By Jacqueline Palank
Associated Press
Scott Rothstein
The Miami Heat and Florida Panthers are ready to rumble…in bankruptcy court.
The Florida teams are among the dozens of enterprises that had the misfortune of receiving money from Scott Rothstein’s Florida law firm. Rothstein used his firm, called Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, to run a Ponzi scheme that bilked investors out of more than $1.2 billion.
With the defunct firm in bankruptcy, trustee Herbert Stettin has spent the past two years suing to recover payments the firm made in a bid to distribute the proceeds fairly among creditors. He filed another wave of lawsuits Friday, including two targeting the Heat and Panthers.
According to court papers, Stettin is seeking $31,250 from the Panthers, a National Hockey League team. The trustee sued the Heat, part of the National Basketball Association, for $156,000. According to the South Florida Business Journal, Rothstein’s firm had a sponsorship agreement with the Panthers at BankAtlantic Center, their arena outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla. That’s also where Rothstein’s law firm operated.
The suits show that
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Article source: http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2011/10/19/rothstein-trustee-sues-miami-heat-florida-panthers/?mod=google_news_blog
More than 2,000 Florida guns last year were linked to crimes committed around the country, and experts say they likely came from the cars and homes of law-abiding Floridians.
In 2010, law-enforcement officers around the country traced 2,251 crime guns to Florida, one of the states with the most guns traced in out-of-state crimes. It follows Georgia’s 2,568 guns and Texas’ 2,301, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Doctors, lawyers and cops, oh my.
The broadcast television network landscape has stayed pretty much the same over the past few decades. This is especially true in the arena of one-hour dramas.
We like our shows set in hospitals, courtrooms and on the mean streets. We like our fictional television police officers catching criminals, our fictional legal eagles prosecuting them and our fictional medical practitioners curing all sorts of diseases.
Viewers seem to like any show that has a CSI or Law amp; Order in the title that is followed by a colon and a specific city name (CSI: Miami, CSI: New York) or department (Law amp; Order: Special Victims Unit, Law amp; Order: Trial By Jury, Law amp; Order: Criminal Intent). Ever since the days of Perry Mason, viewers have always flocked to shows about lawyers. Medical shows such as Dr. Kildare, St. Elsewhere and Marcus Welby, M.D. paved the way for shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and House M.D
If you were watching television in the 1950s, odds are your favorite shows were about cops, lawyers and doctors. In 2011, odds are your favorite shows are about cops, lawyers and doctors. I’d go so far as to say that if you approached
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Article source: http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/life_columnists/michael_orourke/article/Michael-O-Rourke-A-TV-series-that-appeals-to-2229907.php
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. —
Florida’s statewide managed mediation program, designed to settle residential foreclosure cases and clear a huge backlog in the courts, isn’t working as planned and should be replaced with a local-option version and new administrative procedures, a special judicial panel says.
State Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Canady last month created the workgroup of five judges and a court administrator to assess the mediation program.
The panel reported back to Canady in a letter Friday.
The Supreme Court last year ordered the mediation program in all 20 judicial circuits to help clear a glut of foreclosure cases that have clogged Florida’s courts since the nation’s housing bubble began bursting.
“It was the consensus of the workgroup that the emergency in residential mortgage foreclosure filings that occurred in 2008-09 continues to exist as an emergency in pending foreclosure cases,” workgroup chairman William D. Palmer wrote in the letter.
Palmer, a judge on the 5th District Court of Appeal in Daytona Beach, noted that backlog now is about 350,000 cases and it’s expected to grow. RealtyTrac, which compiles foreclosure data, is
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/21/2465550/panel-scrap-statewide-fla-foreclosure.html
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced Friday that crime in the Sunshine State has declined 2 percent for the first half of the calendar year over the same period last year.
The statistics are according to FDLE’s Semi-Annual Uniform Crime Report.
Total violent crime (murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery and aggravated assault) is down by 3.2 percent for the first six months of the year, while total non-violent crime (burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft) declined 1.8 percent.
“The decrease in crime volume is yet another sign that Florida is a safe state, and we are open for business,” Gov. Rick Scott said in a news release. “I commend Florida’s law enforcement agencies as well as our citizens for their commitment and dedication to keeping Floridians and visitors to our state safe.”
“Thanks to the efforts of law enforcement and Florida’s citizens, our state continues to be a safe place to work and live,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the news release. “I am proud to recognize their dedication to protecting our citizens and visitors.”
The report also showed a 3.1 percent decrease in the number of murders, a 4.3 percent decrease in
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Article source: http://www.news4jax.com/news/29552229/detail.html
By Melanie Cohen
This week on The Broke and the Beautiful, two Florida sports teams are feeling the heat from Scott Rothstein’s bankruptcy trustee. Also, Lenny “Nails” Dykstra motors into a plea deal, and British band UB40 is declared bankrupt.
Associated Press
Scott Rothstein
The NBA’s Miami Heat and the NHL’s Florida Panthers are among many who got money from Ponzi-scheme operator Scott Rothstein’s defunct law firm. According to Bankruptcy Beat, trustee Herbert Stettin growled back at the teams, suing the Heat for $156,000 and suing the Panthers for $31,250. The lawsuits show that Rothstein’s law firm, Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler PA, paid the Panthers in September 2009 and the Heat in October 2009—not long before Rothstein’s $1.2 billion-plus Ponzi scheme was exposed.
Last time The Broke and the Beautiful mentioned Lenny “Nails” Dysktra, he’d just been arraigned on two counts of indecent exposure. This time, he’s hit home on a plea deal over other alleged criminal activities. The Los Angeles Times reported that the former New
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Article source: http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2011/10/21/the-broke-and-the-beautiful-scott-rothstein-edition/
Untreated or undertreated serious mental illnesses can be debilitating; resulting in job loss, erosion of family and social supports, involvement in the criminal justice system and, all too often, homelessness.
Sadly, because of combat-related experiences, military veterans are at increased risk of developing mental illnesses and face related social and legal difficulties. Many return home after serving our country and struggle with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or other psychiatric conditions that may go undiagnosed or untreated until dire, and sometimes life-threatening, consequences arise.
In worst-case scenarios, veterans who don’t receive treatment in a timely manner end up on the streets, in jail or worse. Too often, homeless veterans cycle between homelessness and the criminal-justice system repeatedly — and at substantial personal and economic costs to the individual and the community. Yet mental illnesses are treatable.
It is estimated that half of all homeless veterans experience mental illnesses, and almost three-quarters experience substance-use disorders. In 2009, nearly 150,000 veterans across the country spent at least one night in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs. This doesn’t include those who were “unsheltered.” Homeless veterans are
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/20/2464187/helping-veterans-at-risk-of-homelessness.html
LOUISVILLE, Ky. —
From Chris Covington’s perspective, Rodolfo Bouza sits at the bottom of a large chain of people with one purpose in mind – getting money from the federal Medicare system.
Bouza, a 46-year-old Cuban immigrant from Miami, is wanted in Kentucky on charges that he defrauded the health care plan by submitting bills for medical supplies he never delivered, or, said Covington, a criminal investigator with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, had any intention of producing.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General is adding Bouza to its most wanted list. Covington, assistant special agent in charge of the department’s investigative arm in Nashville, Tenn., sees catching Bouza as an opportunity to roll up a little more of the web that starts in South Florida and stretches across the country.
“These schemes are fraudulent from the word ‘go.’ There are no patients, there are no doctors,” Covington said. “These people can be hard to catch. As we saw in the case of Mr. Bouza, they disappear.”
Covington said Bouza’s
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/20/2463245/feds-search-for-fugitive-in-health.html
Miami Beach’s city manager and a top deputy have been cleared of criminal allegations that they tried to extort performance and event tickets from the New World Symphony.
The public corruption unit of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office closed a months-long investigation Tuesday, declining to pursue charges of extortion, unlawful compensation, exploitation of official position or illegal solicitation of a gift against City Manager Jorge Gonzalez and Assistant City Manager Hilda Fernandez.
The two longtime Beach administrators were accused early this year of withholding a $15 million reimbursement grant owed to the symphony while demanding tickets to every performance at the symphony’s new, state-of-the-art South Beach headquarters..
In a three-page closeout memo, Chief Assistant State Attorney Jose J. Arrojo wrote that it is possible Gonzalez and Fernandez violated a county law prohibiting public officials from “soliciting or demanding any gift” by requesting symphony tickets for themselves, legal staff and commissioners as part of a public benefits package linked to the city’s investment in the project.
But he said that a long-standing city of Miami Beach policy of negotiating tickets from companies that run city facilities or
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Article source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/19/2462441/probe-clears-miami-beach-administrators.html
