The media pined for Baghdad Boy last Tuesday night. Six satellite television trucks jammed the teen’s usually quiet street near Las Olas on the Intracoastal. About 40 reporters and crew members mulled about the front yard of his mother’s mansion with the TV lights on and the microphones ready. What…

Jack Makler hadn’t changed much. When he answered the door, his silver-streaked hair was still perfect. Even in his tube socks, he looked ready to roll in a jet-black shirt and dark blue jeans. No, it wasn’t Makler who’d changed, just the circumstances. When I’d last met him about seven…

It wasn’t so much the sight of the backhoe rolling down Broward Boulevard that raised the hackles of Lee Hillier, district manager for the Plantation Acres Improvement District (PAID), as much as the man riding shotgun on top of it. “Shit, Davis is on that backhoe,” he remembers thinking. That…

It’s Christmas Eve, and Pat Riley is toiling away in his palatial office at American Airlines Arena. As the resurrected Miami Heat coach goes over plays in the dimmed room, a strange coldness grips his shoulder. He turns to see an eerie specter from the distant past. “It can’t be…

Who will be remembered as the Grim Reaper of baseball in South Florida? Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who insists on making a vast fortune off the backs of the taxpayers? Or Senate President Tom Lee, who withheld much-needed state subsidies that doomed the bid to put a new stadium in…

It’s time to come to the defense of Judith Miller. Yes, the former New York Times reporter served as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration during the buildup to the Iraq War. And she certainly had a dubious role in the Plamegate scandal. But the way her colleagues have been…

Josephus Eggelletion is the politician who won’t go away. During the past five years, the Broward County commissioner has been hit with scandals involving his taxpayer-issued credit card and his unethical work for developers and trash haulers. More recently, we’ve learned he has an unfortunate knack for having children in…

Broward County Property Appraiser Lori Parrish might as well have ridden up on a white horse. Claiming to be ¨outraged¨ by a plan to build a $45 million governmental complex, Parrish ¨pulled the plug on the deal,¨ according to the October 11 Sun-Sentinel. ¨I never asked to be part of…

Ben Graber, the man slated to become Broward County’s next mayor, is currently battling to lose you $10 million. It’s taxpayers’ money that could go to, oh, people who really need it, like the thousands of displaced Hurricane Wilma victims. Instead, Graber wants it to go to his top campaign…

The city sidewalk in front of my house rose up five feet from the ground like a cobra ready to strike. Then it shimmied like a voodoo dancer. It occurred to me that we might be in trouble. I stood there watching that massive concrete sidewalk doing its jig and…

Max Caulfield didn’t know why he’d been pulled over, but he knew it was deadly serious. He couldn’t see the police in his rearview mirror, but he knew they were there, hidden in the darkness behind a glaring wall of white light. He couldn’t hear them on the elevated stretch…

When the train roared by just a few yards in front of me, Sean Rowe disappeared. One moment, I was watching Rowe walk toward me under the streetlights with a bemused look on his face; the next, there was a locomotive raging northward where he used to be. My hands…

I was sitting in a box seat at Pro Player Stadium, and it started coming out of me like a mantra. “Pull him… pull him… pull him.” Then I said to a friend visiting from Florida’s west coast, “What’s wrong with that jackass? McKeon’s got to pull Vargas.” It was…

Here’s a job for new Broward County government chief Bertha Henry: End the county’s business dealings with the Westside Gazette. The newspaper has been claiming false circulation levels for years and has used the trumped-up numbers to fleece taxpayers. Broward County is just one of many government customers of the…

As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn’t have enough going against them, now they’re the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to Fort Lauderdale’s WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Sun-Sentinel and Florida Marlins. It’s also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America. One…

The king of the North Broward Hospital District fell without a whimper. Bill Scherer was unceremoniously ousted last month as general counsel for the district, which has a billion-dollar budget and is the largest public health care system in the state. From his powerful perch, Scherer controlled not only $5…

In the dream, a young and strong Jairo Sanchez stands on a beach before a vast ocean. His long-mourning sister Beatriz asks him where he’s been. But he doesn’t answer. Instead, Jairo only stands there, as if he is lost with amnesia. He stares out into the distance. “Jairo, what…

(This is the last of a series. See the first three installments at newtimesbpb.com.) The small airport at San Andros was exactly what Donna Weaver hoped it wouldn’t be: a desolate place. There was a hangar, a gasoline pump, trash-strewn concrete stalls with a handwritten sign that read “gabbage,” and…

This is the third in a four-part series. To read the first two parts, visit newtimesbpb.com. As she sat at the end of the long, polished, cherry-wood conference table, Donna Weaver told the story of her husband’s murder. The calm pulling of the pistol on an Andros Island airstrip. The…

In all the head-scratching and fist-shaking since columnist Jim DeFede was hastily fired by the Miami Herald, another of the newspaper’s great writers, Carl Hiaasen, posed the most intriguing question: Who’d DeFede piss off? The query appeared in Hiaasen’s Herald column after DeFede was terminated for secretly tape-recording Arthur Teele…

Editor’s note: This is the second in a four-part series. See the first installment at newtimesbpb.com. After reading the article, Donna Weaver only thought, maybe. Maybe her missing husband had been caught up in Operation Airlift, an FBI drug-smuggling investigation gone haywire. Maybe Airlift would supply clues about Gary, who…

“A lot of people think happiness comes from the outside things. Happiness arises when you have contentment. Contentment comes from the inside, just learning to be content … whether I was in the Himalayas, at school, [or] out there on the field.” — Ricky Williams upon his return to the…