Shabber, a 31-year-old businessman, arrives at his Boca Raton bachelor digs after a long day's work. He switches on the computer in his bedroom and then does something prosecutors insist is illegal. He brings up the home page of intercasino.com, which depicts the portico of an elegant Monte Carlo-style casino...
"What was growing up like for David McClain?" The questioner, a woman with a pad and pencil in her lap, seems in no hurry for an answer. Silently she waits as the 30-year-old man in the wheelchair across from her writhes mutely in his seat. There's a long, slender ribbon...
The gay-pride parade is long over. But any appearance of unity displayed at last month's march through the streets of Fort Lauderdale has mutated into bitterness and invective, which in turn may lead to a lawsuit. The antagonism within the gay community caused by the parade has grown so bad,...
The City of Coconut Creek has battled the Seminole Tribe of Florida for months now, trying to gain some semblance of control over the tribe's planned gambling house before it's built in the fair and tidy little suburb. But if the politicians of Coconut Creek really fear poorly regulated gambling,...
Every once in a while, magazines like Conde Nast Traveller and Travel & Leisure hype the same vacation spot. In the early '90s, for instance, Thailand made all the covers, becoming as familiar to readers as Cindy Crawford is to subscribers of Cosmopolitan and Glamour. The phenomenon is less the...
Dougherty's Reviews: Better Than Xanax! Robin Dougherty needs to be replaced or educated in the art of reviewing. I realize every critic is entitled to her own subjective opinion, but when her reviews differ so drastically from every other critic in the southeast region, it gives one pause. Her reviews...
Willie Thomas' morning starts at 8:30 a.m. with a jolt so powerful it shakes the foundation of his house. Sometimes it seems like it happens even earlier. But like an alarm clock, every working day, the bang awakens Thomas and his wife, Betty, with a start. With that, the couple...
Marc Ribot Marc Ribot y los Cubanos Postizos (Atlantic) The resume of guitarist Marc Ribot is chock full of impeccably hip credentials. Not MTV hip, but rather second-tier hip, a land where rock isn't simply on the cutting edge but has rounded the corner into avant-jazz and neoblues and droll...
Cherry Poppin' Daddies vocalist Steve Perry -- not to be confused with the Journey frontman of the same name -- just got off the stage. As part of the punk- and ska-flavored Warped Tour, his band finished performing at the Utah State Fairpark in Salt Lake City minutes ago, and...
Richard Bronson's fortunes have ripened in the South Florida sunshine like a juicy mango. A virtual unknown when he arrived six years ago, he has constructed a wealthy and glamorous lifestyle that could exist only in the subtropics. The road to glitzy prosperity started when Bronson and fellow former New...
I always thought my fancy writing -- like the wiggly letters I drew in crayon on homemade Mother's Day cards and birthday messages -- was lovely. Recently, though, I was humbled. Sitting at a dining room table in Plantation with four calligraphers, I was thinking, "How difficult can this be?"...
Only four Roller Derby tracks remain on the North American continent. One of them squats in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse just west of I-95 and south of Cypress Creek Boulevard. A tall, talkative entrepreneur named Patrick Schaefer bought the 60-by-90-foot oval last year for $12,000 from the San Francisco Bay Bombers,...
Sometime within the past four years in Broward County, a man in his early twenties developed a fast-spreading infection in his lungs and died within days. Because of his youth and the suddenness of his death, the man's body came under the scrutiny of Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper...
Fred Shotz keeps a tape measure in the bag dangling from the back of his wheelchair for precisely this kind of situation. The long-haired 49-year-old reaches down and, with the tape sliding out, measures the distance from the floor to the bottom of a water fountain in the concourse at...
In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, to name just a few. One measure of his virtuosity as a composer, however, is that no one singer really owns a Porter tune. Not even Frank Sinatra,...
It's a miracle! No, I don't have stigmata, I haven't tasted a Circus Peanut and enjoyed it, and I haven't heard Steve Miller apologize for ripping off other artists. What has happened is that I've found relief for my asthma in a medication known as a steroid (Azmacort). I assume...
The lifeblood of rock 'n' roll has been getting terribly thin lately, the result of decades of generational inbreeding. The Beatles stole from Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin borrowed from Muddy Waters, and even the anarchic Sex Pistols covered Eddie Cochran's "Lonely Boy." By the '80s Sonic Youth was mimicking the...
Get Ready, It's Going to Be a Contentious Ride I was surprised by the tone of Michael Freedman's article, "Cruisin' for a Bruisin'," April 30. Frankly, after my lengthy discussions with him and his interview with SunCruz Executive Vice President Greg Karan, I would have thought it would be more...
At age 67, Frank Pernice looks and sounds like Hollywood's vision of an aging mobster -- gold medallion, big indoor-outdoor prescription sunglasses, an accent one generation out of Sicily. Three years ago he opened Plato's Repeat, a swingers' club on Sunrise Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. The name is a reference...
Smashing Pumpkins Adore (Virgin) The massive success of Smashing Pumpkins is positively uncanny -- MTV Video Awards, Grammy Awards, plaudits from Rolling Stone and Spin -- but in a decade with so few true rock stars, the band fills a void. The band's frontman and overweening artistic visionary, Billy Corgan,...
Robbie Robertson Contact From the Underworld of Redboy (Capitol Records) A haunting Native American song floats over a bed of tribal shakers and atmospheric keyboards. Sweet piano chords add harmonic dimensions to the simple melody. Then an abrupt wall of industrial noise and harsh guitar feedback overwhelms the melody as...
Franco Nicoletti's hair has gone salt-and-pepper, and he's shaved off his mustache. He doesn't look half the man he used to be. But maybe that's the point. Could this be the same man who spent the last decade engineering schemes to swell his offshore accounts? The man accused of defrauding...
