Weird Florida: The Wildest Headlines From 2024 – Flamingo Magazine
Florida has been wild and wacky for a loooooong time. Our first state flag in 1845 actually said, “Let us alone.” (Did anyone listen? No.) But it’s taken until 2024 for TV executives to figure out how to use our weirdness as an entertainment resource.
I’m talking about the HBO Max series “It’s Florida, Man,” which takes a “Drunk History” approach to recounting some particularly wacky—but true —Florida headlines. For instance, one story dealt with how a self-proclaimed witch and her husband, a Broward County sheriff’s lieutenant, wound up in a dispute with a group of professional mermaids who perform shows at the historic Wreck Bar.
“Pagans, witches, we’re all normal people,” the lieutenant told the show. “There is no craziness, per se, to it.”
But then, shortly after that show aired, the sheriff’s department informed the lieutenant he was being put on leave without pay pending an investigation of his comments by Internal Affairs. Perhaps now he’ll admit there’s a little craziness.
If nothing else, the show, which has been renewed for a second season, proves that Florida weirdness is an endless—and endlessly surprising—resource. You never know when you’ll open your paper in the morning and find a headline like “Miami-Dade police respond to man dressed as a clown and holding a mallet on Palmetto.”
Unfortunately, by the time police arrived at the pedestrian bridge over the Palmetto Expressway, the clown was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he or she had returned to the sewer like the clown in Stephen King’s “It.” But fear not, lots of other clowns showed up all over the state.
As usual, there was little evidence in this year’s news of criminal masterminds. One Suwannee County man called the cops because he’d gone for a hike and gotten lost. When they rescued him, they escorted him to a jail cell because he had an outstanding warrant. Remember, kids, when you go for a hike, be sure to take a map and a bail bondsman.
Even better was the car burglar in Miami Beach who broke into a Corvette andthen discovered he couldn’t get out. When the owner showed up, the trapped burglar asked if he’d let him out. You can probably guess how fast the owner dialed 911.
Florida cops didn’t always display their smarts, either. A Fort Walton Beach police officer who heard a falling acorn hit his cruiser, which was parked behind him, believed he was under some sort of attack. He began shooting at his own car. A second officer joined in. Together they fired 22 shots, yet somehow missed the unarmed prisoner freaking out in the back seat.
Some Floridians displayed a remarkable ingenuity in committing unusual crimes. Take the man from Altamonte Springs who was unhappy to see Seminole County put solar-powered license plate readers all over in order to track potential miscreants. He foughtback against this invasion of privacy by using a drill to remove the top off 20 of the readers, then tossing the parts into bushes, ditches and ponds. Of course, one of the readers captured the image of his license plate.
Speaking of license plates, South Florida drivers with fancy customized cars have been customizing their license plates, too–changing colors, airbrushing designs or applying vinyl wraps. Everyone else might say how cool this looks, but the Florida Highway Patrol says it’s illegal.
Unlike these sports car owners, plenty of Floridians got in trouble for what they took off, not what they added on. Nudity, in other words, merited plenty of headlines. My favorite was the Pensacola woman who showed up unclothed for a neighbor’s birthday party. She was just celebrating by wearing her birthday suit.
At the other extreme was the Jacksonville man who went for a joyride in a stolen $100,000 boat while wearing nothing but his underwear. The joy ended when he crashed. One disapproving local sailor told a TV reporter, “It was very clear he had very little boating knowledge.”
Couple caught having ‘loud sex’ atop a huge elephant sculpture ahead of Art Basel in Miami Beach https://t.co/iAnZf2svQs pic.twitter.com/ANI63p6jQ9
Sex provided plenty of potential fodder for the next season of the HBO show. For instance, for the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach, one artist installed a life-size herd of wooden elephants lined up on South Beach. One night a security guard discovered an amorous couple conducting a noisy mating ritual atop one of the wooden pachyderms.
Sometimes sex mingled with money, as in the case of a thief who broke a window of an adult toy shop in Fort Myers called Tender Moments, climbed in and stole a $300 sex doll. Doesn’t sound very tender, does it?
One more example: A Pompano Beach-based prostitution ring called Pretty Woman Escorts operated in full view of the public for 25 years—even registering its incorporation with the state and running a website that claimed to have “one of the most lucrative VIP Client lists in South Florida.” But the mother and son owners wound up charged with money laundering because they allegedly hid the profits by disguising them as profits from the mom’s real estate business.
A more altruistic sexy story came from Tampa. During hurricane season, one strip club there offered free admission and drinks for visiting linemen who were restoring power, explaining, “One turn-on deserves another.”
Some of the wildest tales showed up via non-traditional news sources. For instance, there was a St. Petersburg house listed for sale on Zillow with a photo that showed it had been on fire. In fact, in the photo, the house was still smoking. The $259,000 listing said it would be sold as-is, and the agent wrote, “For safety reasons, entry to the property is not permitted.”
Then there was the High Springs home for sale that went viral on TikTok because it had a hidden dungeon. I was just amazed to see a Florida home with something resembling a basement.
As usual, lots of stories concerned odd legal disputes. My favorite was the one about the lawsuit against the Square Grouper Tiki Bar in Jupiter by a woman who complained she’d been beaned by a coconut that fell from one of the bar’s palm trees.
One of the odder food-related stories this year concerned an upscale Tampa restaurant that turned out to be harvesting common foxtail ferns from the courtyard of an adjacent apartment building to use as a garnish on its pricey dishes. That meant some of the garnish had been, um, “sprinkled” by passing canines. Think of it as flavoring.
Speaking of food, Floridians displayed their usual flair for creativity with the use of food and other unlikely implements as weapons. This year, we weaponized ravioli, a tomato, a burrito, fried chicken, a coconut, a “forcibly” thrown cheeseburger, macaroni and cheese, a Subway sandwich, pizza dough, an Apple watch, a stack of cash, some grits and an Easter Bible. That last one gives new meaning to the term “Bible belt.”
We had our share of wild animal stories, too, including not one, not two but three stories of escaped kangaroos. My favorite headline was on the third one: “Kangaroo in a diaper leads deputies on a hop pursuit in Florida.”
Invasive species ran amok more than once. In Key Largo, city workers discovered the cause of a sinkhole in the street was a nest of burrowing iguanas. One of the more unsettling headlines of the year said, “Firefighters remove boa constrictor that was threatening peacocks in Palmetto Bay.”
A Pine Island woman who confronted a feral hog rooting in her mango grove hurled a mango at its head and killed it. “I have the worst aim on the planet,” she said later, “so this was an inspired hit.”
Even political animals made weird news. Employees of the Republican Party office in West Palm Beach called in police and evacuated their office because they believed they’d found illegal bugging equipment. The cops found the devices were a different kind of bug: Cricket Noise Makers that sell for $11.99 on Amazon.com.
Pagans, witches, we’re all normal people. There is no craziness, per se, to it.
—Lt. Jeff Mellies
The most unusual legislative gambit this year concerned a bill filed by Rep. Jason Shoaf, R-Port St. Joe, to loosen the rules protecting bears from slaughter. Shoaf said his bill wasn’t aimed at regular bears, which tend to be shy, but at “the ones that are on crack… When you run into one of these crack bears, you should be able to shoot it, period.” While no such crack bears have been reported in real life, the measure passed both the House and Senate by wide margins.
Some normally stodgy local and state government officials generated weird news. My favorite was the Indian River County School Board, which chose to ban from the schools’ libraries a book titled “Ban This Book.” The book contains no sex or foul language, but school officials complained that it challenged their authority.
Running a close second was the state Department of Education, which issued a list of books recommended to bolster our “American Pride,” yet somehow included “Pride and Prejudice” by quintessentially British author Jane Austen.
Me: "Let me check the Key West webcams to see how things are going…"
Key West: pic.twitter.com/Ckd5SZjPGh
The string of hurricanes that clobbered us this year brought enough drama for a whole shelf of classic novels. So much destruction can make laughter as difficult to come by as plywood and a steady power source. Still, Florida’s always going to Florida. Just ask anyone who checked the Key West “Southernmost Point” webcam during the storms and saw someone dressed as a T-Rex cavorting around the red-and-yellow tourist attraction in the rain.
They say comets killed the dinosaurs, but I guess hurricanes just bounce off. I look forward to seeing THAT on HBO someday.
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