Accompanied by a handful of rabbis, Harold Wishna lowered the boom on the North Broward Hospital District last week. The 75-year-old political power broker stood before the district board, which is appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, and complained that the public hospital system discriminates against Jews. The gray and balding…
Let’s say you’re on the second date with a person whom you’re really, really attracted to, but then he or she does or says this one thing, and you suddenly decide: “It’s over. Deal breaker.” For me, if a guy uses the term “bro,” the dishes are done. It’s finished…
But this copper has some sense: I just finished reading Trevor Aaronson’s March 25 article regarding Johnny Mamone (“The Snitch”). I thought I would provide you with a little more information in respect to his so-called family life and “non-criminal” activities. For more than 21 years, I served as a…
Eighteen of them crowd together under the basket at the south end of the court. Most stand menacingly with their hands on their hips, in tank tops that show well-defined muscles. The loudest of them is Rick Smith, an African-American debt collector from here in West Palm Beach who isn’t…
It’s almost midnight on a Friday at Assman’s Wacky World (3000 E. Oakland Park Blvd., Fort Lauderdale), and 42-year-old Dave Tarr, the Assman himself, is bending over on the deck behind the restaurant to plant a kiss on his thin, blond girlfriend’s butt. He stands up and rests his lanky…
The audacious bid to gain control of government money and media coverage began with a strange but simple equation: a quarter a head. That’s how much the downtown developers and businessmen who formed the Broward Alliance in 1998 felt they deserved from your local tax coffers. Twenty-five cents for every…
Justice of the Church: Trevor Aaronson’s March 18 article, “Father Gomorrah,” is interesting but fatally flawed by a common misstatement that continues to plague the movement toward civil marriage equality for us gay and lesbian citizens. Aaronson says, “Father Reid has wedded dozens of gay couples, sanctifying their marriages before…
On July 26, 1999, at 5:01 p.m., 57-year-old Al Polito walked into Gold Coast Check Cashing, a squat, pink, concrete-block building on the corner of Margate Boulevard and U.S. 441, with an FBI microphone strapped to his body. He was there to meet John Mamone, a six-foot-two, 260-pound New Jersey…
Cher Durham is preparing to deliver her first child at a home in Kendall. Midwife Corina Fitch settles herself under a blanket at one end of a couch in Durham’s living room. Having delivered more than 150 babies and witnessed 300 more births, the midwife knows from the serene expression…
John Joseph Reid creates a striking image as he walks out of his pink house on NE Tenth Avenue in Wilton Manors, just two blocks from the popular bars and restaurants of Five Points. A gentle, reserved man with a coif of gray hair and a trimmed mustache, Reid wears…
The story of a cash-hemorrhaging public boondoggle begins, appropriately enough, with a massive heart attack. Seven years ago, a man woke up gasping for breath in his Fort Lauderdale mansion in the middle of the night. It was Dave Thomas, founder of the Wendy’s hamburger chain. Cardiologist Michael Chizner helped…
The last time Broward County mounted a big dredging program at Port Everglades, environmentalists raised so much hell that taxpayers had to spend millions to create a whole new mangrove marsh along the edge of John Lloyd Park. It was the late 1980s, and port officials vowed that the adjoining…
Wait for a doc? Never! I read Bob Norman’s March 11 story, “A Screw Loose,” on Dr. Sein Lwin. Hmmm. I wonder. Here’s my story: On Christmas Eve day at 11 a.m., my 16-year-old son got hurt in an accident and broke his wrist. My daughter took him to the…
Jarvis Francis, a broad man with sleepy eyes and a mop of black dreadlocks that looks like a petrified jellyfish, is penciling in a green grid to tally how badly his cricket team is getting shellacked. “Baby steps, Virgil!” the 34-year-old hollers across an Opa-locka schoolyard to teammate Virgil Francis,…
Every Tuesday, Frank Burgos receives a fresh shipment of cold wasps. Bred for bloodthirstiness in a Puerto Rico government laboratory, 4,000 of the insects are overnighted to the Davie office where Burgos reports for duty. He gently removes them from their temporary Styrofoam crypt and places them in a 48-quart,…
It’s a medical horror story that never happened as far as the State of Florida is concerned. And it began on New Year’s Eve 2001 in the most mundane of places — a living room. Mary Emma Marshall thought she simply pulled a muscle in her left hip as she…
A favored professor at a college in the Northeast once asked me where I was from, and I said, “Fort Lauderdale.” In front of a group of my classmates, he replied, “Fort Lauderdale always makes me think of a girl walking down the beach on crutches with a piece of…
Cut the costs: Thanks to Bob Norman for “All the Governor’s Men” (March 4). Keep up the great work. These expenditures by the North Broward Hospital District are ridiculous, and I will make sure to express my displeasure to my local elected officials. Or should I say partygoers? LOL! Even…
Gov. Jeb Bush will likely be pulled into a federal grand jury investigation of the North Broward Hospital District, the $800 million-a-year, tax-subsidized public health powerhouse that serves as one of his chief political fiefdoms. The grand jury is looking into a project by the nation’s sixth-largest public hospital system,…
Dressed in an olive suit with an American-flag pin on the lapel, Charles Clay walks into the downtown Fort Lauderdale office of New Times on a warm February morning. The 54-year-old political novice is here to explain why he’s the best man on the March 9 ballot in his tiny…
At the mere mention of the title of Anne Louis and Joyce Bandler’s new book, Predicting the Penis, Jamie, a raspy-voiced, brunet bartender, explodes: “They’re lesbians trapped in a heterosexual mind frame, and they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about…. How the hell do they know? Some guys…
Pull up a stool, kid. You want the Mickey shot of vodka or the SpongeBob tequila? Hey, it’s for a good cause. The kids from Indian Pines Elementary School in Lantana regularly bring home fliers encouraging families to encouraged to patronize JJ Muggs, a local sports bar. and grill. The…
