Free Republic

A South Florida mom who brought her five young children along for the ride when she staged car crashes to make cash will spend even longer in prison because she put her kids in harm's way, a judge ruled Friday. Ana Ovando, was already looking at a four-year prison term. Instead, she'll spend 6 1/2 years in federal lockup, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks decided.

The four areas where organized crime reigns in America -- New York City, Dirty Jersey, Chicagoland and South Florida -- also account for the lion's share of corruption convictions by federal prosecutors against local officials as reported by Joe Palazzolo for The Wall Street Journal Law Blog. The U.S. Department of Justice has released the number of corruption convictions its prosecutors have won against public servants over the last ten years across the 93 federal judicial districts into which the country is divided, and at the top of the list is New Jersey with 429 convictions. Third on the list...

Apparently she's a bit like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, and she must have the precious. Kim Rothstein, the wife of convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein, has been charged by federal prosecutors in Fort Lauderdale, FL with "conspiring to hide more than $1 million in jewelry from federal authorities," and "among the items was a 12.08-carat fancy intense yellow diamond ring" as reported by Jon Burstein for the Sun Sentinel. Scott Rothstein ran a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme involving his law firm as a front to sell phony legal settlements to investors, and he alleged pervasive public corruption...

Firefighters don't often dig up drug-smuggling cases. But they did early Wednesday morning, and it was a $2 million jackpot. Returning from an early-morning call, Palm Beach firefighters spotted a fishing boat beached on the north end of the island, just as the sky lightened over the ocean. Palm Beach police soon discovered 80-100 tightly packed bricks of marijuana abandoned on the open Concept 22 motor boat.

A heckler was kicked out after disrupting Newt Gingrich’s jam-packed rally in Coral Springs on Wednesday and making it difficult for the GOP presidential candidate to continue his long-anticipated speech.Standing among a crowd of 1,200, the protester made sure she got the attention she was seeking, positioning herself right in front of a stage where dozens of photographers and reporters were set up, making her an irresistible part of the story.

A heckler was kicked out after disrupting Newt Gingrich’s jam-packed rally in Coral Springs on Wednesday and making it difficult for the GOP presidential candidate to continue his long-anticipated speech.Standing among a crowd of 1,200, the protester made sure she got the attention she was seeking, positioning herself right in front of a stage where dozens of photographers and reporters were set up, making her an irresistible part of the story.

The 250 sailors of the USS Cole, the Navy destroyer that survived a terrorist attack that killed 17 sailors in Yemen in October 2000, started three days of shore leave after the warship docked at Port Everglades Thursday morning. As the ship offloaded it sewage and took on fuel, lucky sailors were climbing into shuttle buses and taxis to enjoy time off in South Florida.

Some people say BIZPAC is too tough on politicians. My reaction is that we’re simply not shy about saying what others are thinking. At any rate, here’s some advice to you if you are an elected official of a certain ilk and you want to stay elected. The political world is changing. A new political dynamic is brewing. You can ride with it or you can get swept away by it. As a politician, you seek political power nowadays in a world where the internet can render you naked in an instant. You can scramble to cover-up your exposure, but...

Dell laptops designed for Spanish-language speakers are selling briskly for BrandsMart USA at the company’s South Florida stores, which makes plenty of sense given the area’s high numbers of Hispanic residents. The Dell Inspiron M5030 sells for $498.88 at BrandsMart USA stores in West Palm Beach, Deerfield Beach, Sunrise and Miami and features a keyboard with keys labeled in Spanish and special characters like the ñ. In addition, it operates on Windows 7 – the Spanish version used by manufacturers in Latin American countries. And of course, the manual is in Spanish.

Tamarac Mayor Beth Flansbaum-Talabisco turned herself in at the Broward County Main Jail on Wednesday morning on unspecified charges. Flansbaum-Talabisco, 57, is the third Tamarac city official arrested in recent months and the latest in a growing list of Broward County politicians to face charges. She has been under investigation for several months on allegations that, while publicly returning some campaign donations from controversial developers Bruce and Shawn Chait, she secretly received help from them to attack her election opponents and in return, voted in favor of their development project.

Brandon Marshall, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, is catching heat from a former Dolphin over a home Marshall bought last month in Southwest Ranches for $4.15 million. Patrick Surtain, a Pro Bowl cornerback who played seven seasons in Miami, said the 17,000-square-foot palace should have been his. Surtain and his wife, Michelle, have sued the builder, Landmark Custom Ranches. The Surtains’ complaint alleges they entered a deal in October 2007 to build the home for $5.2 million.

CORAL GABLES — Police on Tuesday arrested and charged a local model in a traffic accident that killed a University of Miami student last month. Valentina Hubsch, 45, of Coral Gables, was charged with leaving the scene of an accident involving a death.

Was it merely coincidence or something sinister that a man's head was found behind a Dania Beach auto parts store named Millions of Parts? The question is part of a grisly mystery that now covers two counties, as authorities in Miami-Dade try to determine whether that head and a torso discovered in a Miami Gardens canal the day after Thanksgiving belong to the same victim. Police still don't know his name, let alone who killed him, or why. "To dismember someone is really awful … It's quite evil," said Dr. Joshua Perper, Broward's chief medical examiner.

The Big East's football expansion plans leave the conference with 17 universities, including non-Football members. That's a terrible number for scheduling; the only way the basketball teams can schedule an even number of games is if they play every other team only once. 18 teams would allow three divisions of six teams each. Any team would play the other five teams in its division twice, and one half of the twelve other teams in the conference. 18 sounds like worsening the problem of too many teams, but having three divisions could actually restore some rivalries, and return the conference to...

I'll put the entire press release from the Southern Florida office of the DOJ below the fold, but the entire thing reads as if something much more was going on here then a simple gun running scheme. We're not talking just a few weapons either. In addition to wanting to buy hundreds of fully automatic weapons, he was also inquiring into purchasing C-4 and .... IEDs. And here's a couple of key bits from the affidavit against Abdalaziz Aziz Hamayel, the Palestinian national (is that a nationality?) who was busted: HAMAYEL indicated that a "family friend"... from the same village...

Since announcing he would be bringing his talents to South Beach, LeBron James has been called a one-man stimulus package for South Florida — but among the area's real estate circles, the Miami Heat's entire starting lineup looks like a walking, dribbling dollar sign. At least four of the Heat's highest-paid players are looking for a place to live. With hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth combined, the Heat's newest acquisitions — James, Chris Bosh, Mike Miller and Zydrunas Ilgauskas — could each drop millions on a new South Florida pad in the coming months. Add Dwyane Wade...

Fort Lauderdale heir Novack's widow arrested in 2009 murderThe widow of Fort Lauderdale millionaire Ben Novack Jr. is among four people who will be charged in his brutal July 2009 murder in an upstate New York hotel room. Narcy Novack was arrested early Thursday in Fort Lauderdale, and later made an appearance in a South Florida Federal courtroom, where she was denied bond. According to indictment documents, Narcy Novack, her brother and two accomplices will face charges in New York including stalking and conspiring to commit interstate domestic violence. Federal prosecutors in New York plan to hold a news conference...

At the dawn of the last century it was known as "slipping a mickey" — serving someone a drugged drink, then robbing them. Now, police suspect some women of putting a modern twist on an old crime. In four instances involving six men across Broward and Palm Beach counties, flirtatious women, singly or in pairs, have slipped drugged drinks to older men, robbing them of more than $50,000 in jewelry and cash. Police in Palm Beach Shores, a small coastal town, are taking the lead in investigating the robberies, one of which occurred in their jurisdiction. The fear, Detective Paul...

A man with at least 19 driver's license suspensions has been arrested in connection with an October hit-and-run crash in Pompano Beach that killed one man and injured another, the Broward Sheriff's Office said Wednesday. Paul H. Paraison, 28, of Pompano Beach, was arrested Monday after a traffic stop along the 1200 block of North Federal Highway.

South Florida hospital spokespeople strongly denied Saturday that their facilities are refusing to take more trauma patients from Haiti, leaving them to die at field hospitals in the earthquake-ravaged country. Military planes stopped flying the injured to Florida on Wednesday, after Gov. Charlie Crist wrote to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, asking the federal government for help covering millions of dollars in care that hospitals around the state are providing, the New York Times reported in Saturday's editions.