August 10, 2013

Sheriff Scott Israel
2601 W. Broward Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33312

RE: An immodest proposal to salvage your first term plus laying up a few dollars for my fast approaching golden years.

Sheriff Israel,

OK. OK.

The people, most of whom become enraged reptiles when you piss on their backs, can understand that you confused a few nights on a gazillion dollar yacht, a boat with extras that compare favorably to a Nimitz class carrier, with a few nights in a B minus Motel 6 scow.

You were “on the job” for a long time.

Years of street duty should have imbued you with a built-in GPS that told you when it was worth driving 5 miles more for a better donut, right? In for a pence, in for a pound has always worked for me. Besides, it is far, far better to be hung for 3 sheep than 1 goat. Your internal alarm should have gone off when you realized that Perrier was coming out of the shower. If that didn’t make you shout Avast! or Arrgh! the choice between a live production of The Lion King with Elton John as Simba or the keelhauling of the scullery maid who failed to remove the pits from your orange juice should have sent a flare up your yazoo.

These are missteps that can be corrected.

It’s the brouhaha with Senor Jorge Forte, this decade’s version of Craig Livingstone that has me worried. You may remember him as the guy who was in charge of getting pizzas for the Clinton ’92 campaign [That was his cover. His main job was scoping out the chicks for Handsome Billy from Hot Springs. Ask Debbie. She could never break into the rotation] He wound up in charge of the White House appointments desk before Congressman Tom :Lontos asked him to commit suicide on national TV.

It is in the nature of political campaigns to attract polished but shallow entrepreneurs whose main goal in life is to fill inside straights. Res ipso loquitur or quod erat demonstratum. Either one will work.

There is a Texas tale that may explain it.

A guy with a hat, always a big hat, runs around shouting “Does anybody have a rooster ‘cuz I got a truckload of chickens?” Somebody finally says, “Yup”





“Don’t move”, says the big hatted first guy. He then begins to retrace his steps as he shouts, “I got a rooster. Who has some chickens?”

Thus, Senor Jorge Forte, who will soon find himself looking at some serious time in a Federal pokey, wound up on the pad at your department. [Senor Jorge Forte will soon need a bird the size of a whooping crane to equal his singing to the Feds. He will give up his mother, his dog, his Siamese twin, and he will close out the Kennedy hit in return for life in the Witness Protection program in Wynona, MN or Darmiscotta, ME.]

By now you know this.

You have a problem:

You paid this guy $15, 000 to write a report on leasing cars. I used to lease cars. I leased two 54 inch continuous underground coal mining machines. I used them, can you believe it, to mine coal. It is a , leasing, with which I am most familiar.

You paid him $197 an hour to perform some unknown duties. Based on the report in today’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel it was not to teach grammar to your employees.

Here is my solution.

Pay me $7,500 and I will write a report on why the moon is made of green cheese. Tell me whether you want the world to be round or flat for your next outreach luncheon and I will support either argument. Or both in case you have back-to-back meetings with groups that have different beliefs.

Tu quoque, argumentum ad captandum, Rhetoric, Sophistry. Modern American Liberal gravity defying programs – just ask. Give me an hour with a good word processor and I’ll have you sounding like Demosthenes or Don Rickles

Pay me $93.50 an hour and I will get my stout yardstick out of storage and teach grammar the only way it should be taught. One ruler for 10 knuckles. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, moods, onomatopoeia, maybe even metaphors and litotes for the good ones. Spelling, of course. Particularly your name. I have more rulers than your employees have knuckles.

As a Board Certified Life Coach, as an alumnus of Hudson County, NJ, the ancestral home of the Sting, as someone familiar with both Mr. Strunck & Mr. 
White, as a curmudgeonly, erudite, literate ne’er-do-well, as someone who knows, genetically, the difference between the buttered side and the dry, as someone who is known to various law enforcement agencies [including yours] as someone who believes, fervently, in the adage “Whose wine I drink, whose song I sing”, I am your ma. I daresy for all seasons.


It’s time to bring the Broward Sheriff’s Office back to the glory days of Ken Jenne.

You have the cojonic chutzpah to do it.

I can help.

Let’s have a bang up lunch and work out the details.

I’ll flip you for the tab.






Kevin Smith