Broward Palm Beach News Blog

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Jeb Bush

​Your former governor was in Atlanta recently, earnestly pretending to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination for president. Or maybe he was testing a theory about mind control: that if you keep telling people something that's false, maybe they'll come to believe that it's true.

If so, Jeb Bush should take a cue from those windowless, clockless casinos -- the key is to contain the encroaching forces of reality. That's what appeared to break the spell for an Atlanta columnist, Maureen Downey, who had just finished enjoying enduring a replay of Bush's Power Point presentation (Can you possibly imagine how stultifying that was?), when she was bombarded by an email from the ACLU, which just happens to be filing a suit against the same utopian education system that Bush left in his wake.

Clearly, one of the two was full o' shit. But which will prove more convincing to the education columnist?

Photo courtesy Fort Lauderdale Police

David Forget

​Just slap on those handcuffs. His name may be David R. Forget, but he remembers this drill. According to police, the registered sex offender who lived in Plantation believed -- truly believed -- that when he arrived at their meeting place, he would see the 15-year-old girl with whom he'd been having amorous online chats.

But we know how these stories end. The 27-year-old was pounced upon by the Fort Lauderdale Police, and now he's facing a new batch of child sex charges. Full release after the jump.

Flickr: foXXtail

Deerfield's Mango Festival has been a financial juggling act

​I've been stymied in my efforts to get an answer to the question I put at the bottom of this mammoth post from yesterday, about the Deerfield Beach's Mango Festival. Namely, why did the city cut the Mango Festival a check for $36,000 in June 2008?

Acting parks and recreation director George Edmunds might know, but he hasn't returned calls or emails. Nor has City Manager Mike Mahaney (update: until just a moment ago). Vice Mayor Sylvia Poitier, the festival's leading patron on the commission, isn't picking up her phone, either.

The president of the Mango Festival, Norm Edwards, didn't act on a appointment we had to discuss the issue yesterday. And he hasn't a returned a message I left for him today. So we'll have to try cracking the case without help from the people closest to it.

Flickr user: tshein

Think man, think!

​Lee Abrams is an infamous figure around the Sun-Sentinel newsroom. He's chief innovation officer for the Tribune Co., which owns the Sun-Sentinel, WSFL-TV (CW), the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and a slew of other newspapers and television stations across the country.

Abrams ordered the dramatic redesign of the Sun-Sentinel last year, which ushered in the era of the enormous red-and-white S, and just two stories on the front page. But he's mostly known for his "think piece" emails, which are meant to motivate and inspire the troops but are often long, exhaustive, stream-of-consciousness diatribes, littered with trademark phrases such as AFDI -- Actually Fucking Doing It.

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The Oasis of the Seas leaving Finland.

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Flickr: Arroz con Nori

My precious...

​If the man who stole the bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue from the Weston liquor store thought that this blog -- which covers only major breaking crime stories -- was going to overlook this case, well, that person does not know this blog. We will solve this case, and we all we ask in exchange is for the victim to make a gift of that bottle to the New Times newsroom. But there will be plenty of time to talk about rewards. Let's look at the Broward Sheriff's Office release for clues on this caper:

The suspect was slick about his approach. After removing the bottle from the plexi-glass case where it was displayed, he grabbed another bottle and put that in its place. Store employees didn't notice the item was missing until Monday, November 2, but the entire heist was caught on surveillance video.

The tape shows a heavy-set man walking into the store Friday, Oct. 30, at around 6 p.m.

Flickr: DarkHairedGirl

​Poor Frank Sarcona, AKA Frank Sarcone, AKA Dave Johnson. Whatever the chap's name, he lacks the creativity to concoct new scams. Sarcona -- let's stick with that -- was convicted last week by a federal jury for a host of fraud charges, after he violated the terms of an injunction that barred him from "deceptive marketing practices." Sarcona's specialty: weight-loss drugs that promised impossible results.

This criminal conviction came ten years after a civil regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, won a judgment against Sarcona for exactly the same kind of scam. A 1999 Sun-Sentinel article (sorry, but there isn't a link) explains how in the mid-1990s, Sarcona promised "SlimAmerica" buyers they could lose 49 pounds in 29 days without diet or exercise.

The physician who backed this improbable claim: Dr. Howard Retzer, who apparently knew nothing of it. FTC attorneys found Retzer in a nursing home -- the elderly man suffered from dementia and hadn't practiced medicine for years.

Flickr user: samcrockett

Want to buy your old desk back?

​No, the paper's not closing. But after losing hundreds of employees to layoffs and buyouts and shuttering its presses so the Sun-Sentinel could print the paper, the Palm Beach Post has a lot of extra office equipment laying around.

Desks, chairs, bookcases, and filing cabinets are being hawked from the paper's headquarters in West Palm Beach all this week.

After the jump, check out the email that was sent to Post employees last week,

Flickr: Romance is alive.

At this rate, what next? Do-It-Yourself home liposuction kits?

​I know this may come as bad news to the middle-class folks with a jones for cosmetic surgery, but the days of bargain Botox may soon be over. This is the kind of article that politicians tend to clip out, then paste into a new piece of legislation. It appears to have been inspired by the death in September of Rohie Kah-Orukatan of Weston. From the New York Times:

On Sept. 25, Mrs. Kah-Orukotan, a 37-year-old nurse, entered the Weston MedSpa in Weston, Fla., for a minimally invasive liposuction procedure to remove fat from her abdomen and thighs. During the treatment, she suffered seizures and never regained consciousness.

And here's where politicians get their cue:

Flickr: UN1SON

Gelber

​Usually, we're skeptical when a campaigning politician cites a breaking news story as a basis for new legislation, but we'll suspend that cynicism for the moment. State Sen. Dan Gelber, Democratic candidate for Florida attorney general, has seized on the recent corruption cases in Broward County to demand new laws against official misconduct.

This issue is right in Gelber's wheelhouse: He used to work in the public corruption unit of the federal prosecutor's office in Miami, meaning he worked on cases exactly like the ones those against Broward County and School Board officials. He knows the advantages that a federal prosecutor has in working with an "honest services" statute.

But now that he's a state lawmaker, Gelber also understands how much weaker Florida public corruption laws are. Here's the passage of that blog post that makes a muckraker's heart flutter: