A note before we start. I have been buried. Records requests, a fee fight, a sworn complaint, an ethics docket, two Pro Se lawsuits against ESA letter mills (winning both), and now, a lawsuit that landed on a Friday. Somewhere in there I stopped writing things down for you, which is the one job I actually have. So this is a catch-up. It jumps around. Every piece of it is live right now.
The Door
A man broke a door at Deerfield Beach City Hall.
That is the whole thing. A door. The city looked at it and figured the repair runs about $1,500. Then BSO wrote it up, and by the time Deputy Betiana Clausell finished the paperwork the damage came to $968 and change.
Florida makes it a felony at $1,000.
Thirty-one dollars and eighty-seven cents.
Let’s pause for a moment, because the state constitution says a convicted felon cannot hold office until his rights are restored. A misdemeanor says nothing at all. The man who broke the door is Dan Herz, and he has been circling a run for city commission. Somebody shaved five hundred dollars off a repair bill, and that five hundred dollars is the difference between a man with a future and a man without one.
So on July 28 I asked a question. One question. How did $1,500 become $968’ish, and who checked it.
I started with the mayor. Could Captain Adam Hofstein pull the incident report? Hofstein runs District 10. District 10 is this town. The report was written about a building we own, by deputies we pay for, under a contract we sign.
Two days later City Manager Rodney Brimlow wrote back that the city “does neither possess nor maintains this record.” We hand BSO about $75 million a year and we do not keep a copy of the police report about our own City Hall.
Twenty-six minutes after that, Hofstein: he cannot release any official document outside the records-request workflow.
Then Sunday night, 9:13, a captain emailed a blogger a link to a portal.
Nobody works a Sunday night at 9:13 to say no unless the no matters to somebody.
I filed a request asking BSO to produce the written policy behind that sentence. Four lines. One document. If none exists, say so in writing. BSO logged it as R569673-080226 and added, in bold, that this request type does not include incident reports. Correct. I had not asked for one. I asked whether the rule a captain quoted at me exists on paper anywhere.
No answer on that one either.
Three Miles West On Hillsboro
So on Saturday, August 8, I put the question in a letter and carried it three miles west on Hillsboro Boulevard to the State Attorney’s North Regional office. Harold Pryor’s office. I am not a party to that case. I did not ask anybody to charge anybody. I asked his office to confirm one of two things in writing. Either BSO’s $968.13 got checked against the city’s estimate before the charging decision, or it did not.
No third door. I asked for the letter to go in the case file, so whichever answer comes back, it lives there.
The Signature Block
Then the week turned.
On August 7, Wayne Adams and Herz sued the City of Deerfield Beach over the election calendar. Same Herz. Same door. On August 9 I filed a three-paragraph friend-of-the-court memo, no lawyer, and disclosed on the face of it that I used STAN to write it. One point: the ballot gets certified August 18, and that clock decides which fixes are still on the table.
The next afternoon at 5:04, their lawyers filed an eight-page emergency motion built on the same clock.
I read it. Then I read the last page.
Two names sign that motion. Louis Baptiste. And Stephen G. Webster, of Webster + Baptiste, Tallahassee.
Stephen Webster is Gregory Tony’s lawyer.
In July 2022 Webster signed the paperwork fighting the state’s move to strip Tony of his badge. That September he stood beside him at the closed ethics hearing where nine commissioners voted 8 to 1 that there was probable cause against him. In February 2024 he filed the court papers for Tony’s license trial in Tallahassee and put a driver’s license clerk on the stand who admitted, out loud, to a long romantic relationship with the Sheriff. In March 2025 he told the ethics commission that Tony’s critics had thrown every sling and arrow they had at the man. Dan Christensen has been printing that name next to Tony’s in the Florida Bulldog for four years running.
That is the lawyer now suing this city over when we vote.
His client is the same man whose broken door came in $31.87 under a felony, written up by the same agency the lawyer has spent four years defending.
Here is why any of it matters. In January the commission voted to leave BSO after thirty years and roughly $75 million a year. That vote is not permanent. A future commission can turn right around and vote back in. Which means the calendar question is not a calendar question. It is a question about who sits in those five chairs when the second vote comes.
What Is Being Protected
On July 20 BSO printed its payroll for 2024 and 2025. 5,318 employees, about 130,000 lines of pay. Sergeant Andre Quest works in the jail. He grossed $457,309 last year. Sheriff Tony grossed $292,374. Twenty-four of his own people out-earn him. He ranks 25th on his own payroll. The agency burned $107 million in overtime across 1.5 million hours, seventeen cents of every payroll dollar, up $14 million in one year. Eight of the ten highest-paid people in that entire agency work inside the jail.
Not one dollar of it appears to be illegal. That is the part that should keep you up at night.
Now Watch How Hard It Is To Look
On July 31, Erin Foley, who runs BSO’s records bureau, sent me a bill. One letter, eight pending requests, one number. Four hundred dollars. Fifty bucks an hour, eight hours, no cap written down anywhere, and she reserved the right to charge more when the meter runs out.
One of those eight asks for the status log on a ticket inside the portal Foley herself administers. Another asks for two sections of BSO’s policy manual, 7.4.1 and 7.4.3. I did not guess those numbers. BSO printed them on a form and handed it to me. A third asks for the written policy that lets BSO charge these fees.
They charged me a fee to read the fee policy.
That is the machine. Back in March I asked who has keys to the Sheriff’s training center. BSO handed over two pieces of paper and closed the file as done. I raised a lawsuit with their general counsel. Fifteen more documents appeared, and inside them were two private medical businesses operating out of a public building. No lease. No rent. Furniture included. Renewed through June 2027. Same request, same records. The only thing that changed was the word lawyer.
I asked who gave the Sheriff’s wife a badge to walk a locked BSO building without an escort. BSO swore in writing that no record exists showing who approved access for anybody who is not an employee. One key card blows that sentence apart. I filed a sworn complaint with FDLE on July 26, then filed my own correction when I caught BSO citing a security policy two versions out of date.
The Florida Commission on Ethics has him docketed as Complaint 26-174, served May 14. His graduation program says Doctor of Philosophy. His own dissertation cover page says Doctor of Education. Pick one, Doc.
And This Town Helps
There is a paragraph in that emergency motion the commission would rather you skipped. The Charter Review Board studied moving elections from March to November and recommended the version that shortens the sitting terms by four months. The commission threw it out and took the version that adds twenty. Three to two on August 4. Hudak, Plaut and Drosky yes, Preston and Shanetzky no. Hudak gets termed out in March 2027 under the current rules. The new language keeps him eligible.
The review board called it straight and got run over. Credit where it is due.
Peggy Noland, Again
Now the chair of that board. Peggy Noland. The city put her name on an aquatics complex. In 2004 she voted on a fire pension that reached her own household, and I lined 12th Avenue with yard signs until every kid in town could recite it. Twenty-two years later her son, Thomas Noland, holds a rotating fire chief job at BSO drawing around $225,000 a year, and his mother chairs the board that reviews the charter of a city trying to divorce BSO.
We have a retired hairdresser reviewing this city’s constitution while her household cashes a BSO check. Was the Flowbee unavailable?
A Story
Down the road on the same ballot sits Original Save Our Beach, a nonprofit formed in June 2003, still breathing twenty-three years later with Tom Connick as registered agent the whole way. Political committee attached. Donate button live right now. They sent the city a 1,400-word letter and labeled the centerpiece “A Story.” They are right. A story is what you tell when you have no data. I counted. Protect, three dozen times. Power, thirty. Developer, ten. Then I counted the evidence and it took a lot less time. One meeting date, three charter sections, one city named, one dollar figure copied out of the charter itself. No address. No parcel. No tax number. No study.
They raise money to swing a city election and file nothing.
The Ledger
Sheriff Tony has a political committee called Broward First. In the 2020 race it raised $1.7 million. One man wrote it a $500,000 check in November 2019. When Tony qualified in June 2024 it was sitting on $682,000 in cash. Since then it has shipped $250,000 to a sheriff candidate down in Miami-Dade, $100,000 of it in a single check. There is no limit on what one person can hand that committee. None.
I run a GoFundMe called Records Cost Money. So Does Silence.
It has taken in $983.
If you don’t donate, and we get our asses handed to ourselves, point the finger back in your direction. I am all in, 100%, giving every single thing I have. Don’t blame me, and in fact, blame yourself.
Two people have written more than one check. Two. They don’t even live in this town. The rest of you read the post, share the post, cuss the Sheriff in a group chat, and close the tab. I am not fighting Tony. I am fighting a wire transfer, and I am doing it with nine hundred eighty-three dollars and a printer.
I have heard the excuse for thirty years. Chaz is fighting the good fight, so we will not pay him. I heard it through a poisoned dog. Through bullet holes in my car. Through the weeks BSO deputies parked outside my house so my family could sleep.
Full disclosure, because I hold everybody else to it. Donations are gifts, not tax deductible, and I am not a nonprofit.
Sylvia Poitier was untouchable in this city for thirty years. Everybody knew it. Everybody said it out loud.
Nobody wrote anything down.
I write it down. The requests still go out. They go out slower, and slow is the whole product BSO is selling.