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By Grant Balfour & Steve Ellman
Florida had a great big Coming Out Ball around the turn of the millennium. The party favors were butterfly ballots and anthrax-laced love letters, the guest of honor was an eight-year-old Cuban boy riding a magical dolphin, and Florida was officially crowned the new Queen of Scandal.
Look at our demographics. Nine hundred people a day move into Florida, and those numbers are heavily skewed in favor of petty crooks, drug lords, serial killers, Kennedys, war criminals, Rhesus monkeys, visionary philanthropists, despots, terrorists, and the ex-wives of Donald Trump. We're the only state in the union with a whole townful of psychics (See *Cassadaga). Then there's the weird shit-UFOs, shark attacks, O.J. Simpson, the Bermuda triangle, and roadblocks that mysteriously materialize on election day. Credit our geography: We're a peninsula and a subtropical swamp. Both of those conditions lend themselves to the formation of what anthropologists call "isolate communities." And both also make Florida a useful gateway to the US for countries further south. People tend to forget that the beach is also a frontier.
Throughout history, here's where people have run to when they've got to get away from someplace or someone else; in fact, the name "Seminole" probably comes from the Spanish word "Cimarron," meaning "runaway." The first white settlers in Palm Beach-who built neighboring shacks down by the Palm Beach inlet--were a couple of Confederate soldiers gone AWOL. Because people have run away here for so long--escaping slavery, or the English, or the Law, or Castro, or Duvalier, or maybe just trying to outrun old age and the ravages of northern winters--we've got a bizarre cross-section of humanity. At any given South Florida bar, you could watch a Voodoo torturer from the Ton-Ton Macoute rubbing elbows with a retired accountant from the Chicago mob sitting next to a fifth-generation frog-gigger and dope smuggler, getting served drinks by a gay Cuban painter and a German runway model wanted for credit fraud in Europe. And those are just the folks no one pays attention to because they're the regulars. Every now and again, a *real* character shows up.
"I doubt that any other state has as many residents who refer to the place they moved from as 'back home,' says David McCalley, assistant professor of history at the University of Florida. "For whatever reason, people can live in Florida for years, even decades, without adopting it as home. People who find their sense of place 'back home' confining feel more free to move somewhere new--and that somewhere new is quite often Florida."
It's that same sense of imperial possibility that California once offered. There is no "there" here, and we like it that way. It's what has set Floridians free to act on the most outrageous dreams and schemes imaginable, from our days as a pirate haven in colonial times, to slaves and outlaws on the run in the 19th century, to megalomaniacal development schemes post-WW II, when the interstate highway system and the ubiquity of air conditioning opened the floodgates to refugees from the North and Midwest. Those nouveau Floridians drained the swamps, manicured the landscape, and rode off, in their Lexii and golf carts, into the newly tamed wilderness of their imaginations.
This month, CLOSER offers our custom map of the Sunshine State, in all its glorious folly. Happy trails.
Little Killers
A spate of little killers have been tried as adults in South Florida courts lately, beginning with 13-year-old Tronneal Mangum, who was slapped with a life sentence for shooting Conniston Middle School seventh-grader John Kamel during an argument over a wristwatch in 1997. Joining him is Lionel Tate; Tate was 12 when he beat six-year-old Tiffany Eunick to death in his home in Pembroke Park. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Then thirteen-year-old Nathaniel Brazill made national headlines when he shot his language arts teacher, Barry Grunow, with a .25 caliber Raven in May 2001. He received a 22-year sentence. The Brazill murder was only the most sensational of a string of Palm Beach County middle and high school shootings dating back to 1994.
Pensacola Parricide
Pensacola is ordinarily a quiet little city--so far west it's more Alabama than Florida. Most of the locals devote themselves to prayer (it's a hotbed of fundamentalist Christian belief, and home to the Creation Science Evangelism ministry, "Where God and the Dinosaurs Meet") or military order (it's home to the Pensacola Naval Air Station, the "Cradle of Naval Aviation"). Imagine the shock, then, when it was discovered last year that two young local boys, Alex and Derek King, ages 12 and 13 respectively, had taken a baseball bat to the head of their father and done away with him. Imagine the further shock when it was found that Alex had been involved in a passionate affair with a male,
40-something acquaintance of dad's, and that the boys had taken refuge with sugar daddy in the crime's aftermath. The local state's attorney found it all so befuddling he charged the boys in one trial and the c'hawk in another, offering two different theories of the crime to the two juries. Confounding all expectations, the c'hawk walked (though he'll be back in court on charges of lewd and lascivious and evidence tampering) and the boys are looking at 22 to life. Justice is blind, especially in the Sunshine State.
Ballot Box Boogie
Yes, the butterfly ballot and the legal wrangling in the election's aftermath were a fright, and made Florida a byword for electoral bumbling. But the most bizarre--and most frightening, and instructive--moment in the whole convoluted story had to be the Blue Blazer Riot, the Republican attack on the Miami-Dade canvassing board. For one afternoon of shocking clarity, the essentially fascist impulse at the heart of the party of "compassionate conservatism" stood naked for all to see.
On the afternoon of November 22, 2000, as the canvassing board prepared to do a hand count of 10,000 "undervotes"-- ballots on which voting machines had been unable to detect a vote for president--and while an angry crowd of mostly Cuban Americans provided a lynch mob backdrop in the streets outside, an elite strike force of congressional aides from the offices of Tom "Hammer" DeLay and Trent "Blowdry" Lott, among other GOP leaders, stormed the counting room itself, pounding on windows and furniture and, according to the New York Times, "trampled, punched or kicked" government workers until they did, as instructed by New York Republican congressman John Sweeney, directing operations from outside the building, "shut it down." Ten thousand ballots went unexamined, Dubya won by a mere 537 votes.
Imagine a political mob storming a government building and forcing a halt to the machinery of democracy in any other city in the U.S. Go figure. Just don't do it in Miami.
Primary Colors
How do I flub thee? Let me count the ways. And if it's Florida elections we're talking about, the number seems limitless. Governor Jeb Bush had promised to overhaul the system in time for the 2002 primary elections and save the state the embarrassment of repeating the 2000 disaster. The state invested $32 million in ridding the counties of the troublesome punch-card ballots and replacing them with touch-screen voting machines. The net result? Equipment failures and human error produced enough confusion to cause some polls to open late, others to close early, and countless voters to give up in disgust on the chance to cast ballots. The Democratic gubernatorial primary was close enough, as luck would have it, that the uncast ballots may have been enough to swing the decision away from Tampa lawyer Bill McBride and over to former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. The lady had the grace to concede, however. As for the Jebster, he promised to make it all good come November, suggesting that Brother Dubya's Department of Justice oversee that race, preventing any possible glitches in Jeb's contest with McBride. Some observers felt those rules were more suitable to the World Wrestling Federation than to an electoral exercise. But this is Florida.
To Live and Die in Boca
Maggot Mile
With the possible exception of Beverly Hills, this city of gated communities and opulent country clubs must be home to more scam per capita than any other place on earth. Maybe it's the classy tones of the city's name as it rolls off the tongue. Notorious as the address of choice for high-pressure securities salesmen, so many of whose boiler room operations bloomed on the city's Federal Highway through the long stock market boom of the '90s the strip was dubbed "Maggot Mile" by securities attorneys. Often enough, the salesmen were bankrolled by organized crime.
Leading lights in the recent Boca catalogue of white collar crime include:
- April 2000: 40 employees of Meyers Pollock Robbins are charged with promoting worthless stock, costing 16,000 investors more than $83 million. The brokerage's staff includes many past grand jury targets, among them some salesmen who took bribes from mobsters to promote and inflate the price of specific stocks.
- March 2001: Frederick Buckley is indicted for tax evasion in connection with the operations of Innovative Telemedia, which convinced thousands of investors they could get rich quick through the leasing of fraudulent 900-number telephone lines.
- January 2002: William Caudell is sentenced for his role in Professional Resource Systems International, an Internet pyramid scheme that ripped off about 48,000 people, chiefly mom-and-pop business operators, for an estimated $13 million, charging them $295 apiece for space in a nonexistent Internet shopping mall.
- August/September 2002: "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap--nicknamed for his brutal cost-cutting and job eliminations--a corporate chieftain formerly worshipped as a paragon of tough-minded capitalist virtue, has to fork over $15 million to settle securities fraud claims brought by shareholders of Boca's Sunbeam Corporation. Turns out at least $60 million of the appliance maker's profits under Dunlap involved fraud. Dunlap pays another $1/2 million to settle SEC charges. No sweat off the slasher's brow, though--he cleared a cool $100 million during his reign of Boca-based Scott Paper. Pending further investigation, of course.
Two of Boca's most successful corporate crooks had the good taste to use the city only for rest and recreation, doing their looting and pillaging elsewhere.
- The completion of former WorldCom chief financial officer Scott Sullivan's $15 million estate on four acres of western Boca has taken so long to complete the neighbors have complained. Now under indictment for his role in the bankrupt telecom giant's overstating of $3.8 billion in earnings, Sullivan may never get to enjoy the 24,000-square-foot mansion's swimming pool, cabana and two-story boat house. Maybe he can rent out the 18-seat movie theater to raise bail.
- Also now under indictment is fellow part-time Boca resident Dennis Kozlowski, currently free on $10 million bail. Big D orchestrated the looting of conglomerate Tyco International to the tune of nearly $600 million, a mere $30 mill of which went toward the purchase of his Boca estate. It is unclear which, if any, of the following widely-reported Kozlowski extravagances are found there: a $15,000 umbrella stand, a $6,300 sewing basket, a $17,000 "traveling toilette box," a $2,200 wastebasket, a set of coathangers for $2,900, two sets of sheets for $5,900 and a $1,650 appointment book.
Tabloid Anthrax
Another Boca affair that, if offered up in a Hollywood pitch session, would have immediately been tossed as simply too unbelievable. Two versions: A love letter directed to Jennifer Lopez arrives at the offices of the world's leading publisher of tabloid newspapers, American Media. The letter contains a powdery, soapy substance and a Star of David charm. Or, somebody simply dumps a pile of anthrax near the mailroom floor, and Bob Stevens, an unsuspecting photo editor, walks through it, dragging the stuff all over the newly refurbished-to the tune of millions of dollars--building. In any case, Stevens is soon dead of the legendarily awful disease, others fall ill, and the fancy digs are vacated for hastily cramped together offices in nearby quarters. Within weeks, similar outbreaks of the disease happen elsewhere, locally and nationally. But the original panic--hundreds of tabloid journalists and their families gathered for inspection and inoculation at an understaffed county health clinic, with a mob of as-yet-uninfected journalists swarming around the event--had to be Palm Beach County's.
In a weird coincidence, 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and members of his team rented an apartment in Boca Raton. The real estate agent who found the place for them? She's married to the Sun's editor-in-chief.
Pass The Chips?
Even when Boca became the scene of a supposed advance in human welfare, it turned into a full-blown media circus and, as it happened, a stock market manipulation stunt. The "chipping" last February of the Jacobs family--a West Boca nuclear threesome who volunteered to have microchips implanted in their bodies, for retrieval of medical records in the event of an emergency--made the "Today" show, which broadcast the procedure live. It also drew the attention of the financial press, which probed deeper than the physicians and discovered that the chip's manufacturer--West Palm Beach's Applied Digital Systems--had some serious cash flow problems and that the company's executives had stock options about to expire. Nothing like a few headlines to drive up the price and let the big boys cash in. The chips? ADS was making out better selling them in South America, where Big Brother could quietly put the little devices to more nefarious use.
Elianismo
The only-in-Florida story of all time centered on a six-year-old boy pulled out of the sea in November 1999 and returned home to Cuba in June of 2000. Elian Gonzalez was caught up in a political uproar that could have happened no where else, thanks to the good sense of Miami's Cuban exile community and its 40 years' worth of brooding resentment. Not only did this kid have the bad luck to lose his mother when the raft on which they fled Castro sank, he ended up in the hands of a band of crackpot relatives and glory-mongers who tried to transform him into an amulet of anti-Communism and a sure shot for world fame.
There is hardly time or space to go into the conniving of politicians local and national in the affair, so consider only Elian's situation in the bosom of the family, among them:
Uncle Lazaro--Housebound when the last of his drunken driving convictions left him without a license, thus unable to drive his daughter Marisleysis to the hospital for her recurring episodes of "nervous exhaustion." No doubt the tyke felt safe in the care of cousins Luis and Jose, sterling young men with, as England's BBC summarized it, "long criminal records involving assault, theft and firearms." That it took the authorities seven months to return the boy to his father is as good a measure as we have of the perversity of Florida's political and social landscape.
A Taste of Palm Beach
Now known for old money and upper-crust attitudes, most of the mansions in this millionaires' resort were built by visionary weirdo Addison Mizner. In his heyday in the 20s, the eccentric architect was known for his own medieval home (complete with portcullis and trapdoors for dropping boiling oil on unwanted callers) and his constant companion Johnny Brown, the Human Monkey. Perceptive strollers along Worth Avenue may have noticed Johnny Brown's grave, tucked into a corner of Via Mizner. It's the only grave in Palm Beach--there are no cemeteries or funeral homes.
It was here, in 1990, that William Kennedy Smith was unsuccessfully charged with raping a woman on the grounds of his family's historic estate. Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh bought a house down the block... then another, and another, and another. Now he's got his own oceanfront compound, and has been known to broadcast shows from his Palm Beach living room.
Just down the street from the old Kennedy place, Palm Beach businessman Richard Kreusler was blown away one night in 1976 by three shotgun blasts when he answered his doorbell. Mark Herman, a Riviera Beach n'er-do-well, took the fall and did 14 years in prison for the killing, which nobody now believes he committed. Kruesler had spent time on sugar baron Alphonso Fanjul's fishing yacht the day before; two of Fanjul's sons had purchased shotguns that same day. Maybe Kruesler saw something on the fishing expedition he shouldn't have. Or, it may have been a simple botch job: a well known peg-legged drug dealer with an evil temper lived next door-Kruesler may have taken the blast meant for the doper. Or better yet, it might have been Kruesler's stripper girlfriend's jealous ex who had him whacked. The case even drew in millionaire Palm Beach con artist Dexter Coffin III, who testified against Herman in exchange for a sweet deal to lighten his own sentence for the bogus sale of somebody else's yacht. Kreusler's murder has never been resolved.
Mass Murder
The largest mass murder in Palm Beach County history was committed in the small hours of September 22nd last month, when Michael Roman gunned down an entire Lake Worth family of five, including a young pregnant woman, in revenge for what he claimed was the sexual abuse of his toddler daughter and six-year-old step-daughter. Roman, his girlfriend and their daughters had been staying with 52-year-old Ismael Gomez and his family at 529 S. H Street; Roman left a note the day before the slaying saying he was moving to Miami. Neighbors discovered the body of Gomez's common-law wife lying dead in the street at a nearby intersection. When repeated calls to the house failed to rouse anyone, family members checked the yard and discovered Gomez's body under a tarp in his car. Police later found the other three victims slain inside the house. Roman's full taped confession was obtained on Wednesday. He showed no remorse, claiming his daughters had been sexually abused by the male members of the Gomez family. "It doesn't matter if I found them in hell. Wherever I found them, if I need to kill them again, I will," Roman said in a taped interview.
Sullivan's Folly
For sheer greed and chutzpa, few stories can top the 15-year saga of Palm Beach murderer James Vincent Sullivan, who allegedly had his estranged wife Lita whacked in 1987 when she opened the door of her Atlanta townhouse to accept delivery of 12 long-stem pink roses. The case was a four-star entry into the annals of Palm Beach gore: Sullivan paid a North Carolina trucker $25,000 to do the dirty deed on the very day the couple's divorce hearing was to proceed; that same night Sullivan was spotted scarfing up champagne and caviar at Jo's, a ritzy Palm Beach eatery, with his new squeeze, Korean beauty Suki Rodgers, the wife of one of his best friends.
Lita was Sullivan's second wife, and wouldn't be his last.Sullivan inherited his fortune from an uncle, in the form of a thriving Macon Georgia beverage distributorship. Despite his put-on tony Boston accent, and a lavish lifestyle that included a convertible Rolls Royce Cornishe and a $4 million Ocean Drive estate, Sullivan was notoriously cheap. According to court testimony he forced Lita Sullivan to manage their Palm Beach mansion on $300 a week, and he wore World War II Army-issue underwear he'd inherited from his uncle. Lita's parents claimed their daughter had polished up her husband' image considerably: when they met in 1975-she was 22 and he 34--Sullivan was wearing red polyester slacks and black horn-rimmed glasses, not exactly the presentational style that would win him entry into Palm Beach's poshest circles. But he was already desperately trying to erase his blue-collar background with fantastic tales, telling people he was an heir to the Hearst newspaper fortune.
The couple's entry into those notoriously clubby Palm Beach circles was far from assured. Lita was black. She was from a politically influential Atlanta family-her mother was a state legislator--and she'd graduated on the Dean's list at Spelman College with a bachelor's degree in political science. Lita had met Sullivan while she was managing a Macon boutique, and they were married in 1976. After their move to Palm Beach, Sullivan yearned to join the swankest clubs on the island, and to sit on its most prestigious boards. But despite her education and social credentials, Lita was shunned because of her color. As one Palm Beach neighbor who occasionally dined with the Sullivans, Lois Terry, put it, "There is still that feeling here that it's alright if your gardener's black. But you're not going to invite him over for cocktails."
Feeling marginalized, and increasingly estranged from her husband, who had started to romance Suki Rogers, Lita packed her possessions in a U-Haul and fled back to Atlanta. The divorce proceedings she filed subsequently probably spelled her doom. She wanted half of Sullivan's property, the Atlanta townhome, and the silver Mercedes coup. He didn't want her to have anything.
Eight months after Lita was killed, Sullivan married Suki. But they split in 1990 after yet another sensational Palm Beach divorce trial-during which Suki testified that Sullivan had threatened to have her taken out, too, and that she was "deathly afraid" of him. After Lita's parents won a wrongful death civil suit against Sullivan, he fled the country, eventually ending up in Thailand. The trail finally ended when Sullivan, who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, was discovered living in a condo at a beach resort community outside Bangkok, where he'd hidden for four years with yet another woman, Chongwattana Sricharoenmuang, a Thai native and Palm Beach divorcee. In May 2002, a fan watching "America's Most Wanted" in Thailand turned in the tip on Sullivan's whereabouts. Hearing of his pending extradition, Suki's lawyer Ronnie Sayles commented, "It couldn't happen to a more evil person. He is one of the most evil people around."
Sullivan is awaiting extradition in a Thai prison. Phillip Anthony Harwood, the alleged hit man, was arrested in April 1998 and is currently on trial in Atlanta for murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Harwood.
More worst of the worst
- Floyd Holzapfel was convicted of kidnapping and killing popular Judge Curtis Chillingworth and his wife, Marjorie, after midnight June 15, 1955. Chillingworth, the youngest circuit judge in Florida history, had learned that municipal judge Joe Peel was on the take; Peel hired Holzapfel for $2500 to kidnap the Chillingworths and dump them from a small motorboat into the Gulf Stream. The couple reportedly held hands and exchanged "I Love Yous" before being tossed into the waves to their deaths. The case was solved five years later.
- "Shallow, self-centered, self-pitying scum," was the character summary a judge offered of Robert Messer, who, in 1995 with his cohorts Chris Caballero and Isac Brown, abducted Denise O'Neil-a beloved, Oxford educated waitress at Charley's Crab in Palm Beach who planned to become a teacher--and stood by as she was brutally tortured, raped and murdered in their West Palm Beach apartment. The trio, neighbors in O'Neil's apartment complex, later dumped her body, wrapped in a pink sheet, into a Broward canal. Police linked Caballero to the murder in part because he feverishly courted the limelight. As TV news crews roamed the apartment complex interviewing O'Neil's neighbors, Caballero repeatedly buttonholed reporters to express his horror and fear, saying news of the murder had left him "breathless." Bobbie Conklin, a volunteer with the West Palm Beach police missing persons unit, saw Caballero on TV and smelled a rat. ``I thought it was odd,'' she was reported saying. ``It just seemed like every time you turned around, he's jumping in front of the camera." Caballaro was sentenced to death and Brown to life in prison.
- In June 1996, Geraldine Pucillo, a 71-year-old grandmother, was murdered by Kim Cain, a 32-year-old pest-control worker from Palm Springs. Pucillo and her late husband Gus had been the proprietors of what was long the most glamorous restaurant on the island, Petite Marmite, frequented by celebs as diverse as John Lennon and Richard Nixon. Cain was convicted of entering Pucillo's home and strangling her with her dress. He is serving a life sentence.
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