It’s been a long week. Here’s a short recap of some fun Florida news stories.
Sometimes criminals just make it easy
A St. Petersburg woman was arrested this week when police found a bag labeled “Bag of Drugs.” Officers on the scene apparently found this label to be suspicious, so they had the contents tested and were likely unsurprised to discover that it contained cocaine, meth, and a cornucopia of other pharmaceuticals and paraphernalia. It borders on public service how easy this person made her own arrest, though, to be fair, a different label probably wouldn’t have helped her case.
Owner of lost cocaine found
Speaking of bags of drugs, last week, a mystery man broke into West Palm Beach’s City Hall and left behind a bag of cocaine (not labeled, of course), and West Palm police have now identified the suspect. But more importantly—and hilariously—they have released the surveillance video of the break-in. The video shows the suspect, a Lake Worth Beach man, stripping to his shorts and rolling around on the floor of the council chambers before getting up and leaving his clothes, shoes and cocaine on the floor. Police found and arrested the suspect at a drug rehabilitation center, because where else do you go after a crime like that?
Nobody coups like Floridians
A former U.S. Green Beret from Melbourne, Florida, was arrested this week in connection to a weapons smuggling case filed in Tampa. The accused, Jordan Goudreau, was also caught in 2020 trying to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from office and the smuggling, apparently, was to help support the attempt.
This arrest further supports the notion that we Floridians are more prone to coups than the average American. After all, Floridians made up the majority of J6 defendants, with a whopping 11.5% of capitol rioters coming from the Sunshine State (take that, Pennsylvania and Texas). Maybe it’s just something about a 110-degree heat index that makes us more primed to revolt.
With friends like these…
The race for west Broward County’s state senate seat is heating up, and candidate Rodney Jacobs has put himself in the hot seat by committing the unforgivable sin of…saying that someone is a friend of Rick Scott.
Jacobs is being sued for defamation by fellow candidate and former Broward County Mayor Barbara Sharief over a campaign ad that suggested an admiration from Sharief toward the former Florida governor and current U.S senator that was part of to the largest Medicare fraud case in history. While it’s understandable that a candidate for office wouldn’t want to be associated with fraud (though it certainly hasn’t hurt Scott), it has to be a sad day for Rick Scott when someone is willing to go to court to prove that they want nothing to do with you.
Gas station hallucinogens—what could go wrong?
Anyone who’s ever eaten sushi from a gas station knows that there are some things sold over the counter that are absolutely not meant for human consumption. That lesson is now being reinforced with the latest epidemic of gas station drugs that find their way on the shelves of our local filling stations, marked as “dietary supplements” to bypass FDA laws. So far, Florida scrambled to outlaw “gas station heroin”, but are now up against a new street-legal analogue of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
In 28 states, including Florida, reports have been made of hospitalizations resulting from eating “shrooms” sold at convenience stores. The absolutely not FDA-approved, much-worse alternative to psilocybin mushrooms that contains who-knows-what has been linked with seizures, confusion, loss of consciousness, and all manner of other unpleasantries. Needless to say, the DARE program didn’t prepare us for this one, but in fairness, hallucinogens sold at gas stations are just about the easiest thing to “Just Say No” to.
Former West Palm police officer is now acting director of the Secret Service
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the Secret Service. The organization only has two jobs—protecting the president and, for some reason, tracking down counterfeit currency. Of the latter, the Secret Service has had a pretty good run—we Americans are generally safe from the hidden but ever-present threat of counterfeit bills. As for the former, it recently had to reset its “days since last incident” board after an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, and heads have been rolling at the agency since.
Enter the Secret Service’s newest acting director, Ronald Rowe. Rowe began his career as a police officer in West Palm Beach and has now climbed the ranks of the highest protection detail in the land. It’s great to see a Palm Beach County resident to be elevated to such esteemed ranks. And with all the Mizner-inspired architecture of Palm Beach, we can only assume Rowe will have a vastly better handling of sloped roofs than his predecessor.
