his friends drove around West Boca Raton in his parent’s Chrysler convertible, setting random cars on fire. According to this report, Nick DeSalvo and his friends also set fire to American flags. Police were able to nab DeSalvo thanks to surveillance footage of…
A man thought he scored big when he met an attractive woman at a strip club who agreed to come home with him. Later that night, he was beaten, robbed, and tied up by the woman’s two male accomplices. Perhaps meeting a woman at a strip club was a bad…
Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Gerald Wengert, a cop who was a dog handler on the Learning Channel’s now-canceled Unleashed: K-9 Broward County, is being sued for beating up a Hollywood man and then inventing a reason to arrest the man to justify it. Just this past April, Wengert was acquitted of…
The wall: a six-foot stack of blue bricks. The mission: go up and over it, the first hurdle in a 16-part obstacle course. Me: suddenly, surprisingly nervous. The vertical lift has resurrected some anxiety from seventh-grade gym, where the prospect of flinging my pear-shaped, hormone-chemistry set through a public display…
Gus Boulis’ green BMW was pinned between two cars. One had halted directly in front of him as he pulled out of his office building’s parking lot. The other appeared from the opposite direction as a dark blur in the vacant Fort Lauderdale street. Boulis’ killer was facing him from…
For legislators – especially the ones looking to earn tough-on-crime points – it’s open season on sex offenders. Following a Sun Sentinel investigation that found a high number of re-offenders among the worst of the worst, Tallahassee has elbowed everything else to the side, clamoring to find new ways to…
According to a police report, between 7:30 and 7:35 p.m. on September 23, $870 worth of “Lacie panties” were stolen from the Victoria’s Secret at City Place in West Palm Beach. “The items” — weirdly categorized as “clothing/furs” — “were last seen at 1930 hours,” the report states…
It took a jury only five hours Thursday to weigh the evidence stacked against Rose Marks, the matriarch of a Fort Lauderdale Roma family accused of running a $25 million fraud. In what turned out to be a dramatic climax to the well publicized case, jurors found the psychic guilty…
