It’s one award bestowed on the city that you’ll never hear Mayor Jim Naugle boasting about in his upcoming campaign speeches: Best Tourist Destination of the Year. Naugle would be proud if the honor had been presented by, say, a national coalition of churches or a chamber of commerce. But…
Leon Hendricks squeezes his linebacker frame into a kitchen chair in his modest Lauderdale Lakes house, the television blaring sports in the background, as always. The curtains are drawn in the dark, cramped living room, the focal point of which is a La-Z-Boy recliner perched in front of the large…
If you’ve been reading the heart-wrenching tales of abused and drug-addicted children that accompany the Sun-Sentinel’s pitch for contributions to the paper’s Children’s Fund as avidly as we have, you’ve no doubt been tempted to reach for your wallet and give till it hurts. After all, these anecdotes of youth…
I drank cool water from a clear plastic bottle and tried to get down some trail mix. It was probably 2:30 in the afternoon and I hadn’t had anything to eat all day, so I should have been hungry. But it’s amazing how the stomach takes to itself at the…
Col. Ralph Abra Vaya stood in the middle of 18th Avenue a block north of Sunrise Boulevard and ignored the beaded sweat that dropped from the tip of his 80-year-old nose to his scarred sternum, the mark of open-heart surgery. The old man announced he was going to die. “Tell…
Our attempt to publicize and invigorate the “Get Those Damn Grammys” campaign by Broward County tourist officials got plenty of notice in certain circles last week. The satire pointed out the difficulty of attempting to pull in such an international event, and we tried to poke fun at both Miami’s…
It’s 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, prime time for basketball at Hollywood’s Jefferson Park. A dozen men are shooting basketballs at two half-court hoops. The players are a refreshingly diverse bunch, running the gamut from middle-aged white men to black teenagers to a young Hispanic dude whose two small…
A typical day for Wendy Lee Allen might include, oh, say, hacking off the head of a farm pig with the serrated edges of her hunting knife. Afterward she’ll fling the skull atop a mound of red ants, that, having found a meaty food source, will ring the dinner bell…
We think it’s time for Scott Cowan to take stock of his political career and then admit that he was beyond the pale in insisting to us that there was nothing wrong in paying his daughters with campaign donations for work they didn’t do. In October of last year, we…
The kosher rubber chicken is down the hatch, and 500 synagogue officers from around the country troop noisily into the convention hall at the Wyndham Resort in Weston for the after-dinner musical treat. All day they have attended brain-numbing seminars on topics like “Can church and state really be separate?”…
Pete Brewer admits he’s a gadfly, an agent provocateur of Hollywood officialdom. For this resident it’s a salute of praise, but city officials who have been called to task by Brewer for wasting money use the word derisively. “Mr. Brewer’s ‘facts’ — and I put quotations around the word facts…
Approaching Belle Glade on County Road 880 on Friday evening, the muck is all around you. The rich, sugar cane-yielding soil is closer to coal in color than most dirt. A sign along the side of the road welcoming you to town lays it all out: “Her soil is her…
Remember that October Los Van Van show in Miami? Ay, what a mess! It was so… Miami. Cubans protesting outside, Cubans wagging their butts inside, cops clad in riot gear, foul language in two tongues, reporters out the wazoo. It was enough to make us thank our lucky stars we…
Ah, the roar of the crowd. The chanting for more. All the finishing elements of a successful show at the Broward Center For the Performing Arts. But this clapping is not for the revival of Chicago playing inside, it’s coming from outside the hall, and it’s occurring before the performance…
The sisserou parrot will never make it as the poster child for endangered species. Nobody would pay $1 million-plus to exhibit a sisserou in a U.S. zoo, as is occasionally the case with those cuddly giant panda bears from China. Nor does the sisserou have the exotic appeal of the…
So often do the words politically powerful precede references to Miami’s Latin Builders Association that they’ve become something of a standard prefix in news reports. There are good reasons for this. The 900-member-plus association of builders, lenders, contractors, and developers is legendary in its ability to funnel money to candidates…
It appears that while John Henry plies the political backrooms for a $400 million tax subsidy, his supporters and operatives are at the same time working other angles to make the idea of a baseball park more palatable to Broward residents. Move number one: He told the media last week…
There’s a pile of 34 shoes just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell’s comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the 17 people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell’s living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall…
If you’re lucky enough to be buried in Section A on the west side of Boca Raton’s Municipal Cemetery, you might eternally lie beneath the broad shade of two colossal banyan trees or, at the very least, rest among speckled granite and monochromatic color schemes. You could also rest amid…
So Jeb has a problem with the Supremes reviewing the constitutionality of killing someone with huge amounts of electricity? Governor Bush is peeved that the high court brings up that annoying Eighth Amendment and that a review will stop the state-sanctioned murders of inmates for a few months. Cruel and…
Michael Maroone sits atop AutoNation, the largest automobile-retailing company in the world. When he’s not starring in commercials with Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, he’s overseeing the growing empire of 412 car dealerships, which he joined after selling his own auto plaza to AutoNation boss Wayne Huizenga for $200 million in…
Bordered by plywood and chainlink fences and occupied by a large trailer, the heart of the Deerfield Beach Middle School campus might seem like a construction site. But it’s really a destruction site. While the school is packed with 1500 seventh and eighth graders, it’s undergoing what the School Board…
