Attorneys at Scott Rothstein's firm landed a highly privileged meeting with the executive leadership of the North Broward Hospital District in September 2008, the month after Rothstein was appointed by his friend, Gov. Charlie Crist, to the nominating committee for Florida's 4th District Court of Appeals, according to documents that were part of an internal investigation at the district.
Also, at that meeting: Broward Health Chief Operating Officer Spencer Levine, who was seeking the judicial appointment by that very same committee on which Rothstein had a vote.
Conspicuous by his absence: Troy Kishbaugh, the acting general counsel, a position that based on the district's charter gave him sole responsibility for selecting outside attorneys, the status Rothstein's firm was seeking. The architect of the meeting: Commissioner Joseph Cobo, who is currently weathering a criminal investigation for corruption by the Broward State Attorney's Office.
Yup, this is going to get complicated. Let's get into it after the jump.
Foster: Proving South Florida still has a few good men
What are the odds? Of 10 extraordinary people chosen from around the globe as the finalists for CNN's Heroes of 2009, two of them are doing their good deeds based in South Florida. And until this Thursday the 19th, you can click here to vote for one of them, possibly netting them $100,000.
Andrea Ivory goes door-to-door in Miami in her mobile mammography van, bringing free breast cancer screenings to women who are uninsured. Roy Foster of Lake Worth runs Stand Down House, helping homeless veterans in recovery from drug and alcohol addictions. At Stand Down House vets get job training, substance abuse counseling, and help finding permanent work and housing.
Documents recently made available by the North Broward Hospital District show that former general counsel Laura Seidman made major improvements to a legal department that -- by some indications -- had been full of cronyism and waste under attorney Bill Scherer. The most striking example of Seidman's progress: She reduced the district's outside billings by a third in just her first year, a savings of nearly $2 million for a public hospital district that depends in part on your tax dollars.
These findings suggest that whatever outrage there was over the political friendships that helped Seidman get hired in March 2006, there ought to have been even more outrage for the apparent political reasons she was pushed out the door two years later.
Since May, Sam Goren has been the acting general counsel of the North Broward Hospital District, a position that allows him to dole out millions of dollars in legal work and makes him one of the county's most powerful attorneys.
But the manner in which Goren landed that job keeps getting murkier and murkier. The most recent cause for discomfort comes from within a lawsuit filed by the man Goren replaced, Marc Goldstone. Hospital district commissioners fired Goldstone in mid-May, in part based on their consultation with Goren. Commissioners claimed that Goldstone -- who moved here from Tennessee -- had misled them about the manner in which he was going to become licensed to practice law in Florida. Can you guess what licensed Florida attorney was advising Goldstone as to how he should gain admission to the Florida Bar?
This weekend, Hollywood Beach will swarm with impossibly ripped humans, all here for the NPC National Bodybuilding, Figure & Bikini Championships, which is making its annual appearance at South Florida's Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa. For rubberneckers who can't fathom how a person can get that muscular, the answer's in the fitness supplement booths.
More than 60 sports-related companies have flocked to the event, the better to showcase their most injected popular products. Tickets for the November 20-21 HGH extravaganza range from $35 to $125 and can be purchased at nationalbodybuilding.com or at the door.
Shortly after Marc Goldstone began his new job as general counsel of Broward Health in November of last year, he found that the public hospital district -- which is among the nation's largest -- had been violating a range of federal laws and court orders, some of which jeopardized the safety of patients.
He also found that at least two of the seven commissioners who hired him had committed grievous ethical lapses that warranted change. In a suit he filed yesterday afternoon in Fort Lauderdale's U.S. District Court, Goldstone claims that he was fired in mid-May before he could make these reforms and that the decision by commissioners was based on their desire to protect a corrupt status quo.
It was a balls-to-balls battle, with Joey "Jaws" Chestnut squeezing out a victory over Pat "Deep Dish" Berletti at Sunday night's Masters Meatball Eating Championship in Las Vegas. The competitive-eating marathon was sanctioned by Major League Eating and hosted by Broward restaurateur Steve Martorano, the tattooed hulk we recently profiled here.
Martorano, whose celeb-heavy Fort Lauderdale Cafe Martorano was named "Best Restaurant in Broward" by New Times this year, insisted that competitors honor his oversized meatballs by using utensils. Fork in hand, the six-foot, 218-pound Chestnut edged out Berletti by putting away 50 to Berletti's 49.
And the 105-pound Sonya Thomas swallowed 42 meatballs to finish third. It was all over in ten minutes.
Chestnut is currently ranked number one by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. But we don't think Sunday's contest was too much of a burden: Martorano's meatballs have been known to reduce hard-nosed Juice reporters to tears. We'll be heading over there tonight to stage our own mini-meatball-eating contest.
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?
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.
We can all agree with what Florida's new senator, George LeMieux, says above, that this health-care fraud thing should stop. And he makes it sound so easy!
But if you watch the longer version of that speech above, you'll see that LeMieux's debut piece of legislation is part of a larger, grander Republican scheme:
This Thursday, Tamarac residents will be able to hop on a bike for free, then take it for a spin, all at the expense of Humana, a health-care corporation that's out to encourage bicycle riding as an alternative to driving cars. But "Freewheelin," a program that first launched in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2007, arrives just as a similar program in Paris has been found to be a profound failure.
This recent New York Times article about that Paris' bicycle rental system suggests that the bikes have been used not purely as a means of transportation but also to express political frustration. The same poor and working-class people for whom the bikes could be most valuable appear to be stealing them and vandalizing them.
Like Paris' program, Freewheelin loans residents a bike in exchange for a swiped credit card. But in France, that didn't prevent
Way back on Friday, when it was still October and Scott Rothstein was still a pillar of Broward County society, I spoke with Sheriff Al Lamberti. Not about Rothstein, who was a major a campaign fundraiser of Lamberti's. Rather, I spoke to Lamberti about his mustache.
I realize that such topics seem a bit trivial compared to the topic that will rule today's news cycle, but I still feel obligated to post that interview if only to correct the record to reflect Lamberti's being a good sport for a goofy blog series and a charitable cause.
In promoting "Movember," I sought to convince locals that mustaches really are a mark of distinguished, powerful gentleman, and I recognized Lamberti for boasting the region's third-most formidable 'stache. That post, however, lists several hard-hitting questions that went unanswered. After the jump, Lamberti himself solves his own mustache mysteries.
The Reynolds 'stache in full bloom at the 1992 Emmys
We have some splendid local mustaches, but the only suspense in this week's contest was for readers who forgot that Burt Reynolds is eligible based on his brief residence at a West Palm Beach addiction treatment center. Reynolds lives just north of the Palm Beach County border, in Hobe Sound, but he spent much of his youth -- at least the mustache-growing years -- in Riviera Beach.
It may be a little early to anoint Tony Sparano the savior of the franchise, but at the very least he's made the Dolphins fun to watch again. And he definitely un-did the damage to a previously proud tradition of upper-lip hair inflicted by one Dave Wanndstedt.
Juice hereby awards Sparano with the region's silver medal 'stache.
The countdown is a Juice effort to encourage our fellow locals to participate in the Movember fund-raising drive, whereby men grow mustaches in the month of November to benefit prostate cancer. Here's the fifth, fourth, and third most celebrated mustaches in the bi-county area.
Everybody's still talking about Crist gaffe-ing (lying?) over the Obama appearance, but this quotable moment is, I think, much more precious. Let's pull out a portion of that Sarasota Herald-Tribune article, which asked for Crist's opinion of a Senate Democrat health-care reform package that would allow states to opt out of government-run health care -- the so-called public option.
"My view of it is that the public option I think may be sort of a Trojan horse to a government takeover of health care," Crist said. "And I think our administration has demonstrated that's not what we favor, nor do I think that's what Floridians really want."
But Crist refused to say whether he would support letting Florida "opt out" of the government plan if the Senate proposal becomes law.
"I would rather see them pass something that doesn't have a public option in it," he said.
So he took the bait. Your prospective Florida senator is telling Floridians that they should reject the option of having an option of a public health-care plan. Does that make sense?
Batman and Lamberti in the same photo. So that's not his secret.
You may have noticed there's been a pause since we unveiled the fourth most formidable mustache in Broward and Palm Beach counties. That's because we were really hoping to get a comment from the man behind Mustache No. 3: Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti. And it's become clear that those hopes have been dashed.
Does "consumer option" sound more inviting than "public option"? How about "competitive option"? In case it does, Fox News is warning its partisan audience that whatever West Broward Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Nancy Pelosi call it, it's still a "public option" -- which still translates to the dreaded "big government."
Normally, efforts to re-brand public policy, deserve the eye rolls they get. But then you look at polls like this one, which suggest that roughly a quarter of the population has a knee-jerk opposition to policies that sound public option-y but who will reverse that opposition if the same plan is described as giving them a "choice" between a government health care plan and a private one. It's roughly the difference between a plan that only half of Americans support and one that three-quarters of Americans' support.
So if it boils down to semantics, and if -- as those polls attest -- opponents of the public option don't understand the public option, why not try re-packaging it?
Last week, we told you about Dr. Bernard Zaragoza, the Harvard-educated surgeon who in 2007 operated on an 83-year-old man who had an inflamed gallbladder. Zaragoza was supposed to remove the gallbladder but took out the man's kidney instead.
However innocent the mistake was, the original penalty seemed a bit light. Zaragoza was to pay a $5,000 fine, write a letter of concern to the Florida Medical Board, give a one-hour lecture on wrong-side surgeries, and perform 50 hours of community service.
Or at least, that was the settlement Zaragoza and his attorney hashed out with attorneys for the Florida Department of Health. But the Florida Medical Board refused to sign off on that deal, recommending more severe penalties.
The South Broward Medical District was found not guilty of malpractice in the case of a Fort Lauderdale mom who lost all her limbs after being misdiagnosed by doctors, but the case is far from over. A Broward judge has taken the unusual step of calling for a new trial, saying jurors who cleared Memorial Hospital West doctors failed to look at all the evidence.
For her second trial, expected to occur next year, Lisa Strong's heartbreaking story figures to get national attention, like the article and video that appeared yesterday on CNN.com.
Historians will look back some day on the autumn of
2009 as a period of mass hysteria over a relatively innocuous strain of flu
called H1N1, which so far has killed 1,000 Americans (normal seasonal flu
averages 36,000 U.S. deaths per year, according to the CDC -- see how they arrive at
that count in this Slate article). President Obama has
declared swine flu a "national emergency" that might kill 90,000
In what may come to be called the Great Swine Flu Fuck-Up,
local health officials have vaccinated thousands of schoolkids this year with
the regular seasonal flu nasal mist -- a vaccination which unfortunately
promises to protect them not at all.
The seasonal flu vaccine purportedly
protects against three viral strains that aren't very common this year -- those
three strains together will probably account for as little as five percent of
flu illnesses. But the kicker is, once kids get the seasonal vaccine, they have
to wait an extra month to get the Swine Flu vaccine, which contains a live
virus. The two vaccines given too close together can prevent an effective
immune response.
According to this Palm Beach Post article, parents are livid that their kids can't get vaccinated for the Swine Flu strain, H1N1, that the Post says may have sickened as many as 300 Palm Beach County school kids already this year. But parents should relax. According to an excellent article in the new issue of The Atlantic Monthly, flu vaccines don't work worth a damn anyway.
Dr. Sanford Siegal, the so-called "cookie doctor" from Kendall and partner-turned-rival Dr. Sasson Moulavi of Boca Raton have taken their diet war into the pages of the New York Times. Siegal gets more ink, but he also gets the biggest share of skepticism. From the article, headlined "Skin Deep" in yesterday's edition:
Critics of cookie diets are not convinced. Weight-loss plans that center around a diet of below 1,000 calories do not, they say, lead to long-lasting weight loss and can result in potassium deficiency, gallstones, heart palpitations, weakened kidney function and dizziness.
In April of last year, Deirdra Funcheon wrote this New Times article about the tug of war between Siegal and Moulavi over the cookie diet franchise.
Rape? Sounds like a pre-existing condition to insurance companies.
Christina Turner, a 45-year-old Fort Lauderdale woman, was downtown, letting men at the bar by her drinks. The next thing she remembers is waking up on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she may have been raped. As a safety precaution, she visited her doctor, who prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine. And that's about when things went from horrible to unbelievably fucked.
When Turner went to change health insurance companies a few months later, she learned she was essentially uninsurable. Turner, a former health insurance underwriter, told the Huffington Post that the AIDS meds raised too many health questions, and that even after she repeatedly explained the assault (that doesn't sound fun) insurers wouldn't sell her a policy.
Today, newswires were abuzz with the information that a Washington-based nonprofit group called the Cancer Project, on behalf of two plantiffs in Connecticut, filed a class-action lawsuit against Burger King, McDonald's, and Friendly's. The lawsuit alleges that chicken sold by the three restaurant chains contains a chemical, PhIP, which causes cancer. PhIP can form during the grilling/barbecueing/flame-broiling process.
Now comes the swine flu vaccine, a health care scare that elderly people can totally get behind. They don't mind waiting in line for the chance to inject a weird mist up their noses. They still read newspapers, so the hysterical, bold-faced headlines about vaccine shortages make a big impact at their breakfast tables. Plus, they hate everything to do with swine. It's not kosher, you know.
And yet, they're being told they can't have it. Imagine the insult! Hordes of frail
In June 2007, an 83-year-old man went to the Northwest Medical Center in Margate to have his inflamed gallbladder removed. The surgeon took out the man's kidney instead. Dr. Bernard Zaragoza told the Florida Medical Board that he was "completely mortified" by his error, and that's about the reaction you'd also expect from his patient, identified only as J.C.
According to an article in Health News Florida, J.C. died three weeks after the operation, though from heart failure that may have been unrelated to the surgical snafu. In the two years since, the state medical board has been divided about how to punish Zaragoza.
Tomorrow at 11 a.m., health care reform advocates will gather at the West Palm Beach location of Humana, the health care insurance company, demanding that it stop
denying coverage to policyholders with preexisting conditions and
life-threatening illnesses.
It may lead to scenes like the one above, at Cigna's offices in Chicago.
Floridians' communications director, Al Rogers, tells me
they've assembled only 18 confirmed participants, trained by lawyers for
peaceful protest, ready for weaponless battle and possible arrest.
UFC light heavyweight champion fighter, Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell.
One of the few new industries to rise from the smoldering ashes of
our crumbling modern economy is Mixed Martial Arts. It seems that men in touch with their inner caveman make voracious consumers, snatching up everything from iPhone Apps to videogames and, increasingly, gym memberships.
Not even Iceman's switch from the cage to the ballroom
has managed to cool off this hot sport.
It's really cooking in South Florida. After all, this is the region that produced the sport's biggest celebrity: Kimbo Slice. That, plus the Coconut Creek headquarters of American Top Team, which has ten training facilities in the tricounty area, have made South Florida a mecca for aspiring pro fighters. This weekend, I had a chat with one of those hulking pilgrims.
There you have it: a gym strictly for the aspiring mixed martial arts star. The Fighter's Edge on University Drive in Lauderhill trains its members to kick ass, Kimbo-style. Or at least before Kimbo got his own ass kicked.
Seems a rather bold venture, though, in this economy. This month the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association just released research findings (available to members only, it appears) that show Americans are buying more dumbbells during a period when virtually every other variety of fitness equipment -- and presumably, gym memberships -- are not being purchased.
You thought you were so "aware" with your pink ribbon for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Where's your purple ribbon for Domestic Violence Awareness Month? Did it fall off while you were beating your spouse, hypocrite?
October is Spina Bifida Awareness Month. And since you're not aware of what spina bifida is, you failed that one too.
By the way, why are you wasting time reading this blog when it's National Book Month?
Contributors: Eric Barton, Michelle Centrone, Deirdra Funcheon, Keith Hollar, John Linn, Michael J. Mooney, Bob Norman, Lisa Rab, Nicole Rodriguez, Gail Shepherd.
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