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Back from vacation to find that the Larry Seidlin special we broke last week is hitting the fan. That wacky lawyer Jack Thompson prompted the Broward State Attorney'd Office to request that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist assign an independent prosecutor to determine whether Judge Larry broke the law. And the Miami Herald's Wanda DeMarzo and Sun-Sentinel's Tonya Alanez followed it in their respective pubs (with commendable citations of New Times).

Bill Gelin's JAABlog lit up with it as did the celebrity site, TMZ.com.

The Broward State Attorney's Office is calling for the governor to appoint an independent prosecutor to look into Seidlin's acceptance of gifts, land, and large sums of money from a lonely elderly woman in his condo building and a Louis Vuitton purse and other items he allegedly received from a lawyer whom he was appointing to juvenile cases in his courtroom. In a letter to Gov. Charlie Crist on the matter, SAO spokesman Ron Ishoy mentions that Seidlin used to be a prosecutor under Michael Satz. The fact is that Seidlin and Satz have been friends for many years. Seidlin's wife, Belinda, told me she met Seidlin on the tennis court when she was 16. Playing with them were Satz and former public defender Al Schreiber, she said. It's cozy at the top of Broward (in?)justice system, that's for sure, but Satz has done the right thing in calling for an independent investigation.

While the brunt of the coverage has been focused on Seidlin's actions, some have taken to bashing Lawrence "Chris" Roberts, the lawyer who only reluctantly went on the record regarding gifts he says the judge solicited from

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Agami At Right

Another young Broward County man was killed in Iraq. 25-year-old Daniel Agami, was an expansive guy with lots of friends and a girlfriend at home. On his MySpace page, he lists his general interest as "killing Arab extremists!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and his name as "Whoes Your Baghdaddy?"

Known in his unit as G.I. Jew, Agami was going to be in Army ads aimed at recruiting more Jewish soldiers, according to Lisa Huriash in the Sun-Sentinel.

(Read the story by Erika Bolstad in the Herald).

I'm off this week, so postings will be sporadic, if at all, but a few quick things while I'm online. First, the Sun-Sentinel quietly made history on Sunday:

The front page had an advertisement on it.

It was an orange-colored two-column AT&T ad -- "fewest dropped calls" -- on the bottom right-hand corner of the newspaper. And it helps to confirm the theory propagated here that the redesign adding a larger "bottom drawer," or junk drawer to put it more aptly, full of chaotic colors and crap was, in part, a ploy to camoflauge the selling out of prominent news space to advertisers.

This also seems to be a part of the infamous "Transformative Change" stratagem, wherein Sun-Sentinel publisher Howard Greenberg et al want to more seamlessly combine news, marketing, and advertising. I call it the "Why Even Try Pretending Anymore?" initiative.

After the jump: Three Good Reads

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Thought I'd post a couple of VVM specials. First, the Village Voice up in New York is up to its ears this week with the old Broward crowd. Yeah, first the newspaper got our editor, Tony Ortega, and now it's snapping up our former reporters and stories (and yes, there just might be a correlation between the two phenomena). Former NTer Julia Reischel leads off the Voice's Queer Issue with her opus, "Queer in the Crib." And current NTer makes a splash with her follow-up on Bruce McMahan, the mega-wealthy money man who married his own long-lost daughter. This one is about McMahan's fifth wife and you can read it here on this website. Gawker picked it up as well.

And if you remember my column on the John Frey (see it here), the poor fellow who went through a nightmare trying to get health care from the taxpayer-assisted North Broward Hospital District, things have turned out well. The district OK'd Frey for free health care just a few days after the story ran.

On top of that, the column prompted a town hall meeting last week that was sponsored by Florida CHAIN. Held at the ArtServe building on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, the panel included state Rep. Elaine Schwartz, past Broward County Medical Association president Arthur Palamara, and state health officials. I was so swamped with work that it was physically impossible for me to make it, but the Pulp commends CHAIN for giving a damn about one of the most important isssues in Broward County and the nation.

Check out this story by Lester J. Davis in the Palm Beach Post about a developer's son, his gigantic truck, its train horn, and the love they share together in a cold, cold world. Rick over at Stuck on the Palmetto breaks down the story of Jeff George well, sharing a classic mugshot.

So there was an investigation by MSNBC reporter Bill Dedmaninto American reporters giving political contributions to candidates for federal office. And one reporter pops up as giving money from the Sun-Sentinel. Can you guess who?

Yeah, it was Ethan Skolnick.

He's always been such a blowhard political ha-- ... hey, wait a minute, Ethan Skolnick? He's a sports reporter. And a good guy (I once played on a softball team he "coached"). The investigation found that he gave $250 to Peter Deutsch, Democratic candidate for Senate, in July 2004, and $250 to Debbie Schultz, Democratic candidate for House, in June 2005.

Here's Skolnick's explanation, which he e-mailed to Dedman:

"I no longer can make any more. At the time that I made them — they were both friends of a politically active friend — I was not aware of the newspaper's policy that restricts us from

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Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is getting threats from white supremacists -- and the FBI is on the case, according to Greg Gordon, of McCatchy's Washington bureau. The owner of a supremacist website called overthrow.com has made a lot of hay over Pitts' column of June 3 headlined "'Oppressed' Whites? Give Me A Break."

Overthrow.com owner Brian White (yeah, that's supposedly his real last name) posted Pitts' address and phone number, prompting threats. When Herald managing editor Dave Wilson asked him to take it down, White wrote: "We have no intention of removing Mr. Pitts' personal information. Frankly, if some loony took the info and killed him, I wouldn't shed a tear. That also goes for your whole newsroom."

As you can see, it's a vile site -- predictably full of both racism and anti-Semitism (though it is sometimes inadvertently humorous: The "most popular" link at the moment is something titled "Whites have bigger cocks than blacks"). And I'm sure this little bit of news concerning Pitts (which actually was first written about by Rob Redding on his site Redding News Review) will be the best thing that ever happened to it.

(Update: The above post has been corrected to show that the Redding News Review broke the Pitts story. I strongly urge you to click on the site, which now has a post up about White's links to the Washington Times).
After the Jump: Jicha On Seidlin and More Moore

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If there's hate to be had, leave it to the commenters on the Sun-Sentinel website to find it. Case in point, the story about a Deerfield man who was murdered last night. Here's the first message on the board, from someone calling themselves Carlton Moore (the black Fort Lauderdale commissioner whom I write about in the post below):

"Just some of us schfartzas having some good summer recreation."

Okay, that's just goood old fashioned racism, which fills the boards on a weekly basis. But then the worm turned on another group: The dreaded Brazilians, who have indeed been flocking into the northern Broward beach town.

"Please tell me it was a Brazilian that got shot by another Brazilian...they are so selfish and rude. Hopefully, instead of us deporting them back to Brazil, they'll just kill each other off."

That was followed by:

"OMG. they ARE RUDE!!!!!!!! and those rubber flip flops they wear with the tiny brazilian flag on them. YUK. maybe i'll move to brazil and wear american

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You probably remember that Fort Lauderdale Commissioner Carlton Moore recently made the news (yeah, I'm linking the Freepers -- couldn't find a full version) for intervening on his son Forrest's behalf during a run-in with police at a bar in the Himmarshee district. What you didn't know is that his oldest son, Martin B. Moore, was recently sentenced by the feds to life in prison for running crack cocaine.

U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak handed down the brutal sentence on May 30 for the 29-year-old Martin, who was caught in January in Panama City with bag full of crack and has a history of drug charges in Broward County. The feds found that the cocaine came from a kilogram deal that went down in Atlanta with a supplier known as "Bleed."

As much as I abhor the crack trade, I don't think anyone should have to spend the rest of their life in prison for a bag of rocks. The federal sentencing guidelines are criminal in that regard. And somehow knowing this makes me respect the commissioner more than I did. The guy has been going through hell and yet he keeps plugging away when most people probably would have crumbled.

After the jump: Mongo Runs For Office and Chan Lowe Misses The Mark

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This news day is slower than Miguel Cabrera's metabolism, but there is some unconfirmed news to report: Las Olas Magazine has gone under, according to a good source. Kaput.

I'm still gathering info, but the word is that the mag was losing money and the owners -- an outfit called HPJ Media Ventures Fund, LLC -- just decided to fold it (as they did Miami's LRM Magazine a few months ago. Some might say LOM never had a chance. The publication, under editor Lori Capullo Lawrence, was making a go at becoming a real city magazine, with interesting stories by talented freelancers, including a back-of-the-book column by Jim DeFede. But don't worry, HPJ's other local pub, the hard-hitting and always controversial International Yachtsman , appears to be doing just fine.

You want a fascinating crime story, check out Audra D.S. Burch's piece on the eight human skeletons discovered in a wooded area in Fort Myers. Eight sets of bones, all of them from white men who were killed between 1980 and 2000.

The theories on the March 23 discovery range from it being the work of a bad funeral home, a serial killer, or the Mafia. And, in weird Fort Myers, all three are feasible. I worked at the News-Press there for five years and got my fill of all three of the above.

As Burch points out, Daniel Conahan, the so-called Hog Trail Killer, is one suspect. His M.O. was to lure his gay victims to wooded areas, where he'd have his way and kill them. I didn't cover Conahan much, just a couple of stories, but it was enough that a friend of mine who was looking into the case found a deposition in which he referred to me as "that asshole Bob

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North Broward Hospital District CEO Alan Levine wrote this letter to a district employee in response to this column that was published this week. The column -- about the travails of a man with no money, no insurance, and plenty of health problems -- details a scene where the district refuses to do potentially life-saving heart tests unless it gets payment of $1639 up front. The district employee who handled the situation was Annette Perez. The following is Levine's letter to her, which he cc'd to me:

Annette, I read the story by Bob Norman in the New Times this afternoon. I think Bob touched on some very important issues related to the larger problem of access to health care in our country, although I think he may have missed some important issues relevant to this particular situation. But I want to tell you the one thing that did touch me in his story was the part where he referred to the employee at North Broward Medical Center - YOU - as "pleasant". You have a difficult job, Annette, and sometimes the best measure of who we are is how we deal with people we don't know in various and difficult situations. That day, you were faced with with a person who had tragic circumstances, and you

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John DeGroot is looking for redemption. And I confess to having felt the same Sentinel-ments at times. When I first started the Pulp 17 months ago, it was all kicks and giggles making fun of the Sun-Sentinel. But things have changed. Dramatically. The newspaper has been sold, 20 or so newsroom folks have been put out to pasture, the product has been downsized, people have been reassigned to lesser positions ... the list goes on and on. I've talked to people in the newsroom who resemble DeGroot's "Sam" -- good newspaper folks who are stressed out and wondering if they are next.

It's like everybody not only gets the joke, but they are being crushed under the weight of the reality of it.

Now I present to you, DeGroot's latest wherein he claims his Sentinel-hashing days are over (I give him two weeks, if anybody wants the action):

The time has come for those of good will to stop slamming Florida’s Incredible Shrinking Newspaper.

Butt-kicking the Sun-Sentinel ain’t any fun no more.

Especially for me.

It’s like cracking wise over a suffering soul in the advanced stages of Lou Gehrig’s Disease – or stage four lung cancer.

So enough already.

True, the newspaper has been prostituted by a band of corporate pimps and editor whores who – journalistically speaking – aren’t worth spit.

Morally speaking, they are the journalistic equivalent of well-paid Judas Goats.

However, there still remains a dwindling collection of decent writers and reporters who daily struggle to remain true to their craft – sans hope or help. And they, as keepers of the dying light of decent journalism, deserve our compassion and respect. Like the band that played “Nearer My God to Thee” on the deck of the sinking Titanic.

I ran into one of those brave souls at the Floridian restaurant a few days ago and he broke my heart.

He had the eyes of a trapped rabbit.

Out of respect for his dignity, we’ll call him “Sam” – an older, loyal worker in the trenches who has been part of the Sun-Sentinel’s warp and woof for more than four decades. Once more, having known “Sam” for nearly 30 years, I’ve never heard him say a discouraging word about the newspaper, or his fellow workers. (Unlike I, he is one of those rare folk driven to seek and speak only good.)

Yeh, “Sam” had been offered a “buy out” by the pimps. But he passed, not knowing what else he might do if put out to pasture – the news game having been all he is and does.

“So how goes it?” I asked “Sam.”

“I dunno anymore,” he said, with a sigh. “I used to love hanging out in the newsroom. But now it’s like a hospice ward, you know? People used to be pissed off, or

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In his column yesterday, Sun-Sentinel editorial columnist Kingsley Guy asked the question we're all wrestling with right now: Haven't we had about enough of all this wild "democracy" stuff?

The controversial decision to build a new billion-dollar runway -- and set Broward County on a course to become a metropolis -- was a "no-brainer," he wrote. In Guy's particular case, a more apt phrase would be hard to imagine. But after having to listen to all the "self-appointed activists" -- a.k.a. citizens who give a damn about their government -- and "self-absorbed environmentalists" fighting the airport expansion, he says we need to be more like autocratic China, which doesn't suffer such fools so politely. (You know, they throw them in prison).

This is classic Guy, who while serving for decades as the Sentinel's editorial editor always marched lockstep with the chamber of commerce crowd. But this time he raised the ire of one of those environmentalists, Sara Case. She sent him this e-mail:

From: "Sara Case" Date: 2007/06/13 Wed AM 07:49:29 EDT To: Subject: Your Commentary of 6/13/07 Dear Mr. Guy,

You are certainly entitled to your opinion on airport expansion or anything else. What I found objectionable in today's commentary is your reference to expansion opponents as "self absorbed environmentalists."

In my opinion, it is not professional to denigrate opponents with adjectives like "self absorbed." I would like to know what distinguishes you and the many airport supporters from falling in this "self absorbed" category you have created. Is concern for Broward's environment different
from concern for the economy, with all self absorption located in the former?

Your use of this term is not only an insult to environmentalists. It also reflects poorly on you. I hope that in the future you can express your opinions without denigrating those who hold contrary ones.

Guy then fired off this response:

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You probably have no idea how close we were losing to losing the great Jim DeFede.

Yesterday morning, the former Miami New Times and Miami Herald columnist turned radio host and TV commentator explained in detail a very recent and very harrowing medical ordeal on his 940-WINZ morning show. He'd been missing in action on the radio since Tuesday last week. On Sunday, Joan Fleischman reported in her Miami Herald gossip column that he had undergone surgery early Wednesday morning to drain fluid that had been building up around his heart.

Sounded fairly serious, but DeFede, now recovering at home, let his listeners know just how dire the situation was during a phone interview with his producer/fill-in Nicole Sandler on Monday morning.

For anybody who has followed DeFede's amazing work and knows how important he is to South Florida's media scene, his words were just flat chilling. What follows, after the jump, is the story:

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