Gangland-style murder. That’s how the 2001 slaying of gambling mogul Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis is remembered, and for good reason. That night, February 6, while driving in his black BMW on Miami Road near downtown Fort Lauderdale, Boulis pressed the brakes to avoid hitting another car traveling slowly on the two-lane…
Listen up, kiddies. Next time you want to buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Stubbs the Zombie, you might need Mom’s permission. State Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla sponsored a bill in the Senate two weeks ago that would prohibit minors from buying or renting video games…
Ben Graber, the man slated to become Broward County’s next mayor, is currently battling to lose you $10 million. It’s taxpayers’ money that could go to, oh, people who really need it, like the thousands of displaced Hurricane Wilma victims. Instead, Graber wants it to go to his top campaign…
Ever seen the sad folks slipping dollar after dollar into the bar-top video machines at your local dive? You know the machine I’m talking about, the one that quizzes you on sex trivia or your anagram skills or, best of all, your ability to compare two images and find five…
Lemme Sleep Generators generate neighborhood noise: In response to your lead story on October 27 regarding Wilma the Bitch (“Category Too Much”), I offer the following. It is not so much frustration with Wilma as with the degrees of human selfishness that weren’t washed away by the storm: Generator etiquette…
A few months past his 16th birthday, Jerrod Miller longed for manhood. Throughout the beginning of 2005, the Delray Beach teen had been searching for part-time work in his hometown, but landing a first job isn’t easy — even more difficult if you’re a black teenager. Tall and lanky, with…
A natural disaster can give you profound, unwitting glimpses into the secret workings of Big Government. Wilma barreled into the Broward County School Board building last week, splattering much of its guts around downtown. Two days after the storm, Tailpipe sifted through the piles of insulation and dry leaves on…
The city sidewalk in front of my house rose up five feet from the ground like a cobra ready to strike. Then it shimmied like a voodoo dancer. It occurred to me that we might be in trouble. I stood there watching that massive concrete sidewalk doing its jig and…
It was the Tuesday night after the storm. With a 7 p.m. curfew, there wasn’t a hell of a lot for a nightlife columnist to do in a town that hasn’t been bitch-slapped this hard since the ’50s. I had a freezer full of pork loin hours from thawing into…
Still Seedy After All These Years Hambright makes a homesick Floridian warm and fuzzy: Every time I’m back in my hometown, it seems more and more corporate and strait-laced; thanks to Courtney Hambright for writing columns that renew my faith in its sketchy seediness (Night Court, “Saving Face,” October 20)…
Welcome to the Stone Age, bitches. While you’re waiting in a four-block line to buy a tank of $3 gasoline, maybe it dawns on you that things would be a lot easier if you could do like Fred Flintstone and thwack your feet against the pavement to get your dinosaur-bone…
War is the hot industry. Recently, New Times described how Pompano Beach’s Point Blank Body Armor has raked in millions since 9/11, despite repeated allegations that the company produces unsafe body armor (see “Vested Interests,” September 29). Although military officials, police departments, and even company employees have raised questions about…
First a rock smashed the front window. Then, after a metal shutter was slammed shut, a bottle exploded against it. Then another. And another. A thousand Haitians burst through a police barricade one steamy summer Saturday in 1990 and swarmed a storefront off Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. Inside, as muscular…
October marks the 90th birthday of this mélange of pavement and sawgrass we know variously as “The 954,” “The Brow Cow” and “The Official Home of Spring Break 1986.” Yes, it’s a joyous month for our very own Broward County, which was scratched together from portions of Miami-Dade and Palm…
Looky Looky Not even “Geeky Tiki”: Thanks to Jonathan Zwickel for his October 13 article, “Playin’ Huki.” And thanks even more for not titling the article “Tacky Tiki”! “Curvy Formikahini” Mwah! Alice Berry Houston Loved the Book Someday he might even read it: Good article on Sean Rowe (“Blood on…
Michael Ray Roberts was just nine miles out of West Palm Beach on August 1 when he spotted what no drug smuggler ever wants to see. Painted across the hull of a ship on the horizon was the Coast Guard’s blood-red stripe, a terrifying sight for a man with 400…
Max Caulfield didn’t know why he’d been pulled over, but he knew it was deadly serious. He couldn’t see the police in his rearview mirror, but he knew they were there, hidden in the darkness behind a glaring wall of white light. He couldn’t hear them on the elevated stretch…
The chant “Here we go, Steelers, here we go!” was winding down at the very packed Humphrey’s Tavern and Grill on 33rd after the Steelers touched out the Chargers last Monday night. Hip, hip, whatever! Far more interesting than the carousing over the game was the line of questioning I…
You’re young, you’re gifted, you’re gay. Keep away, dude. You ain’t nothin’. Under the law, you still can’t get married, can’t file a joint tax return, can’t adopt kids, and — maybe the ultimate insult, as well as a senseless rebuff that makes pariahs of a whole class of people…
Last time Tailpipe met Brigitte Lang, she was talking about the “circle of very positive people” who came together ten years ago to put out the first issue of Happy Times. The free good-news monthly newspaper — with its steady diet of cute pets, triumphs over adversity, and accounts of…
When the train roared by just a few yards in front of me, Sean Rowe disappeared. One moment, I was watching Rowe walk toward me under the streetlights with a bemused look on his face; the next, there was a locomotive raging northward where he used to be. My hands…
It’s Wednesday night at 11, the Broward Center is disgorging hundreds of The Phantom of the Opera viewers into the hot Florida night, and the friends I watched the play with were trying to say their goodbyes. A couple of soporific hours of Andrew Lloyd Webber and all of a…
