Not-so-secret agent man Daniel Cleary

↓
Daniel Cleary was apparently spending his Thursday morning the way a lot of the City Link staff does — at home, drinking alone. Actually, Cleary must have started his bender Wednesday night, because by early Thursday morning, he was righteously tanked. As the Sun-Sentinel reported, he fell into his tub, busted the faucet, and water began to flood his Weston apartment. He called the building manager for help in dealing with this diluvian dilemma, and like any good apartment manager, this one dutifully came over. That was when the manager noticed that Cleary was packing a sidearm. But Cleary allegedly set the manager’s mind at ease by explaining that he was an FBI agent, even going so far as to produce a badge and an ID.

Still, the manager’s suspicions were aroused. She called the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, and two deputies arrived at the apartment at about 10 a.m. They claim that Cleary was noticeably inebriated. (Again, this was 10 a.m. On a Thursday.) Once again, this time according to police, Cleary was packing a Glock handgun and identified himself as a federal agent. That’s when he made the mistake of letting the cops into his flooded apartment, where the deputies say they spied a couple of dozen fake badges, including ones from the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration. They also found 26 more firearms and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

The cops checked with the FBI and, wonder of wonders, discovered that Cleary was not actually an FBI agent. They then arrested the man for impersonating a federal agent and possession of federal agency badges and credentials. No gun charges, though — Cleary has a license to carry, God bless him.

The whole thing’s like a bad Scooby-Doo episode. The jackass would have gotten away with his clever disguise, if it weren’t for that meddling faucet!

In case it weren’t patently obvious, laser pointers and helicopters don’t mix. (photo illustration by Jennifer Boehm.)

↓
In certain post-holiday periods, we know we’ll find a jackass. Nov. 1, following Halloween, is always a good bet. You just know that somebody’s gonna get caught doing something stupid while wearing something even stupider. And the first day of the New Year, following the fireworks-filled, booze-drenched, everybody-get-your-jollies-in-one-last-time New Year’s Eve, is another great candidate. So it comes as no surprise that this week’s jackassery took place in the wee hours of the first day of 2011.

It was just after 2 a.m., in fact, when a police helicopter with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office was patrolling Naples. Suddenly, a flash of green caught their eyes — and then ruptured blood vessels in those eyes. The pilot and co-pilot were forced to turn back to the hangar, each of them suffering the effects of a high-powered laser pointer to the face. At the other end of the laser pointer, allegedly, were 19-year-old Hidalgo Moreno and a 17-year-old cohort. (You just knew it was going to be at least one minor, because flashing laser pointers at shit stops being funny about the same time you graduate junior high; for most people, anyway.) The jackasstic duo were having such a fun time shooting their laser at stuff that they allowed Sheriff’s deputies to track them to their location in a Naples home, the laser serving as a homing beacon for law enforcement.

The pair were charged with pointing a laser at an aircraft operator, causing injury. And that’s all well and good, but what does it say about our society that we have such a law on the books?

Welcome to the club, governor.

↓
Well, it certainly didn’t take long for Governor-elect Rick Scott to make what we’re guessing will be the first of many appearances as City Link’s Jackass of the Week. And boy, is he donning his first set of donkey ears in grand fashion: by defaming and attempting to demonize the state’s roughly 1.1 million unemployed people just three days before Christmas. As reported by the Orlando Sentinel and other newspapers, our new governor’s transition team issued a 109-page economic-development report Dec. 22 that claimed to cite research by Princeton University economics professor Alan Krueger that found “the amount of time people on [unemployment compensation] spent looking for a job averaged only 20 minutes a day! Within two weeks of [unemployment compensation] ending, that increased, but to only 70 minutes a day!”

Setting aside the fact that our new governor abuses the exclamation point as if he were a drunk-texting teenager, Krueger says the report misstated his findings and misspelled his name. “The unemployed in the U.S. devote more time searching for a job than unemployed workers in other countries,” says Krueger, a former chief economist with the U.S. Treasury Department, “yet [Scott’s team] make it seem that the unemployed put little effort into finding a job.”

Krueger’s study actually discovered that the unemployed spend an average 40 minutes a day — not 20, as Scott claims — searching for work. But even that statistic is no longer accurate, the Sentinel reported, as Krueger’s research was conducted several years ago, before “laid-off workers outnumber[ed] job openings by about five to one.” A new study conducted last year found unemployed people spend about an hour a day trying to find a job, and their numbers continue to swell. Florida’s unemployment rate stands at 12 percent, which is 2.2. percentage points higher than the national average.

“The main problem we face now is an inadequate number of jobs,” Krueger told the Tampa Tribune, “not inadequate search by the unemployed.”

The Scott team’s attack on the unemployed came just two weeks after the governor-elect indirectly increased their numbers when a company in which he owns a $9.7 million share, Argan, announced it would lay off dozens of employees. The Naples Daily News reports that Vitarich Laboratories, a division of Argan, will close its Naples plant, a move that will terminate the jobs of at least 50 people. The layoffs will begin Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day.

↓
by Dan Sweeney

This year, the Florida Keys gave us our most-memorable jackasses. The place has a reputation for being a repository of weird, but they really went all out this year. There was the guy who landed at Key West’s airport and, impatient to get his luggage, climbed onto the baggage carousel and then down into the tunnel and onto the tarmac, where he was arrested for trespassing. There was the 61-year-old fellow who left what police referred to as a “sexual stimulating device” in his room at Key West’s Marriott Beachside Resort, and returned to claim it, swearing that the device belonged to “a friend.” And who could forget about Y Le and Vinh Pham of Sugarloaf Key? Le held a Super Bowl Party at his house and, when he tried to close the party down at 2 a.m., Pham wouldn’t leave. So Pham got a beer bottle upside his head. At which point he busted Le in the chops, breaking his jaw, and then got him in a chokehold. Le, deterred by neither the broken jaw nor the lack of oxygen, reached back and crushed Pham’s balls with everything he had. The police report stated that he squeezed them so hard he was “puncturing them with his fingers.”

But no incident in the Keys goes as far to illustrate the nature of the place as the tale of Megan Mariah Barnes. Barnes was arrested after allegedly causing an accident near mile marker 21 on Cudjoe Key. Just the day before the crash, Barnes had been convicted of a DUI (with a prior). She was on her way to visit her boyfriend — her ex-husband was in the passenger seat.

↓
But wait! It gets weirder! Wanting to look her best for her beau, she decided that she needed a trim down there. While her ex took the wheel, she started to shave herself, and that’s when her Thunderbird rear-ended a pickup truck. Trooper Gary Dunick, who responded to the crash, said, “If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. About 10 years ago, I stopped a guy at the exact same spot … who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, ‘Nothing will ever beat this.’ Well, this takes it.”

Trooper Dunick, you said it better than we ever could. God, but we love the Keys. Thank you, thank you, just for your very existence. Don’t ever change.

Contact Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com.

Joyce Kaufman

↓
by Jake Cline and Dan Sweeney

The year of our Lord 2010 was a banner one for jackasses. In a year in which Sarah Palin was the driving political personality, when caffeinated alcoholic beverages reached such a sublime state of perfection that they had to be banned for the safety of college kids, when Tea Partyers stomped the terra demanding that government keep its hands off their Medicare, when the Super Bowl and its surrounding debauchery came to Miami, when panic and hatred seemed to bloom everywhere you looked, it goes without saying that the jackasses were on the prowl.

They seemed to be everywhere, from the local bar to the halls of Congress. If a local radio talker wasn’t calling for people to resort to armed insurrection if a nutcase like Allen West couldn’t get elected (the one upshot to his successful campaign, really), an angry motorist was plowing through a Martin Luther King Day parade, or a deputy sheriff was involved in a complicated scheme involving falsified police reports and fraud to get a refund for his Def Leppard tickets. (Also, he may have stolen a tractor.)

This was the sort of year that, if you told Carl Hiaasen to write a book about it, he’d laugh in your face and call you a lunatic, right before he gave you a wedgie and tossed you in a canal along Alligator Alley. We hear he likes giving wedgies almost as much as he enjoys the floating underground midget knife fights held in warehouses around Little Haiti — which is to say, a lot. But who really knows? In any case, stranger things have happened than a Hiaasen-delivered atomic wedgie, as the following stories will surely show.

We would, at this point, offer some sort of prayer that 2011 proves to be a saner, less-stupid year than 2010, but let’s face it — the bizarre acts perpetrated by some of our sun-fried neighbors here in South Florida are among the things that keep this place interesting. It just wouldn’t be South Florida without an all-Asian Super Bowl party broken-bottle brawl that ends in a partial castration.

We love you, South Florida. We really do.

↓
THE JACKASS: SHAWN BARBER
The jackassery: Shawn Barber just wasn’t made for these times. A former Broward Sheriff’s deputy, Barber was suspended from the force in December 2009 because he may have been involved in the theft of a neighbor’s tractor. As if that weren’t enough of an anachronism — who the hell steals a tractor in this day and age, let alone in South Florida? — Barber may have gotten caught up in the only criminal act involving Def Leppard in the 21st century.

This past June, Barber turned himself in to Palm Beach County Police for his alleged role in a complicated and supremely jackasstic scheme to get a refund on tickets to see the aging hair-metal band two years earlier at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood. Pour some sugar on yourself, take a deep breath and try to follow along with this: After the babysitter Barber and his wife had hired to work the night of the show bailed on the couple, the totally rockin’ law-enforcement officer allegedly decided the best way to get his money back for those unused concert tickets would be to draft a fake report that stated his wife and neighbor had been in a traffic accident. The resulting insurance claim would cover the price of the tickets and then some. A brilliant idea? Does the drummer from Def Leppard only have one arm?

Well, after Barber got caught up in Tractorgate more than a year later, the Broward Sheriff’s Office began to take a closer look at his old police reports. Surprisingly, it turns out Barber didn’t think his plan all the way through, as the date he listed on the phony accident report happened to coincide with a day he wasn’t working, meaning he could not have filed it, and used a case number that belonged to another, obviously unrelated case.

Palm Beach County Police reportedly charged Barber with grand theft, insurance fraud and Florida Communications Fraud. The neighbor who went along with his plan, Sharyn Iaboni, faced the same charges.

“There’s an innocent explanation to this,” Barber’s attorney told The Palm Beach Post. “There’s another side to the story that will come out.”

For Barber’s sake, we hope it involves a time machine, a Pyromania cassette and a bitchin’ ’83 Camaro.

THE JACKASS: NATHAN ROBERT MOSER
The jackassery: Before he became a reality-show punch line and a World of Warcraft pitchman, Ozzy Osbourne did some downright freaky things. He bit the heads off bats, snorted ants, wrote songs about werewolves and Aleister Crowley, peed on the Alamo and married Sharon Osbourne. And even though Ozzy now acts more like the Duke of Dusk than the Prince of Darkness, no one should try to outmadman the guy who recorded Diary of a Madman in his presence.

Enter Nathan Robert Moser, who apparently misread the lyrics of “Crazy Train” as an instruction manual and showed up to an Ozzy book-signing at a Barnes and Noble in Palm Beach Gardens with a questionable bag of tricks. Actually, it was a backpack, and after police allegedly spotted Moser smoking a joint while waiting for the original Iron Man to sign his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, they discovered within it a healthy supply of pot and some homemade fireworks. The 19-year-old jackass was arrested, of course, and charged with possession of narcotic equipment, possession of marijuana with intent to sell and possession of explosives. We’re not sure if he ever got that autograph.

↓
THE JACKASS: KENNETH PARKERSON
The jackassery: Heroes seldom appear in our Jackass of the Week feature. Heroically stupid decisions, yes. Heroic people, not so much. But the story of Kenneth Parkerson involves a hero the likes of which we see far too little of these days, the kind of brave soul whom, if we were living in another age, we would have already written a folksong about and whose likeness we would have cut from a block of marble and erected in a town square. Pity for Parkerson, he is not that hero.

That honor belongs to Capt. Ireneusz Fajkis of the Pembroke Pines Fire Department, whose Coral Springs house Parkerson allegedly made the tremendously unlucky mistake of breaking into this past May in an attempt to secretly film the firefighter’s wife going about her business. Parkerson made it no farther than the couple’s porch when Mrs. Fajkis saw the voyeuristic jackass and screamed for her husband, who caught up with the intruder on the lawn and smashed his face into the ground (resulting in one of the most-Godawesome mug shots of the year). Police arrested Parkerson and charged him with burglary, video voyeurism, marijuana possession and tampering with evidence for trying to destroy his camera while running scared shitless from Fajkis.

If you think the firefighter is a hero for fearlessly pursuing a burglar who for all he knew could have been armed — with a knife, a gun or a brain — you’d only be half-right. You see, a few months earlier, Fajkis joined the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 2 in Haiti to seek out and save people trapped under mountains of rubble created by the earthquake that devastated the country in January. To save one of those people, a woman he found pinned under a concrete slab, Fajkis had no choice but to amputate her leg on the spot with a power saw. To rescue another woman, he crawled into a collapsed building through a narrow hole filled with dead bodies and unstable debris. That woman, Mireille Dittmer, turned out to be a resident of Pembroke Pines who was in Haiti on business at the time of the earthquake.

Parkerson was unaware of any of that when he broke into Fajkis’ home, though he certainly realized the firefighter was no ordinary human being, telling a hospital staffer following his arrest, “I picked the wrong house, because a UFC fighter lived there and beat me up.” Parkerson has a hearing scheduled before a Broward County judge Jan. 13, the same day, we imagine, Fajkis will be preventing a massive asteroid from striking the Earth or retrieving a child’s kitten from atop Mount Everest.

THE JACKASS: JOHN LONG
The jackassery: Break-ins happen all the time, but it’s not often that someone breaks into your house for the orange juice. Up in Wellington, though, several residents experienced just that state of affairs when John Long allegedly busted into their joints and absconded with their juice. (Also, a flashlight.) Long’s father, Vincent Long, told WPTV News, “He did some ecstasy and PCP and hasn’t been right since.” To which we say, man, you’d have to have done a shit-ton of ecstasy to start busting into people’s houses and stealing their O.J. When we named Long our Jackass of the Week in August, he had been arrested and faced a psychiatric evaluation. Since that time, according to the Palm Beach County Clerk’s office, his evaluation has been completed and he now faces trial.

↓
THE JACKASS: BENNETT WYCHE
The jackassery: You may think New York Jets assistant coach Sal Alosi pulled the biggest jackass stunt on the sidelines of a football field in 2010 when, earlier this month, he intentionally tripped the Miami Dolphins’ Nolan Carroll during a punt return. As childish and unsportsmanlike as Alosi’s action was — the Jets have indefinitely suspended the coach for his numbnuts move — it’s nothing compared to the sideline shenanigans committed this past April by Bennett Wyche, the head coach of the Stranahan High School flag-football team.

Wyche, whom the Sun-Sentinel named the 2009 Coach of the Year, guaranteed he wouldn’t become a repeat winner during an April 27 game between the Stranahan Mighty Dragons and the Western Wildcats. As the accompanying photo shows, Wyche yanked the flag from the waist of Wildcats safety Jessica Lucarelli after she intercepted a pass and headed for the goal line.

“I saw the coach out of the corner of my eye,” Lucarelli told the Sentinel. “I was shocked. You definitely don’t expect something like that to happen. I was upset. He took away my glory and was teaching a horrible example to his players.”

Officials on the field agreed, issuing an unsportsmanlike conduct call to Wyche and awarding a touchdown to Lucarelli and the Wildcats, who won the game 6-0. A week later, after the incident blew up in the local and national press, the Florida High School Athletic Association fined Wyche $100, demanded he attend a coaching course and ordered him to begin the 2011 season with a two-game suspension.

Wyche, who offered a non-apology apology a few days after the game — “it was the wrong thing to do. It was embarrassing and we have no comment” — maintained his silence after the FHSAA handed down its punishment. “I really can’t say more,” he told the Sun-Sentinel. But that says it all, doesn’t it?

↓
THE JACKASS: LATRICIA SAMUEL
The jackassery: Latricia Samuel must have needed a parking place awfully badly. When she pulled into a spot along Northwest Eighth Avenue in Hallandale Beach this past Martin Luther King Day, police informed her that she could not park there, as this was a parade route, in celebration of the holiday. And with that simple explanation, Samuel snapped. According to police, she became “verbally abusive,” and then hit the gas and sped off southward — directly toward the oncoming parade. She plowed right through the parade, made it onto Hallandale Beach Boulevard and then onto I-95 in a disappointingly short police chase that ended when she crashed near the Pembroke Road exit. Although she was charged with 13 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, ironically, only Samuel was hurt in the incident. The struggle of Martin Luther King for civil rights freed many African-Americans from the bonds of Jim Crow. But it also got at least one of them locked up.

↓
THE JACKASS: CHARLES L. STEWART
The jackassery: This past March, federal and state authorities raided the Hialeah home of Charles L. Stewart after they received reports that he had smuggled into the United States a box of giant African snails known by the scientific name Achatina fulica, a destructive species that wreaks havoc on any environment in which it is introduced. Not unlike a Kardashian, the creature can eat just about anything, leaving behind it a disgusting trail of slime and threatening great intestinal distress to anyone who encounters it.

It’s bad enough that Stewart may have brought these nasty little buggers into South Florida, but it’s almost unconscionable that he was able to convince people to ingest them. Yet as reported by The Miami Herald, Stewart did just that. Claiming to practice an African religion known as Ifa Orisha — whose last album was terrific, by the way — Stewart allegedly told his followers that the mucus of these snails contains healing properties and drinking it would cure them of their ailments. Instead of finding themselves magically cured, the newspaper reported, “Several followers became violently ill, losing weight and developing strange lumps in their bellies.”

Stewart, whose breath we imagine could melt hair, is said to have eaten the snails himself. “I did not invent this. It’s something that is part of our religion,” he told the Herald. If true, that only means some other nitwit invented the drinking-snail-snot ritual, and if he happens to be reading this, we would like to ask that he never, ever invites us to a cocktail party.

THE JACKASS: JOYCE KAUFMAN
The jackassery: It takes a truly swirly eyed nutbag to outcrazy congressman-elect Allen West, whose most recent claim to fame is his call to censor newspapers who run the information held in the cables leaked by Wikileaks, regardless of that whole First Amendment, freedom of the press thing. We could go on and on about what a nightmarish bag of hypocrisy this is coming from a guy whose election campaign essentially consisted of swaddling himself in the American flag, but this isn’t about West. This is about Joyce Kaufman, the local talk-radio host who managed to one-up her would-be employer. Not long after West announced that Kaufman would be his chief of staff, she announced that she was withdrawing from consideration for the job, as she would not be part of an “electronic lynching by proxy.”

The fact that schools went on lockdown around Broward County while she was under consideration for the job after someone sent her an e-mail threatening that “something big” would happen at a Broward County government building, or maybe a school, was certainly a factor in her decision. Of course, another may have been that electronic lynchings just aren’t her style — she prefers the real thing. After West’s announcement, multiple videos of Kaufman espousing the most-bizarre, far-right opinions made their way around the Web and onto cable news. She said that illegal immigrants who commit crimes should be hanged and their bodies shipped home. She said before the November election that “if ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and promised “at that point, I’m going to go up into the hills of Kentucky, out into the Midwest, up into the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches, and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

The woman who sent the threatening e-mail turned out to be a left-wing agitator, natch. But that doesn’t change anything as far as Kaufman and her bloodlust are concerned. She returned to local radio, where she continues to preach to the armchair-revolutionary choir, never considering that, as with the Glenn Beck follower who was recently stopped with a small arsenal on his way to shoot up the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, one of her mouth-breathing audience members may finally get up out of his chair and decide to take her seriously.

↓
THE JACKASS: RICHARD PEREZ
The jackassery: Wilton Manors Police Chief Richard Perez hung on to his office as long as he could after the South Florida Times dropped the news that he had forwarded racist e-mails around his office, but he eventually resigned in October, after being issued a month-long suspension. Other than a few breathtakingly racist screeds, the e-mails also included several about President Barack Obama. One suggested that Obama’s mother had engaged in bestiality, while another expressed regret that, when the Marines fired off their 21-gun salute at Obama’s inauguration, they had missed the president. Ha, ha! Hilarious, right? Nothing like a good presidential assassination joke in a country that has seen one in every 11 of its leaders leave office at the barrel of a gun. Police Chief Perez’s e-mails also did a huge disservice to his department. All it takes is one story like this and there isn’t a black man in Wilton Manors who will trust the police to give them a fair shake, regardless of how much community outreach the department may have done in the past. Perez defended the e-mails by claiming that he had forwarded them for “training purposes.” No one believed him.

↓
THE JACKASS: JOSEPH LOPRETE
The jackassery: Joseph Loprete is, apparently, a jealous man. He decided that, at a Fourth of July party, his wife had been paying too much attention to two men who had, as at many house parties, busted out acoustic guitars for some sing-along time. As he drove the family SUV home, he got into an argument with his wife that became quite heated. When he pulled the car into their driveway, she got their four kids out of the car (yes, their children were present) and herded them into the house to let Loprete stew for a while. But while she may have thought that letting him count to 10 out in the car would do some good, this alone time only made Loprete all the more angry. A few brief moments passed, and then — boom! — the car slammed through the living room wall, thankfully harming no one, as Loprete’s wife was putting the kids to bed. According to the police report, when the cops arrived, Loprete demanded, “Put me in cuffs. Take me to jail. Let’s go.” The police complied. And that’s the last we had heard of Loprete, until a search of the Palm Beach County Clerk’s records found that the man, who had a clean record up until the incident, was let go with probation. No word on what sort of punishment his wife doled out.

Contact the authors at jcline@citylinkmagazine.com and dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com.

Joyce Kaufman: Nuttier than squirrel poo. (photo by Cristobal Herrera/Sun-Sentinel.)

↓
When you’re too nutty for Allen West, you’re pretty much a jackass by definition. After announcing that his new chief of staff would be local radio personality/heavily armed lunatic Joyce Kaufman, congressman-elect West was apparently shocked to learn that his close friend and occasional campaign-trail warm-up act had said some controversial things in the past. For one, she said that illegal immigrants who commit crimes (no word on whether that included misdemeanors or traffic violations) should be hanged and the bodies shipped back to their home countries. Also, at a July 4 Tea Party rally, she said that if Republicans such as West failed to take over Congress, it would be time to just start killing people.

“If ballots don’t work, bullets will,” declared Kaufman, who promised to lead an insurrectionist movement. “At that point, I’m gonna up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m gonna go out into the Midwest, I’m gonna go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches, and I’m gonna gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for — and some things are worth dying for!”

Thankfully, the outreaches of Vermont and New Hampshire are safe. Allen West won, but Kaufman will not be joining him in Washington, D.C. After her comments were played on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, she received an anonymous Internet message that read in part: “I’m planning something big around the government building here in Broward County, maybe a post office, maybe even a school.”

That, of course, led to a lockdown of schools and government buildings throughout Broward County this past Wednesday. Soon after, Kaufman withdrew from consideration as West’s chief of staff, saying she wouldn’t be “used in an electronic lynching by proxy.” Police won’t say whether the missive was written by someone in support of Kaufman or against her, though the rest of the letter apparently included strongly pro-Second Amendment language, and Kaufman is, obviously, a big supporter of the right to keep and bear arms.

In fact, that’s one thing we do agree with Kaufman on — handgun choice. We, too, prefer the .357 Magnum as our go-to handgun, mainly for having more than adequate stopping power while eschewing the teeth-chattering kick of elephant-killing hand cannons such as the .44 Mag or the .50 AE. But, other than that, yeah, she’s a total nutter.

Joseph Loprete

↓
There are certain events that we just know will lead to a Jackass of the Week candidate. When the Super Bowl came to these parts, we knew the jackass of the next week’s issue would somehow be Super Bowl-related — and indeed, it involved a brawl between two Asian fellows at a Super Bowl party in the Keys that left one of them with critical injuries to his scrotum. Another of those events is the Fourth of July. Anything that mixes the widespread consumption of alcohol with the use of incendiary devices is bound to result in a jackass or three. So it was that, as Joseph Loprete drove home from a Fourth of July party with his family, the spirit of jackassery was in the air to a far greater extent than the spirit of ’76.

Loprete, his wife and four of their children had attended the party, at which Loprete’s wife apparently enjoyed a musical interlude with a couple of guys; they sat around and played guitar, a scene that plays out at many a house party. But Loprete is a jealous lover. He grew angry over his wife’s making music with other men, and as he drove the family home, after allegedly drinking heavily at the party, his anger only mutated into a dark, nasty thing that clung to him like the gooey stuff from Ghostbusters 2.

His rage must have been palpable to the passengers in the vehicle, for when Lobrete reached his home in Boca Raton, his wife got the children out of the car and into the home, leaving Loprete to stew. It was as she put the children in their rooms that she heard the crash. As the Sun-Sentinel reported, she came to the front of the house to discover that her husband had driven their SUV through their living room wall.

When the cops arrived, they found the physically damaged SUV parked in the driveway and the mentally damaged Loprete parked on his couch. According to the police report, he turned to the cops and said, “Put me in cuffs. Take me to jail. Let’s go.”

The officers complied. Loprete was charged with DUI property damage, aggravated assault and criminal mischief. We understand the aggravated assault charge, but, really, isn’t booze, property damage and criminal mischief what the Fourth of July is all about?

The Dude

↓

When we first heard the story of Klinton McGhee’s trip to Key West, we recalled a line in The Big Lebowski. (This goes back to one of our central premises in life, which is that everything can be described through either a quote from The Big Lebowski or a line from a Bob Dylan song.) So there’s the Dude, staggering around, reeling from the spiked White Russian that Jackie Treehorn has just given him. He’s just delivered one of the great lines of the movie — “You make a hell of a Caucasian, Jackie!” — and he’s mumbling to himself. Just before he hits the ground, out cold, he murmurs, bewildered and despairing at all the terrible turns his life has taken since trying to get a replacement for his rug, which had been urinated on by hired goons: “All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back.”

Indeed. And all McGhee ever wanted was his luggage back. He had flown into Key West from Cincinnati. It was 10 p.m., and he was tired. He just wanted his luggage. But the baggage just would not come. The conveyor belt was running along, but no bags. Finally, fed up with his lot in life, McGhee climbed on the conveyor belt and rode it around a few times. The police frown on that, certainly, but it was what allegedly happened next that got McGhee booked into the Monroe County jail. Not content to just ride the belt, McGhee stumbled through the opening where the bags come onto the belt and down onto the tarmac, which is, of course, off limits to the public. He enjoyed a brief moment of freedom wandering around behind the curtain before he was detained by airport cops and charged with trespassing.

No word on whether he ever got his luggage.

Shawn Barber

↓
Shawn Barber and his wife had tickets for a show. And not just any show, but a concert by the sugar-pouring, love-biting, photograph-having, one-arm-drumming biggest British band of the hair-metal era: Def. Fucking. Leppard. Barber was stoked. He could finally, if for only one night, forget about all those workaday troubles, which for him are now quite substantial. A Broward Sheriff’s deputy, Barber was suspended without pay this past December in relation to the theft of a neighbor’s tractor. But the concert was before that fall from grace, back in March 2008. Unfortunately, when the magical night drew nigh, the Barbers’ babysitter fell through, leaving them with two unused and unrefundable concert tickets. Well, one does not get to be the sort of man investigated in a bizarre tractor robbery without being one to take matters into his own hands. Shawn Barber may be just such a fellow.

According to a police affidavit, Barber came up with the following brilliant plot: He would write up a fake accident report, in which his wife and a neighbor, one Sharyn Ioboni, got into an accident, and then file an insurance claim to get his money back for the concert tickets. And he would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that damned tractor. Since that murky incident, Barber’s fellow officers have been going over his reports with a fine-toothed comb. Not only was Barber not working on the day the alleged accident occurred, making it unlikely-to-impossible that he would be filling out an accident report, but the case number cited on the report was connected to a completely different case.

This past Wednesday, June 23, Barber appeared in court to be charged with grand theft and insurance fraud. From what we can tell, the location of the tractor remains unknown, to which we can only say: Gunter glieben glauchen globen. Which, we believe, is German for “Tractor robbery and jackasses go together like sauerkraut and schnitzel.”

And in those late-night Waffle House sojourns, one thing we can always be assured of is that we will not be the strangest sight in the place. One must keep a mind so open as to be a vast prairie when one dallies among the populace of the wee-hours greasy spoon. But despite our appetite for both good pancakes and bad craziness, one thing we will not tolerate at our early-morning Waffle House is gunplay. That is right out. So we’re relieved we weren’t sucking back a short stack buried in maple syrup at the Waffle House at 2580 Davie Road at 4 a.m. this past Friday, when two men burst into the place guns at the ready.

Unfortunately for the moronic duo, they apparently had not taken the proper courses in gun safety. Details remain hazy, but this much we know: The gun belonging to one of the robbers went off, hitting the other robber. The two fled together, with the wounded would-be thief eventually turning up at Broward General. As of this writing, charges had not yet been filed.

Another maxim we invented and have come to believe utterly is this: People get into a life of crime because they’re too stupid to do something else. And a guy who plugs his accomplice is just another bit of evidence in a long list that proves the point.