Crime and racism at a Palm Beach country club

Flickr user: VeronicaCastillo.com

Palm Beach is a haven of wealth and exclusivity.  Home to Bernie Madoff, a former vacation spot for the Kennedys, and  a playground for  Donald Trump, this tiny island is shrouded in gossip and mystery.

Three years ago, a strange crime occurred at the island’s oldest and most exclusive country club, the Everglades Club. A white chef accused her co-worker, a Guatemalan immigrant, of raping her on the club’s campus. Suddenly, the club was thrust into the spotlight, and forced to endure scrutiny of its long history of racial and religious discrimination. The victim alleged the club’s policies bred “hostility among races.”

Her attacker, Esdras Cardona, is now serving a 20-year sentence in state prison, but many questions about the case remain. To read the full story, check out my recent feature, “The Chef and the ‘Amigo’”.

Inside South Florida’s ghost towers

Flickr user: rayhey2

When I first moved to Florida six years ago, the state was engulfed in a real estate frenzy. Every day, the newspaper I wrote for in Sarasota published another front-page headline about climbing house prices. New condo buildings seemed to appear overnight, and city leaders handed out developers incentives as if they were candy.

Now the nation’s real estate bubble has popped, and nowhere is it more obvious than in South Florida.  “For sale” signs crowd the strip malls; ghostly condo towers beg for residents.  Recently, I decided to go inside some of the most forlorn buildings, to see what life is like after the bust. Read the full story, “Postcards from the Bust.”

My love affair with Cleveland sports

During the three years I lived in Cleveland, something strange happened. I had never really cared about professional sports, or college sports, or any kind of sport at all. Until I met LeBron James.

OK, I didn’t exactly meet him in person, but I watched him on TV, and saw him transform the game of basketball into a near-religious experience for the people of Cleveland. Suddenly, I was a devoted fan. I looked forward to driving by the life-sized, “We are all witnesses” poster of him plastered on a building near the Q. I considered it a modest tribute, given his impact on the poverty-laden city. Once, I even had a dream that he was my husband. Yeah, it was that kind of crush.

And so tonight, on the eve of Game 4 of the Cavalier’s quest to win the Eastern Conference Finals, I wrote this tribute to Cleveland and its beloved basketball team.

More blogs, Florida-style

After a long and beautiful drive across the country (who knew Arkansas was so scenic?), I’ve arrived in South Florida and started my new gig as a staff writer for the Broward-Palm Beach New Times.  The good news: I’m a full-time journalist again, and enormously grateful to be drawing a paycheck for doing what I love. The bad news: I don’t have as much time to keep updating this blog.

However, I am blogging several times a week for New Times‘ blog, The Juice. You should check it out. It’s really funny, and I’m only half saying that for self-promotion purposes.

In the last few weeks, I’ve blogged about KBR’s arrival in Palm Beach County, a state proposal that would make it illegal to use a mirror to look up a woman’s skirt, a hip-hop dating coach, and so much more. If you need a daily dose of my ramblings, please bookmark The Juice.

Otherwise, I’ll try to update this site a few times a month, just so you know I’m still kicking.

One last note:  The links to my Cleveland articles on this site should all, finally, be current. Scene is under new ownership, but the online archives have finally been updated. So all those years of pissing off Cuyohoga County’s politicians won’t be erased from cyber history.

As military sexual assaults rise, the lack of outrage continues

Last year, I wrote one of the most wrenching stories I’ve ever had to report, about female contractors who were sexually assaulted by their co-workers in Iraq. These women–ranging from a Catholic mom in her 50s to a 20-year-old from Texas whose attacker left her drugged, bleeding and bruised–chose to work in a war zone. They chose to walk into a kind of danger most of are too frightened to imagine. But they never signed up to be attacked by the men who worked beside them.

I’ve already complained once on this blog about our government’s astounding reluctance to prosecute these crimes. In today’s New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert adds his voice to the cause.
He notes that the crimes are increasing:

“New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults reported in the last fiscal year — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

And he wonders, as I do, why a government institution as tightly controlled as the U.S. military acts so helpless in the face of this disgrace. As the rapes go unreported, and the perpetrators escape punishment, exactly what kind of message are we sending? Apparently, it’s imperative to spread human rights and democracy throughout the world, but those rights don’t apply to American women.

Good news, and apologies

I have some good news to report: I’ve accepted a job as a staff writer for New Times, the alt-weekly in Broward/Palm Beach Florida. I’m thrilled about the opportunity to keep writing feature-length, investigative pieces in one of the best news town in America.

These last few months have taught me that getting paid to commit journalism, to speak up for the voiceless and expose the slimy underbelly of the powerful, is a precious gift, and I’m so grateful for it.
I’d also like to apologize for my hiatus from this blog over the past few weeks. I’m still trying to sort out what’s appropriate for me to write here now that I’m employed by another company. Also, I’m a tad busy preparing to move across the country.
So please bear with me, and thank you for all your kind words of encouragement!

What is Mother Jones doing right?

Everyone’s talking these days about turning newspapers into non-profits. To me, that’s rather short-sighted. Non-profits generally pay very little and struggle in their own way to stay afloat. Smart, experienced print journalists expect to be paid well–they’re accustomed to a comfortable salary and good health benefits. Even in these trying times, it might be hard to find serious, investigative reporters willing to work for $30,000 a year.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of setting up an online investigative journalism publication that instead relies partly on small subscription fees and partly on funding from foundations. It would draw on the enormous labor pool of laid-off journalists now accumulating throughout the country, and put them to work doing serious digging in their own backyards–keeping an eye on local governments, the police, the sleazy developers, the Madoff wannabes.

Would readers pay for that? Well, look at Mother Jones. A story in the New York Times today explains how the left-leaning, hard-hitting magazine has managed to avoid massive layoffs–so far. Its small donations and subscriptions have remained steady, even as the economy crashed and Obama was elected, eliminating some of the urgency behind liberal muckraking.

A Mother Jones editor points out that her magazine’s work is essential, even in a world of uber-blogging. Without journalists to do time-consuming, original investigative reporting, bloggers would have nothing to pontificate about.

She’s right. And as someone who has spent seven years doing that original, sweaty, dirty, infuriating and exhilarating reporting, I sure as hell hope we can keep doing it.

No coffee for you!

In these trying economic times, newspapers are doing everything they can to cut costs–layoffs, buyouts, shutting down 401 (k) contributions. Somehow, they think they can slow the death of their industry by investing in cheaper funeral bouquets.
At my former paper, they removed all the light bulbs in the newsroom a few weeks before they announced the layoffs. Here’s another recent example, submitted by an employee at a once-proud daily paper. She got this memo in her inbox, courtesy of one of the big bosses:

We simply can’t afford to continue to pay for coffee. We’ll keep the coffee pots that have been used in the newsroom in case some of you want to bring your own and make it here. But we will no longer purchase coffee for employees.

No more coffee! Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid the end is near.

Random acts of kindness

There are two important things I’ve learned from being laid off in this recession:
1) No job is secure. We cling to things like 401 (k) plans and health insurance to give us an illusion of stability, but really, no one is immune to the forces of a vomiting economy.
2) The only thing you can really count on in such situations is your own wit, courage, creativity… and your friends.

I have been blown away by the incessant stream of kindness that has flowed my way in the past two months. Hordes of friends and relatives immediately offered me free places to crash all over the country–apartments, garages, spare bedrooms, old couches. One co-worker called to check in on me every few days, offering freelancing contacts and reasons not to start chugging Comet. My aunts and uncles and grandparents stuffed wads of cash into my wallet, while out-of-town friends mailed me iPod cards, spa gift certificates, and care packages full of tea and cookies. Even my hairdresser gave me a 15 percent discount.

My sister launched a PR campaign on her blog to find me a job. My uncle introduced me to some of the most powerful political players in D.C. My friend Ricardo innocuously offered me free concert tickets along with an introduction to his editors at the Denver Post. And of course, my dear friend Marci invited me to move into her gorgeous two-bedroom condo, rent-free.

If I had known that losing my job could spark such an explosion of generosity, I might have given up working long ago. As it is, I can only offer my sincere gratitude, and hope that somewhere along the way I will be able to return the favor.

Where’s the crackdown on contractors in Iraq?

Today’s New York Times brings more news of graft among American officials in Iraq. Two high-ranking military officials have now been named in connection with the feds’ wide-ranging investigation of private companies that exchanged bribes for contracts to rebuild the war zone. The details are scant, but the article describes a culture that would make Rod Blagojevich proud. One source saw wads of cash—thousands of dollars at a time—being delivered in pizza boxes to secure contracts.

“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”

None of this is especially surprising, given the reams of corruption stories that have streamed out of Iraq since the media awoke from its embedded slumber. But what’s frustrating is that nothing seems to be changing.

Last year, I exposed the gruesome tales of women who were sexually assaulted by their co-workers while working for KBR (a former Halliburton subsidiary) in Iraq. Despite being raped, drugged, and terrorized on the job, these women never saw their attackers punished. The U.S. government has yet to figure out how to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by the 180,000 private contractors involved in the war. In 2007, Rep. David Price (D-North Carolina) and Barack Obama (back when he was a lowly Senator) introduced bills to expand U.S. law to cover all contractors working in war zones, and set up FBI units overseas to investigate the crimes. But the legislation appears to have been forgotten in the rush of Obamamania.

So tell me, President Obama, where’s The Change We Need in Iraq?