Crime Scene

Unsolved cop-killing on America's Most Wanted

America's Most Wanted will again profile the case of slain BSO Sgt. Chris Reyka (left) on Saturday night's broadcast.

This case has weighed heavily on the hearts of law enforcement officers in South Florida and across the country since Reyka was gunned down in a drugstore parking lot last August. Leads have come and gone, and at times investigators seemed close to breaking through with an arrest, but so far, the case is still open and unsolved.

The show airs at 9 p.m. on Fox affiliates nationwide.

The do-good bank robber

Catherine Kaczanowski loves her some bank robbing. She also loves giving back.

A few years ago, Kaczanowski robbed five banks. When cops caught up with her, she told them she pulled off the heists to pay for medical care for her cat, Smoochie.

She was back to her old tricks last week, when she stole $1,000 from a North Fork bank in Bensonhurst, N.Y. How do cops know it was Kaczanowski?

Because she returned to the bank Thursday with $700 and a handwritten note, which she gave to a teller: "I stole this money on Friday, February 22. I'm sorry."

She then went to a liquor store to pick up some Jack Daniels. By the time she got home, police were waiting for her with handcuffs in tow.

New York tabloids the Post and the Daily News have more. Thanks to Judi at Dave Barry's blog for the tip.

Hog-lovin' hulks hogtie heister

Now THIS is what we call a bike patrol.

From The Sydney Morning Herald ...

Machete wielding masked bandits picked the wrong club to rob yesterday - 50 bikie club members were meeting there.

Police said the robbers raided the Regents Park Sporting Club about 8.50pm yesterday, ordering people at the bar to lie on the floor.

But the robbers failed to notice 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club enjoying a drink in the nearby auditorium.

"Fifty of us jumped out of our seats and raced out to the main bar," said club president Jerry "Jester" van Cornewal.

...And a lump of coal

You won't see Sandy groping Santa Claus again -- she promises.

According to the Danbury News Times, Sandrama Lamy, 33 of Danbury, Conn., blames bad meds on her bad behavior. You might remember: Lamy got touchy with a mall Santa a few months back, when she and a friend were sitting on his lap.

A Connecticut judge granted her a special probationary program Wednesday, and if she stays out of trouble for two years, the charges will be dismissed.

Two men arrested for robbing graves

These two men may bring new meaning to the term grave robbing.

Hollywood Police say Carlos Javier Gonzalez (left), 32, and Victor Perez, 44, stole brass flower vases off grave sites at Fred Hunter's Memorial Gardens in Hollywood.

Then they sold them to A & B Recycling for scrap. No word on how much they got for the vases.

Gonzalez was arrested Friday on a charge of grand theft. Police arrested Perez last Wednesday on the same charge.

O.J. over the years

I personally don't care for the O.J. Simpson stories nowadays that mention how he's "looking much heavier than in his playing days" or "paunchier and slower-moving." Happens to most everyone, right? It's not the point of the stories, so why point it out? Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

But, without passing any judgment, check out these O.J. mugshots from over the years, posted in The Smoking Gun's substantial mugshot collection:

First, after his June 1994 arrest in Los Angeles. O.J. was charged with the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. A jury acquitted him in October 1995.

Second, after his September 2007 arrest in Las Vegas. O.J. and several other men were charged with armed robbery and other felonies after taking collectibles from two sports-memorabilia collectors. Their trial is set to begin in April (see last graf).

Third, in January 2008 before a bail-revocation hearing in Las Vegas. A judge increased O.J.'s bond because of a profanity-laced message on his bondsman's voicemail that violated a court order.

In the Vegas case, a judge today denied a request from defense attorneys to postpone the trial. It begins April 7.

Officer fired for porn-star side gig

Easy there, fellas -- this one's from Hungary.

Livia Kovacs, 36, (no photo available, sorry) was fired from her job as a Hungarian police officer after a colleague spotted her in a porn video and reported it to supervisors.

In the flick, Kovacs apparently portrays a dominatrix cop who uses her handcuffs on a partner.

She was fired for "bringing the force into disrepute and misuse of her police uniform."

Kovacs told reporters she didn't mind the dismissal because she's been inundated with offers to star in more films.

Thanks to Dave Barry's blog for the story.

Doc, is that a painkiller in your pocket?

Yes, AND he's happy to see you.

Jacksonville doctor Benjamin S. Malang (left) allegedly found a way to pump up his acupuncture business: He wrote free painkiller prescriptions for patients who had sex with him.

Police launched an investigation earlier this month after a patient told cops Malang, who is 70 (!!!), had been giving her Hydrocodone and Oxycontin scripts in exchange for sex at his home and office for the past two years. Undercover cops set up similar arrangements with Malang and arrested him, the Florida Times-Union reported.

Malang, who has been licensed to practice in Florida since 1984, once served as senior physician for a North Florida jail. His medical training is listed as "Far Easteren (sic) medical school" on a police report, which The Smoking Gun posted.

Attention Seminole Hard Rock

Those Vegas-style slots come with certain -- ahem -- expectations.

From the Des Moines Register:

An Iowa casino worker says he should not have been fired for demanding that his co-workers provide him with prostitutes because the casino promotes Las Vegas-style gaming.

Neil Jorgensen, 62, of Kalona worked at the Riverside Casino and Gold Resort south of Iowa City until last November. He was fired after he was given a $100 Riverside gift certificate and a free night's stay at the casino hotel in recognition of a year's employment with the company.

He used the gift certificate and free night's stay on the night of Nov. 28.

"I went to Ruthie's, the nice steakhouse within the casino, and I had a cosmopolitan or two and a bottle of wine and a really good dinner," Jorgensen testified at a recent state hearing dealing with his request for unemployment benefits.

He said he went to his hotel room about midnight and called hotel managers for help in figuring out how to order an adult movie. An hour later, he said, he called the managers again "and asked for a hooker."

Masked duo steal $11,000 worth of cell phones

Police need help finding the two people who broke into a Davie electronics store Monday and stole dozens of cell phones.

The heist happened at 6:26 a.m. at Mobile Media, 6403 Stirling Rd.

For 16 minutes, surveillance video captured two people in masks raiding the store. In the end, they got away with between 50 and 60 cell phones valued at $11,000, Lt. Wayne Boulier said.

Davie police responded to an alarm call at the store, but they were too late. All they found was the rear door of the business pried open.

Anyone with information is asked to call Davie police at 954-693-8200.

Please allow me to introduce myself

...I'm a man of wealth and taste.

Oh wait, I'm a crime reporter. So I have neither wealth, nor taste.

But I do love a good story, and hope to send one or two your way. I (mostly) cover the eastern part of Broward County, where over the weekend, a homeless man was savagely beaten, a faulty dishwasher toasts a home and a house gets in the way of a car.

Have a news tip? Don't keep it to yourself. E-mail me at abeasley@miamiherald.com.

Also, I'll be happy to answer any question you have -- be it about crime or love -- as long as it's interesting. And no, don't ask me how to get out of speeding tickets. (But if you know how, don't hesitate to tell me).

Don't Tase me, son

Ah, that joke never gets old.

But this does: A drunken party host who uses a Taser to shock his guests.

It was mostly fun and games until Kenny Chumsky (photo here) turned the stun gun on his mom Thursday, police say. The shock hit her in the leg, causing her to fall and hit her head on the garage floor.

The Port St. Lucie man was charged with aggravated domestic battery. His mom pressed charges because she was "tired of being abused," according to a police report cited at TCPalm.com.

Police crash pot party

This is one that goes down in the not-so-smart category.

A group of friends hanging out in a Wilton Manors apartment Wednesday night were surprised by some invited guests.

Someone - perhaps a neighbor - called police to alert them of a "marijuana party" in the apartment, located in the 2100 block of NE 26th Street.

When cops arrived, there was no mistaking that they were in the right place.

Not only could they smell pot from the street, but they saw a thick cloud of smoke billowing outside the apartment window. And that isn't all police say they saw.

Inside the open window was a 3-foot-tall glass water pipe sitting in the kitchen sink, according to police.

In the end, cops found 32 grams of pot and $1,373 in cash. All six people inside, including the 18-year-old who lived in the apartment, were arrested on drug charges.

Who's drunker now?

A Titusville couple got into an argument in a Publix parking lot Thursday night over which one was sober enough to drive home.

Neither one won that fight. The hubby, Richard Zubowicz (left), pushed his wife to the ground, circled the car around the parking lot, then he ran over her with the car, Brevard County investigators say.

Becky Zubowicz was so tightly pinned, cops had to use a jack to get her out from under the car. She was taken to a hospital in critical condition.

Richard was in jail without bond, charged with domestic violence and DUI with serious injury.

Armed robbery at Pines supermarket

A trio of thieves recently robbed a Sedano's Supermarket in Pembroke Pines and got away with $29,000 in cash.

Police are still investigating the holdup, which happened at 9:45 p.m. on Feb. 17.

Here's how it all went down, according to a police report:

The store manager, Wilson Montero, was working in a back office when someone knocked on the door acting as an employee. He was even wearing a shirt and hat

Two men entered, one of them holding a handgun, while a third stayed outside acting as a lookout.

The robbers then tied Montero using packing tape and demanded he give them the combination to the store safe. But even with the code, they couldn't get it open.

So they untied Montero and forced him to open it. They grabbed the loot, tied Montero up again and took off from the grocery store at 17171 Pines Blvd. through the front doors.

The three robbers are still out there.

Anyone with information on this robbery is asked to call Pembroke Pines police at 954-431-2200 or call Broward Crime Stoppers at 954-493-8477.

Naked, bald and caffeinated

Be on the lookout for a naked, bald man in a red Corvette with a cup o' joe at his side.

Cops say a perp fitting that description pulled up to a Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru in Lake Mary, a little north of Orlando, and ordered a coffee with cream Monday night. 

When the clerk handed him the order, she saw he wasn't wearing pants.

"I think 'shocked' would be the proper term for it," Lake Mary Officer Kim Fuehrer said to reporters of the clerk's reaction.

Our favorite part of this story*, reported by NBC affiliate WESH in Orlando, is the suspect's description. (You may remember our previous discussions here about descriptions of crime suspects in the media.)

Police "are searching for a suspect who is bald, has no pants, and apparently likes coffee from Dunkin' Donuts."

*Thanks to Herald Copy Desk Chief Jeff Kleinman for the story alert.

Orgies, softball and beatings

A life of drunken orgies, softball after-parties and inmate beat-downs. That's how Florida's former prisons chief, Jim McDonough, described the state's prison-guard culture in a recent interview with CNN.

McDonough said he resigned from his post earlier this month because he felt he brought sufficient reforms to the prison system in his two years at its helm. But when he got there, here's what McDonough said he found:

-Guards bought and sold steroids to bulk up and give them an edge in their highly competitive softball league.

-Guards used taxpayer funds to buy booze for big parties after softball games, something McDonough said had become "an obsession" among prison staff. "They seemed to be drunk half the time and had orgies the other half," he said.

-Guards brutalized inmates and other guards who threatened to report their behavior.

McDonough said he helped rid the prison system of this "cancer" by demoting and firing corrupt guards and prison officials. He has since accepted a job with a New York foundation that promotes criminal-justice reform.   

Baby-beating death case in court

The Herald's Hannah Sampson reported on an emotional day today in Broward County court.

A 12-year-old boy accused of beating to death his 17-month-old cousin pleaded not guilty in juvenile court of second-degree murder. State prosecutors are close to working out a deal for the boy to serve three years in a juvenile facility followed by probation.

It was a brutal death - police say the boy used a baseball bat to beat the toddler because her crying kept him from watching TV - but the boy's mom says the courts should let him free.

"My son's only 12 years old," she told the judge Monday. "He's not guilty."

No, you're not Rick James

An alarming trend spotted in The Smoking Gun's recent batch of strange and funny mugshots from across the country: Guys sporting T-shirts of a catchphrase that's five years old.

You remember the Rick James sketches from Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central. They coined a phrase that became popular with the kids.

So popular, in fact, that these two guys (here and here) were still getting a laugh out of it when they were recently arrested for unknown reasons.   

C'mon, fellas. Yer better than that.

Cellmates: Coming to newsracks near you

A weekly publication called Cellmates has an interesting concept: Jail mugshots and charging details of local arrestees, taken straight from cops' public crime blotter reports.

For $1 at convenience-store newsstands, the magazines beckon readers to "Look Who's in Jail!" and "See What the Charges Are Inside!"

Our friend Kevin Deutsch at The Palm Beach Post first reported this on his paper's crime blog Tuesday. The mag is already circulating in PB County.

The Cellmates website, based in St. Petersburg, doesn't say what other parts of Florida the magazine covers or whether we can expect it to hit Miami-Dade and Broward anytime soon. Its answering machine, which describes Cellmates as the No. 1 Crime-Statistics Publication in Florida, also says the company won't accept payments from people trying to get their mugshots out of the magazine.

Cellmates puts the booking information together nicely, but you can do it for free online. Most law enforcement websites let you scan the new arrests, including booking mugs and charging details. Here's BSO's arrest search page (no need to enter a name, just click search to see recent arrests). Here's where you can see who's in custody in Miami-Dade's jail (you need to enter at least a last name). And here's the blotter for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.   

 

Lawyer arrested for violent handshake

Kathy Rentas, left, is a Fort Lauderdale attorney who practices commercial litigation for Becker and Poliakoff (read her bio here).

Jennifer Keene is an assistant U.S. attorney who is prosecuting a case against Rentas' husband, Anthony, who violated the terms of his probation on drug charges.

After a hearing for Anthony Rentas Thursday in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, his wife insisted on shaking Keene's hand. Kathy Rentas allegedly was so aggressive with her handshake, jerking and pulling up and down, it injured the prosecutor's shoulder and caused her to miss work the next day.

Court officials arrested Rentas, 49, and charged her with a federal misdemeanor. She spent Thursday night in a solitary cell at Miami's Federal Detention Center and was released on a $100,000 bond the next day. (It pains me to link to the competition, but the Sun-Sentinel had the scoop on this story.)

Rentas' attorney said her client did not intend to cause any harm. Rentas, who practiced law in New York before being admitted to the Florida bar in 2006, faces up to a year in prison if convicted.

Of Lil' Boosie and ACLU-sie

From the Really? Department:

Police in Brooksville, Fla., (where?) arrested 19-year-old Christopher Holder (left) last weekend and charged him with disorderly conduct. His crime: Singing in public.

A Hernando County Sheriff's deputy responding to an animal complaint instead came across Holder and two of his buddies walking down a residential street. The deputy heard Holder say "motherf-" a couple of times, loudly, much to the chagrin of a nearby mom, who told the teen to stop cursing in front of her children.

When the cop intervened, Holder explained he was just rapping the lyrics of hip-hop star Lil' Boosie, whose catalogue includes tracks like "Thug A-- N-" and "Get It Off In This Muthaf-." Nice.

Quoting the cop here, not Lil' Boosie: "As a result of Holder's loud profanity outraging [victim] Amy Churchill's sense of public decency and affecting the peace and quiet of Churchill and her children, Holder was taken into custody for disorderly conduct."

So, what exactly was illegal here? Rapping in the 'burbs? Using profanity in public? I don't know. But I think MC Holder has a defense ... anyone at the ACLU paying attention? 

Thanks to The Smoking Gun, which has the arrest docs. 

Website zeroes in on crime (UPDATED X2)

This is very cool. A website called CrimeReports.com combines Google Maps and crime statistics to show details about every car break-in and shooting in your city.

Well, only if you live in Pembroke Pines. So far, Pines is the only city in Florida being tracked on CrimeReports.

The PPines Police Department, like about 40 others across the country, pays CrimeReports between $100 and $200 a month to extract their latest crime data and load it onto the site, according to this AP article.   

I've just been playing around on it a few minutes, and it's pretty awesome and user-friendly. Kinda has a similar feel to Zillow.com, 'cept it deals in murder and mayhem, not property values and taxes.

The details -- clicking on a crime opens up a bubble on the map showing exact what happened and where -- are impressive, and you can even e-mail specific incidents to a friend.

I put a call in to a Pines police spokesman to find out more about why the department signed up for this site. Here's hoping other South Florida departments do the same.

Update: Pembroke Pines Maj. David Golt called back to say his department is experimenting with CrimeReports on a trial basis. "We wanted to see if it makes it easier for residents and other people in the community to have access to what's going on," he said.

Update 2: A publicist for CrimeReports.com helpfully pointed out that there is a quick form where you can send an invitation to your local police chief or sheriff telling them about the site.

*Thanks to Al's Morning Meeting at the Poynter Institute for the tip.

Woman buckles in beer, not child

A woman remembered to buckle up her case of Busch beer during a trip in St. Augustine on Super Bowl Sunday.

But when it came to a one-year-old girl in the back seat, the woman seems to have forgotten, First Coast News reported.

Police in St. Augustine say the woman, who identified herself as Tina Williams, ran a red light and swerved on the road before she was stopped.

When an officer asked why the girl, who was in the back seat with her mother, didn't have a seat belt, Williams apparently said: ‘‘I don't know."

A deputy arrested her for DUI after she staggered when she got out of the car and failed a field sobriety test, according to First Coast News.

She faces a number of charges, including driving under the influence.

Read the full story on First Coast News. 

10 items or fewer (gun included)

The Herald's Natalie McNeal has been following the story of Miramar Commissioner Fitzroy Salesman's recent arrest on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

In today's latest development, we learn more about what happened in a local Winn-Dixie store on Thanksgiving Eve that caused Salesman (left) to pull a semiautomatic handgun on a fellow customer.

According to a deposition from witness Lazavius Hudson, he and the commissioner got into a tiff over how many items Hudson had in the checkout line. When Hudson challenged Salesman to "step outside" with him, Hudson says Salesman pulled out a gun and pushed him with it.

Salesman, who has a Feb. 26 court hearing, has said he pulled the gun because he felt threatened in the store. 

'Sex Play' story TMI?

During a trip to Pennsylvania this weekend, I got to read my hometown papers' follow-ups on the electric-shock sex story that rocked York, Pa., last week.

Included in the coverage were some letters to the editor, like this one. Apparently, Deborah Rishell of Jacobus and other readers thought the York Daily Record and York Dispatch went over-the-top with their coverage of this story. 

"Don't you have a responsibility to report news with accuracy and yet with some restraint as to what, I believe, is 'too much information?' " Rishell wrote.

She thought the use of "sex play" in the headline and placing the story on the front page was sensational and harmful to children. Rishell demanded an apology from the paper to the victim's family.

I've read the coverage, and I don't think the papers have anything to apologize about. It wasn't tabloid journalism. The reporters just reported the facts police gave them, which happened to involve kinky sex and a homicide investigation.

And spare me the crying, please, about your 13-year-old son who was scarred by the headline. Trust me, he's seen and heard worse in school and online. Use it as an opportunity to teach him a lesson about safe sex and knowing when to say no.

That's just my opinion. What do you think?