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…
He’s no anti-semite: People who plunk down their own money to see The Passion of the Christ, just as Mel Gibson used his own money to make it, will find a movie as diverse in its effect on them as the teachings of Jesus Christ has been on history (“Suffer…
The guy behind the wheel of the Corolla doesn’t look amused. It’s too early in the morning to put up with harassment from some dirty bum. The driver starts to roll up the window before the drunk, who looks as if he has rubbed cake mix on his face, shouts,…
Mark Raczkowski makes an unassuming soldier in the war on terror. The 72-year-old Polish immigrant with aquamarine eyes and silver hair shuffles around his tidy Coconut Creek condo in slippers and a blue dress shirt with a gold watch worn outside the left cuff. On his small dining table are…
The warm California sun drenches the buildings in reds and oranges as another hazy January day comes to a close in Los Angeles. On the rooftop bar of the Standard, a swanky, downtown hotel, you have a panoramic view of the whole city, with the Hollywood sign a distant and…
It’s about 10:30 p.m. linear time on a Saturday night, and 40 partially conscious humanoids have just completed an hourlong, energy-generating “Dance of Power” and drum circle beneath towering light sculptures. Dressed in everything from earth-toned linens to tacky lycra, they are splayed across the dance floor like massacre victims…
The times, that is: Hats off to Christopher Smith for the February 19 cover illustration of Courtney Hambright. (“Drunk Side of the Moon”) He captured her to a T! Now the question is, does Hambright do her male impersonation at bookings or exclusively at the Downtowner? She has set the…
Just before it reaches Sunrise Boulevard from the south, Fort Lauderdale’s NW 19th Avenue shrivels into a forlorn road lined by the razor-wire-topped walls of a junkyard. At the end, oil-soaked asphalt gives way to tire tracks woven in mud. Then, a scrubby, sandy berm rises about three feet to…
Mike Smarro offers a smile as he takes drink orders from behind the bar at Georgie’s Alibi on a sunny February afternoon. A handsome, muscular 36-year-old wearing a baseball cap and a stylish 5 o’clock shadow, Smarro has been finding the upcoming election hard to ignore. Since the beginning of…
Dude, come on in. Welcome to the brand- new Broward County North Jail. Have a seat. No, not there. Over here in this boxy wooden chair with the wires. Built not for comfort but utility, you could say. No, no, no. It’s not — ha ha — the electric chair…
