Frankel at a green market in West Palm Beach

West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel quietly left the city Wednesday for a five-day stay in New York City without telling her own staffers, including city spokesman Chase Scott, what she’s up to.

Why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?

She’s visiting Manhattan green markets with other locals whose job it is to make of the new downtown waterfront a destination.

There’s a plan to bring a green market to the West Palm Beach waterfront, and I’m told you can only know about green markets if you actually go to one or two in exciting places like, say, Manhattan.

The motley crew with Herhoner on her Labor Day weekend jaunt includes: mayoral friend and waterfront manager Joan Goldberg, Downtown Development Authority associate director Rafael Clemente and Willie Perez, the fired Miami cop who runs a security service hired by the city to keep the waterfront peaceful. Sometimes, he’s Frankel’s bodyguard.

So, who’s footing the bills?

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Smith, headed to Motown (Courtesy WPTV)

Now that the Atlantic’s churning with hurricanes, the heat’s turned up on South Florida TV weathermen.

And that’s the moment that one of them chose to exit the kitchen!

WPTV-Channel 5’s Keenan Smith, who was the first to forecast the day’s weather for T-Coast and Palm Beach County viewers at 4:30 a.m., is hightailing it outta Dodge. His last day was today.

Check this out: He wants to work somewhere that has four seasons!

So he picked Detroit, a dying city that people usually leave, over vibrant West Palm Beach.

Sup with that?

“I’m thrilled to be moving back to the Midwest and back to a climate with four seasons,” he said in a statement. “I’m also excited to be moving to the Detroit area.  There’s a unity of spirit in the people in Southeast Michigan that you don’t find everywhere.”

Smith’s new gig at WXYZ-TV, Motown’s ABC affiliate, starts in two weeks.

We hardly got to know the guy, except that he seemed competent enough albeit a little stiff. Smith arrived in 2008 from Chicago to replace long time forecaster Dean Tendrich, who quit to go into real estate. The 4:30 a.m. dudes are now weekend meteorologists James Wieland and Glenn Glazer, who’ll rotate in and out of the shift.

By the way, Keenan, we have four seasons here: Football, snowbird, mosquito and hurricane season, in case you didn’t have the time to notice!

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Ross, and George

Surprise, surprise!

Radio personality Jennifer Ross, who was canned a year ago from WRMF-97.9 FM’s morning show and replaced by younger, cheaper talent, is returning to the station — but not to the airwaves.

Ross, 52, is scheduled to take over as director of community affairs next week, said station boss Elizabeth Hamma. The job’s description is unclear. Hamma declined to comment further.

In an email to Page2Live, Ross wrote:  “I’m thrilled about the opportunity.  As you know, I’ve always been committed to the community, as has WRMF, so this is the perfect opportunity for me.  I’m looking forward to continuing my relationship with the WRMF team and great things for the future.”

A station insider who asked not to be identified said the move makes sense for both WRMF and the woman who ruled local morning radio for 25 years.

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Celine Dion (Click on the photo for more)

Jupiter Island songbird Celine Dion, 42, is said to have undergone emergency surgery in an area hospital Thursday night after she appeared she’d be giving birth to her twins three months early.

The reports in today’s French press mention that the Canadian singer of My Heart Will Go On was at her new home on the island when she felt ill. When Dion arrived at an unnamed hospital, reports in Europe claim that Dion’s cervix was dilated.

The births would have occurred if it hadn’t been for a minor surgical procedure to close it up.

The chanteuse is due in November. She and her 68-year-old husband, Rene Angelil, received fertility treatments for months, and she miscarried several times on her way to conceiving twin boys.

Her publicist in the United States, meanwhile, denied that Dion’s pregnancy has been troublesome.

“She is 100 percent healthy and at home,” Kim Jakwerth wrote in an email to Page2Live. “I have been speaking to both Rene and Celine weekly and everything is going great. It is very disturbing to have to respond to such malicious reports.”

– Click here for exclusive photos of Celine Dion’s new Jupiter Island home

– Click here to locate Dion’s house on the exclusive Page2Live map of celebrities

Lappin

Some business practices at the Palm Beach Pops are leaving the orchestra founded by maestro Bob Lappin exposed to lawsuits and the scrutiny of the IRS, forensic accountants have told the non-profit.

Red-flagged by the Alpern Rosenthal financial sleuths: The Pops is plunking down $20,000 a year for the health insurances of Lappin’s fiancee and his maids.

Also, pops staffers have improperly factored in Lappin’s salary in the books, making it look like he took no pay when, indeed, he’s compensated handsomely. And Lappin is reimbursed for his use of a private jet he co-owns and limo rides, even when it’s unclear whether he is on Pops business or pleasure!

What’s more, the scathing report spells out how the group’s bylaws make Lappin, who’s also the Pops’ CEO and a board member, the sole person in the organization who gets to select, elect and reject members of the Pops board of directors. The board, which includes Lappin’s personal friends and business associates, then approves the conductor’s pay package — about half a million per season!

The forensic report caused such a ruckus that eight board members have resigned over the past month. Only six board members remain, just weeks before the new season’s opening concert.

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Dudes, looking like ladies (Click on the Mike Jachles photo for more)

A seven-foot-tall drag queen. Belly dancers. A party promoter dressed in a Roman gladiator outfit. For a few hours Saturday, it’s as if the Club Kids movement was re-born on Clematis. Newcomer artist/party promoter Arnovich Polania had 200 of his friends at Roxy’s in West Palm Beach for a benefit for Juno Beach’s turtle-saving Loggerhead Marinelife Center. (Click here for the full photo gallery)

Polania (left) and the toga girls (Click on the Mike Jachles photo for more)

Red light cameras on Okeechobee Boulevard

The West Palm Beach Police Department is throwing professional courtesy into the wind.

Patrolmen have been told Friday they’ll have to pay the city’s $125-fines if they’re caught running red-lights equipped with cameras — even while in uniform and in a squad car.

And the same goes for any other law enforcement agency circulating on the city’s territory — unless, of course, there’s a legitimate emergency!

Tired of lawmen trying to weasel out of paying, Assistant Chief Dennis Crispo last week sent a preachy letter to all other area chiefs and  Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw to lay down the law.

“Please advise your members if they are captured on camera in their vehicles running the red light at these intersections, they will be cited,” the letter reads. “The only remedy for relief will be through the traffic court system. All law enforcement personnel must understand the high standard of conduct is applied to them in order for the public to have confidence in their departments and the officers.

“This trust is a critical and precious commodity . . . and yet it is fragile and easily lost.”

For more, and the poll and the locations of WPB’s cameras, look below or click (Read more…)

Ramos (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

Suicide victim Brett Hall, the well-liked accountant who jumped to his death from the 21st floor of a downtown West Palm Beach office building Aug. 19, is believed to have downloaded dozens of pornographic videos, some showing prepubescent boys with adult males, according to police reports obtained by Page2Live.

Had he lived, he could have been charged with felony computer child exploitation and sexual performance by a child, and faced more than 20 years in prison.

Hall’s home in Boca Raton was being tossed by online pedophile-hunter Charlie Ramos, a Boynton Beach Police detective at the time Hall committed suicide. He jumped from the “Darth Vader” building, which ironically is located in the shadow of the county courthouse and the office of the State Attorney.

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Raban, on his old job

Brent Raban, a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office sergeant once known on the tough streets of Belle Glade as “The Punisher,” was fired by Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.

Raban, 34, an 11-year veteran, broke his promise to be good made last year to save his job when he was demoted to patrolman. He’d been bragging on Facebook about beating suspects.

Now, one of his neighbors in Lake Worth has been complaining Raban is “harassing” and “intimidating” her, and Internal Affairs recommended after a long probe that he be terminated.

Bradshaw signed off on it Friday.

Raban made news last year when it was revealed he patrolled the nightscape wearing a camouflage skullcap with the word PUNISHMENT. His strange Facebook postings also surfaced.

In one, he wrote he considered his job to be not so much about fighting crime as about applying punishment! Another read: “But like a good batterer, I know the areas that hide the marks well.” Better yet: Raban, who admitted to being a fan of comic books with troubled heroes like Batman and The Punisher, once commented how he hadn’t beaten anyone in 11 days.

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Hall

The young man who jumped to his death from the 21st floor of a downtown West Palm Beach office building last week was under investigation by a sex crimes police task force, authorities and his employer told Page2Live.

Brett Hall, 24, who was buried today in Valhalla, N.Y., was questioned by members of the Palm Beach County Sexual Predator Enforcement Task Force about two hours before he committed suicide Thursday.

The secretive Boca-based unit is made of detectives with the State Attorney’s Office, Boca Raton and Boynton Beach police as well as the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Through advanced data-mining techniques, the group investigates mainly child porn distributed through the Web.

A spokeswoman with the Boca Raton Resort, where Hall worked as an accountant, said detectives served a search warrant at Hall’s workstation about 9 a.m. Carole Boucard, the resort’s director of public relations, added she didn’t know what the investigators were looking for. But a source close to the probe told me they mainly searched Hall’s work computer.

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