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The internet is abuzz with rumors that Phil Fasciana, the guitarist for death metal band Malevolent Creation, shot and killed a man during an attempted robbery in or around Fort Lauderdale. There are also counter-rumors that the story is unverifiable and that Fasciana is a lying "douche turd."  The Juice attempts to get to the bottom of the story.

On the Fourth of July, the website Blabbermouth.net quoted Fasciano as saying that he went into a convenience store to buy chocolate milk and was assaulted by a man with a gun.

"I nearly shit myself," the website quotes him as saying, "because the dude looked wacked out of his mind and fired four shots directly at me and I went down to the ground because I thought I was surely shot. After about 30 seconds, I realized I was not hit at all and the shooter thought I was dead or injured and started attacking the store worker when I snuck up behind the burglar and talked [to] him and took the gun out of his hands and told him to get out of the store. He then reached in his sock and pulled another gun out and pointed it at me and that's when I fired two shots into his head, killing him instantly!"

He added, "Needless to say, all charges have been dropped and the store owner has offered me a lifetime of chocolate milk! Ha Ha!"

But the plot thickened when a competing website, RockRadio.co.uk, got in touch with a Fort Lauderdale detective, who says there have been no murders in July. (More after the jump)

Flickr User: NIOSH - Nat Inst for Occupational Safety & Health

Who will mind the builders in Pembroke Pines?

Few places illustrate South Florida's housing bust better than Pembroke Pines. A few years ago, it was one of the nation's fastest-growing cities, with a population that more than ballooned from 65,500 in 1990 to 147,000 in 2007. Now, thanks to a multimillion-dollar drop in permit revenue from new construction, the city has axed its building department. The job of reviewing plans and inspecting wiring, drainage, and other building essentials has been outsourced to a Fort Lauderdale firm, Calvin, Giordano & Associates.

This is troubling, not just for the 33 city workers who have lost their jobs, but also for those of us who worry about little things like conflicts of interest. Calvin, Giordano already does engineering work for the city of Pembroke Pines. The company's most recent project, approved in May, was a $2.7 million contract to overhaul the city's waste-water treatment system. Another big-ticket job the firm snagged was planning and surveying land for the City Center project-- an 80-acre housing and shopping center that the city invested $66 million in, but is now trying to unload because of the real estate bust.

Can Calvin, Giordano really be objective when reviewing building plans for projects that could also pad its pocketbook? The Juice called City Manager Charles Dodge to inquire, but his secretary said he's on vacation until next week. I'm sure that's a great comfort to all the former building inspectors who are now looking for a vacation from unemployment.

Flickr user: myyogaonline

They let you do this at the library?

OK, so a few hours of breathing and stretching won't get your house out of foreclosure or convince your boss to postpone layoffs. But these days, anything free is appealing, and you'd be amazed how good it feels to pay nothing for exercise classes that usually cost $17 a pop.

That's why I'm going to gush for a few minutes about the classes being offered at the new West Palm Beach Public Library. This is not your grandma's library. It's got free yoga on Saturdays, meditation on Tuesdays, tango lessons on Thursdays. Earlier this week, it even had Wii bowling for seniors. Did I mention this is all free?

"The idea is health and fitness," explains reference librarian Theresa Trabucco.

Haleigh Cummings has been missing for five months.

It's been five months since 5-year-old Haleigh Cummings disappeared from the bedroom of her family's trailer home in Satsuma, a rural community north of Ocala National Forest. Haleigh, with her blond hair and eager smile, captured the attention of the Nancy Grace media brigades just after the memorial service for the previous missing-Florida-child-of-the-moment, Caylee Anthony.

But since then, law enforcement officers have searched 4,000 leads and come up with no suspect in a case they are treating as an abduction. Most media outlets have stopped sending camera crews to Satsuma. Yet a Fort Lauderdale bounty hunter has made the search for Haleigh his mission, investing thousands of dollars and jeopardizing his day job as a bail bondsman in his quest.

"You got to be crazy to do this shit," admits William Staubs, who goes by the nickname "Cobra." "I just pray that she's still alive."

Flickr user: Heneghan

Do you smell a new scandal, Palm Beach?

Now that three former Palm Beach County commissioners have gone to prison on federal corruption charges, it's tempting believe that local government has been reborn in a cleaner, more-efficient fashion. But of course, the cynics among us are still trying to sort out the damage that ex-commissioners Mary McCarty, Warren Newell, and Tony Masilotti have done to the cash-strapped county. If they were accepting gifts from developers and steering contracts to favored bond-underwriting firms, what other businesses enjoyed an especially cozy relationship with them?

Which brings us to CH2M Hill, a Colorado-based engineering firm that wins government contracts all over the country. Here in Palm Beach, the company is the primary consultant for construction projects at the county's airports. So far, a contract that began in 2005 for "general airport planning and design" has topped $11.6 million (the County Commission approved the latest cost increase in January).

That's a nice chunk of change, especially for a firm that has been tied to at least one major  corruption scandal in the past five years. In indictments filed in 2004 and 2005, federal prosecutors linked CH2M Hill to a bribery scheme in East Cleveland, just outside Cleveland, Ohio.

Cops don't like it when you spit at them.

It's 5 p.m. on a Tuesday. You're drunk, and trying mightily to push your car out of a water-filled ditch. Now, you have to explain to some cop that your day job is working at a prison?

Alas, this was the sad plight of Lisa Mae Hawkins, arrested this week on DUI charges near Fort Myers. According to the Naples Daily News, Hawkins, 48, made the mistake of telling the Lee County Sheriff's deputy who arrested her that she was an officer at the Glades Correctional Institution. That's the very same prison that recently made cheery headlines for becoming a "Faith and Character Based Institution." They probably don't look kindly on officers who get caught drunk in broad daylight, extracting their cars from ravines.

To add insult to injury, Hawkins had chewing tobacco in her mouth when the deputy tried to test her breath. According to the Daily News, she spit the wad at him "as if to say 'look what you missed.'"

Very classy, Officer Hawkins.You make Belle Glade proud.

Morning in Ft. Lauderdale becomes Electra

Big Love for our hometown this week. Not only did Sherman's Travel name Fort Liquordale one of the top 10 most underrated cities in the nation last week, second only to, well, to Baltimumble, but Carmen Electra has announced to the world that she was just simply taken aback by how much fun she had rubbing her fiance with suntan oil all over our beaches. According to Sherman, visitors to FL might spend the day this way:

"Stroll the stunning seaside promenade and comb a strand of sand that rivals Miami Beach, then set out for some irresistible shopping, and finally cap off your day with a culinary feast at one of the city's stellar international restaurants. Combined with a surprisingly sophisticated arts and museum scene, an extensive yachting and golfing network, and one of America's top gay and lesbian scenes, Fort Lauderdale's status as Florida's fashionable destination du jour is long overdue."

As for Electra, she told USA Today that she loved our beautiful scenery and our beautiful bodies (and we love yours too, Carm!). "It was really relaxing," she said.

Still, unnamed sources told New Times that when the people in charge found out Sherman and Electra were coming, they deliberately hid from view:

1) anyone claiming to be the Devil
2) anyone holding a sign depicting Obama as Adolph Hitler
3) any teenager harboring concealed diagrams of feline anatomy
4) all thermometers depicting temperatures of 110 degrees or higher
5) pythons measuring longer than 15 feet
6) Cher impersonators
7) the Jungle Queen

Something for nothing -- just $34,000 in annual taxes!

Miles Brannan and his wife are feeling the crunch just like everybody else. The Brannans are both South Florida realtors, and when their income dipped with the economy they put their $3 million Fort Lauderdale waterfront house on the market, only to watch it sit there idling. The Brannans had bought the place, at 2824 NE 36th Street, almost new in 2005; they'd added a movie theater, a salt water system for the pool, and a lot of expensive stonework to a house already replete with luxuries: a separate game room, a 4-car garage. But this year they'd had to sell the boat they parked at their 100-foot dock, and when the house failed to move, Brannan came up with the idea of offering it by lottery.

$10 sound like a pretty good deal for a 6,000 square foot, six bedroom house? The Brannans have already sold 75,000 tickets for $10 a piece on the website they set up, and they plan to keep the lottery going until they sell 300,000 -- or until December 25th, whichever comes first. "Actually we just looked on zillow.com [a real estate site] and the value of the house is going up, I think it was $3.2 million last time we checked," Brannan said by phone today. "For awhile the mortgage market took a lot of people out of the market, foreign investors were not buying because the lending policies were against them. They could just go to the Bahamas for a vacation home. But it looks like things are starting to turn around again."

Kitchen fit for temperemental chef

The Branans plan to move to a "more affordable" Lauderdale neighborhood "for the time being," Brannan says. He doesn't sound particularly pained about it either. The final drawing, he hopes, will be held at the house, maybe with a celebrity to do the honors. "We've approached Jason Taylor," Brennan confides. "But I suppose it depends on his schedule."

Latifah: smells like a good, stiff drink

Used to be the big celebrities sold mink. Then it was milk. Now it's perfume. Parlux Fragrances of Fort Lauderdale, whose corporate offices are on North Andrews Avenue, had revenues of $153 million in 2008. The company has fashioned itself into one of the fragrance market's top contenders, churning out over the last half dozen years a successful stable of thoroughbred bottles, starting with Paris Hilton ("Heiress," "Fairy Dust"), Jessica Simpson ("Jessica's Fancy"), and tennis star Andy Roddick, whose silver, mushroom-shaped bottle resembles not so much a tennis raquet as a very chic sex toy. Most recently Parlux has scored partnerships with rap royalty: Queen Latifah, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and Kanye West.

We phoned Parlux's PR maven, Lori Zelenko yesterday in New York to ask her about Queen Latifah's perfume, "Queen," scheduled to debut this fall, and also about what happens to the market for a celeb perfume when, say, the celeb goes into rehab, gets trounced on the courts for the gazillionenth time by Roger Federer, or is busted for assault and battery.

Mayor Frankel tests the power of her new software

Ever since West Palm Beach was designated the second most "technologically advanced" city of its size in the U.S. by a Digital Communities survey last year, we've been waiting to see if Mayor Lois Frankel was going to start jetting around to commission meetings in a flying saucer. It didn't exactly make us proud to learn we'd tied with Independence Missouri and Richardson Texas, but still, we'd made the list. Maybe the new City Center was going to turn out to be a marvel to rival those cool futuristic displays at the Science Museum - you know, city employees appearing as holograms, letters whisked from office to office in pneumatic tubes, that kind of thing. That $154 million the city spent on the Center ought to buy a lot of gizmos, right?

So it was sort of disappointing to learn that all that high tech energy was going into "addressing cost inefficiencies specifically related to obtaining construction permits" according to a news release from Avolve Software. Avolve has evidently sold the city a program called ProjectDox, which "serves as a conduit that feeds a variety of programs in an effort to more efficiently manage complex internal processes and provide outward-facing tools to better serve respective constituents faced with the effects of continuing growth and budget restrictions," Avolve CEO Ron Loback told EarthTimes.com  

If you can decode that sentence without using special hi-tech doublespeak software you are a lot smarter than us. But we are in favor of anything that will speed up those needless construction delays in downtown West Palm, anything that would make it faster to waive building heights limitations. Maybe the new software will also work to muzzle the objections of property owners tired of seeing their tax dollars diverted to big-ego projects, to defang critics of "pay to play," in which developers pull out their checkbooks and make campaign donations to grease the wheels. Perhaps now secretaries will merely have to type in the word "Catalfulmo" to instantly generate reams of permits. Now that would be some cool software.