Inside the bedroom of a beachside apartment, a tall, muscular, Italian-American dominatrix with attractive, sharp features and multicolored dreads was putting a damsel named Lumina in some pretty serious distress. She wrapped the naked, feminine body in black plastic wrap, stretching the dense material down Lumina’s arms and legs, binding…
A high-rolling Miami developer came to Pembroke Park and left with a prized piece of public land. For their trouble, taxpayers stand to lose more than $3 million on the deal. The little Broward County town still doesn’t even know what hit it. Back in 2002, Pinnacle Housing Group agreed…
George Don’t Like No Jabberin’ Fort Lauderdale City Manager George “Gummybear” Gretsas don’t like no unnecessary palaver during City Commission meetings. Capeech? If those elected people talk too much, it encourages, er, disagreements. And you know where that could lead, right? So Duh Boss conducts special one-on-one “conferences” with commissioners…
The website www.becomeaplayer.com is one among many resources that tell guys how to pick up women. It offers advice like “constantly repeat her name” and “change the amounts of attention you give her.” Armed with these tricks, you can apparently drive a female crazy. Scary, ladies, ain’t it? It seems…
Investigate and Obliterate More grist for the antibrutality mill: Lucky Trevor Aaronson. He has the writing skills and investigative tools to handle an anaconda, and he has found the perfect bottomless cesspool, the Hollywood Police Department (“Hollywood’s Finest,” June 30). Never will he have the heartbreak of finding layer upon…
Rex was going about a buck-ten when he entered a turn too fast and low-ended his bike, a new Kawasaki ZX-12R that slid away from him like a runaway bobsled. In shock, he screamed incoherently at a woman who stopped her car to see if he was all right. This…
A decade ago, Hollywood Police Chief Richard Witt blew the whistle on corrupt hiring practices at his agency. From 1990 to 1995, qualified candidates had consistently been passed over in favor of unsuitable ones, he said. Many of those given jobs were friends or relatives of high-ranking city cops. An…
Ira Cor says he likes to stay behind the scenes. The real-estate broker contends he’s happy to get government deals done while the politicians — or “electeds,” as he calls them — take the credit. That’s one reason even some veteran political insiders don’t know exactly what Cor does. The…
Bekoff’s Boats You’ve seen Bob Bekoff’s boats, though, if you live in Fort Lauderdale, you’ve probably never boarded one. They’re those 42-foot water taxis that ply local rivers and bays at a jellyfish pace. Bekoff’s company, Water Taxi/Water Bus, is one of Liquordale’s choicest ventures, pulling in a tidy $1.5…
When Revolution, the downtown Fort Lauderdale spot for live rock ‘n’ roll, announced that Nicole Richie would be its surprise “red carpet arrival” last Friday night, Night Court smelled trouble. Come on now, people. Do you expect me to believe that the Revolutionaries would bring in someone so mainstream? Remember…
Free Weekly No Pest But keep it outta the Glades anyway: I was glad to read Wyatt Olson’s June 23 feature story, “Attack of the Killer Weed.” It was a thorough review of the exotic pest plant, Lygodium. I was especially happy to learn that there is extensive research under…
In the 1979 science-fiction film Alien, the crew of the freighter ship Nostromo lands on a harsh and barren planetoid to investigate a distress signal. It discovers the remains of a starship that had crashed, perhaps eons ago, its crew mysteriously wiped out. Quivering in the ship’s cavernous underbelly are…
Hey, remember Young Circle in downtown Hollywood? Sure was a swell little patch of earth, before the city’s grand planners envisioned something called an ArtsPark on the spot. It all started with a modest spruce-up. The county chipped in $5 million. Developers said they’d pony up hundreds of thousands of…
Fish Wrap Neighborhood newsletters are generally innocuous throwaways that put lost cats and recent home sales on the front page. Tailpipe likes to keep one around just to wrap his leftover soot in. But Steve Kelley’s monthly rags are different. The Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur publishes 13 neighborhood or civic association…
“This girl was beautiful. She was gorgeous. She was only 21 years old, and a trick had bought her a brand-new Pontiac Firebird,” recalls 57-year-old, semiretired pimp Charleston Blue. “Then she handed the car over to me. Funny thing is, she was a renegade whore. She’d never been with a…
Cops, Look Out Wait till you see next week’s feature story: New Times reporter Trevor Aaronson never ceases to amaze me. You would never read an article on police corruption in the daily newspaper like Aaronson’s June 16 “Cop, Judge, and Jury.” Such a story would be too dangerous to…
On October 8, 2003, Ronald Addvensky received the visit every drug dealer fears. Two Hollywood police narcotics detectives, Pete Salvo and Robert Wolfkill, armed with a search warrant, raided the 57-year-old’s mobile home near South Park Road in Hollywood. The detectives found a box containing 54.5 grams of cocaine, 12…
Send All Medals by Mail Tailpipe was thrilled damned near to the auto parts graveyard when he opened the envelope to find signed, personalized notes from Dick Cheney and Bill Frist. President and Mrs. Bush wanted to honor this rusty cylinder, they said, for all the things it did to…
The banter in the back room of Bob Roth’s New River Groves, a laid-back, family-run fruit stand and shipping business at Griffin Road just west of Florida’s Turnpike, smacks of lazy, stuffed-belly revelry. It comes as easy as pie, which just happens to be one of the place’s signature products…
The Sun-Sentinel Responds Don’t do it, kids: Chuck Strouse’s June 9 column about wayward high school journalist Nazish Ahmad (“Steal This Prose”) should serve as a cautionary tale for big-league newsrooms, mine included, but he stopped me in my tracks when he wrote, “The young woman was pushed too hard,…
On a sweltering Saturday, Donald Tobkin suns himself poolside behind the pinky-peach monolith that is the Ramada Inn on Hollywood Beach. Children scamper and catapult themselves into the turquoise pool. Shore birds honk overhead. From this spot, perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the surf, the sea is smelled…
As she ducks into a peach-colored skyscraper in downtown West Palm Beach, Lois Frankel suffers a moment of confusion. “I have no idea what this is. Do you know what this is for?” Frankel, the city’s imperious mayor, punches the penthouse button in the elevator, trying to remember the nature…
