The attorneys defending Wellington polo mogul John Goodman in a vehicular homicide case that could land him in jail for 30 years contributed several thousand dollars to the campaign of State Attorney Mike McAuliffe.

McAuliffe’s the man whose job it is to put Goodman behind bars.

Perp walk: John Goodman (middle) is released on bond Wednesday. He's flanked with attorneys Guy Fronstin (left) and Mark Shapiro (right) (Click on the photo for more)

According to state campaign records, Goodman’s star defender, Miami lawyer Roy Black, made two maximum yearly contributions of $500 in 2007 and 2008, the year McAuliffe was elected, as did Black’s law partner Scott Kornspan.

Boca’s Guy Fronstin, the local pointman on Black’s defense team, and members of his family contributed a total of $2,500 toward McAuliffe’s election. Fronstin’s in kind contributions included food and drinks for McAuliffe’s fundraisers.

For more, and the poll, look below or click (Read more…)

Cantens in his Florida Crystals West Palm Beach office (Bill Ingram/The Palm Beach Post)

Former State Rep. Gaston Cantens, the high-profile spokesman for the Fanjul family’s West Palm Beach-based sugar empire, has agreed to pay $340,000 to creditors of his parents’ bankrupt company, which the Securities and Exchange Commission says ran a Ponzi scheme.

Cantens, 48, a Florida Crystals vice president, and his brother, Bernardo, according to last month’s SEC filing, received more than $1 million from their 71-year-old father, also named Gaston, and mom Teresita.

The gifts were listed as “consulting fees” even though no work was performed, and came as mom and dad’s Royal West Properties tanked.

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Madoff

Someone incarcerated with Palm Beach’s favorite financial adviser, Bernie Madoff, did what hundreds of investors wish they could do.

Madoff, who’s serving 150 years in a federal prison for running a $20 billion-Ponzi scheme, is believed to have received a good whuppin’ at the hands of a beefy fellow inmate.

The assailant was serving time for a drug conviction, today’s Wall Street Journal reports.

Madoff suffered a broken nose, fractured ribs and a cut to his face in the incident, a week before Christmas. He was briefly moved to a nearby medical center on the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

Why the rough treatment for the former toast of the Palm Beach Country Club? Believe it or not, the WSJ’s sources claim Madoff, owed the big man some cash!

Another interesting Madoff tidbit: Current and former inmates claim the financial sins of the 71-year-old Madoff are considered to be serious street creds, and inmates usually show him respect.

Officials at the North Carolina prison deny that Madoff was assaulted, but admit he was treated at the medical center — for high blood pressure.

– Click here to find out where Madoff would live, had he not been caught

Picower

Billionaire Jeffry Picower, who died of a heart attack in the pool of his $28 million Palm Beach mansion Sunday, was laid to rest Tuesday before an intimate gathering at the Mount Ararat Cemetery in Farmingdale, N.Y.

Picower, 67, was under investigation in the Bernie Madoff swindle when he died. Picower is said to have made $7 billion on his investments with Madoff — cash that Madoff victims want to recover.

A spywitness tells me Picower’s body was accompanied to the gravesite by a dozen people, including his wife, Barbara, and an undercover security guard. Funeral arrangements for the 2 p.m. ceremony were kept secret.

Picower’s new address: Section 60, Range C, Lot 15.

Mount Ararat Cemetery (Courtesy www.findagrave.com)

(Courtesy www.findagrave.com)

– More Bernie Madoff jailhouse news. The Palm Beach swindler is now living in a cell with a drug offender, according to new court papers, and the poor thing Madoff has been relegated to the lower bunk. He’s reduced to eating pizza cooked up by a sex offender. A big change from Chez Jean Pierre, non? As for recreation, Madoff is allowed to use the North Carolina federal prison’s running track after dark, but he’s apparently just walking. As for his buds, he’s spending quality time with the aging Colombo crime family boss Carmine Persico and traitor Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted of spying on the United States for the Israeli government. The info comes through a new filing in a class-action lawsuit brought by investors and cited in today’s New York Post. Also juicy: The papers tell how Madoff, back in the 1970s, would dispatch an employee to fetch cocaine for him and workers at his firm. The office eventually was given the nickname North Pole, in reference to the mounts of coke used.

– SoFla wrestler Hulk Hogan considered suicide in 2007, when his gilded life of media superstar took a nasty turn. His wife, Linda, had just filed for divorce and his son Nick was looking at jail time for his role in a car crash. “There were times when I thought that a whole bottle of pills would go down easy,” Hulk writes in his soon-to-be-released book, Life Outside the Ring. “Then I noticed the gun in my hand. I was careless with it . . . I kept my finger pressed right to that trigger . . . and if I moved that finger an inch in the right direction . . . I would have blown my brains out.” The tome comes out next week.

Madoff

A talkative inmate at the Butner federal prison complex in North Carolina says $65 billion swindler Bernie Madoff told him he suffers from cancer and is close to punching his ticket.

Re-igniting rumors that the 71-year-old Ponzi schemer was fighting pancreatic cancer after he was arrested by the FBI late last year, the New York Post this morning claims a fellow inmate of Madoff says the ex-Wall Streeter is on “20 pills a day” and “not doing very well.”

“He talks about it all the time,” the unnamed inmate told the paper.

That may sound like good news to some, but don’t dance on the guy’s grave just yet!

One of several authors of recently released Madoff books, Madoff With The Money writer Jerry Oppenheimer, says an unnamed inmate can’t be all that trustworthy.

However, Oppenheimer adds, “cancer devastated the Madoff family.”

“It wouldn’t be a shocker if he were struck with cancer,” Oppenheimer told Page2Live. “He did look gaunt and skinny at his sentencing. His son Andy suffered from lymphoma. His brother, Peter, had stomach cancer. One of his nephews, Roger, died of cancer in his 30s.

“However, I asked several family members who helped me with the book if Bernie ever had cancer, and they all said ‘no!’”

Besides, wouldn’t a weasel like Madoff use his alleged illness to ask for a reduction of sentence on humanitarian grounds? Madoff, whose seized house on North Lake Way in Palm Beach is being put up for sale by authorities, was handed down a 150-year sentence June 29 without addressing his health.

“That’s the point,” Oppenheimer said. “His $7,000-suit (tailored to hide his cellphone) just hung on him at the sentencing. But he didn’t tell the judge anything about dying.”

Said another Madoff author, Too Good To Be True writer Erin Arvedlund: “His camp leaked that cancer story soon after he was arrested. Could it be true? Sure. Why didn’t use it to get sympathy? Because he wanted the focus on him getting a harsh punishment so that his family would be left alone.”

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Oxygen

– He once felt really bad about losing $7 billion of other people’s money to swindler Bernie Madoff. But the feeling probably is a distant memory for Andres Piedrahita. Piedrahita ran the Fairfield Greenwich Group founded by his father-in-law, Palm Beacher Walter Noel. Over the years, FGG became a feeder fund for fellow Palm Beacher Madoff. So, where is Piedrahita these days? Crying in his beer on a distant island? Working hard to recoup some of the losses? Hell, no. Business Insider reports Piedhahita is sailing the deep blue Adriatic Sea on his brand spanking new yacht, Oxygen. So far, he’s visited places like St. Tropez and Venice. Seemingly not too worried that he lost cash from Colombian entrepreneurs, Piedrahita took delivery of the $30 million toy in June, just as Madoff was getting sentenced to 150 years in prison.

Kim

– We didn’t see that one coming. Miami Beach clothing store owner Kim Kardashian and New Orleans Saints star running back Reggie Bush have called it quits. By reality TV standards, they were at it for a long time. Two years. She must be mad, because there’s talk Kardashian is about to sell the fine threads that Bush left behind on eBay. The two cited distance as the contributing factor for this disaster.

– Sightings: Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, host of England’s No. 1 cooking show, Hell’s Kitchen, sampling the chow at the Boca Resort . . . Comedian Joe Rogan, sitting down at a table at, where else, The Improv at West Palm Beach’s CityPlace, with martial arts expert Jason Chambers (who hosted Human Weapon on the History Channel) and Fort Lauderdale artist Larissa Meek . . . Rapper Pitbull’s staying at the Catalina Hotel in Miami Beach . . . Supermodel Niki Taylor, having sushi at Kung Fu Sushi in Miami Beach with a camera crew . . .

David and his wife (Courtesy New York Magazine)

– Rough patch for captain of industry George David, whose UTC owns Palm Beach County’s second largest employer, Pratt & Whitney. The 67-year-old is going through a nasty divorce in Connecticut. The wife, Marie Douglas-David, wants $100 million to go away. And the dirty laundry aired out in court Tuesday, according to the Hartford Courant, included how David spent one weekend on the French Riviera with his mistress, a New York financial advisor, and the next in Paris with his wife. David averted disaster in Paris when, walking with his “ole’ lady”, he saw another couple who’d met him and his mistress on the Riviera. David made sure to steer is wife out-of-sight. The wife’s attorneys accuse David of going on a shopping spree with the mistress at the time he was trying to patch things up with the wife. The spree included $10,000 worth of Manolo Blahnik shoes and a $15,000-fur coat. Meanwhile, 11,600 of UTC’s employees could be shown the door this year.

— Palm Beach Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff has just arrived at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area. Madoff, 71, is scheduled to remain at the low to medium security facility until 2139, according to Bureau of Prisons records. The complex also includes a hospital.

McCarty

– Speaking of federal prison, the supporters of disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty received this e-mail from her family after she checked into her new digs for the next five years, the Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a women’s camp in Texas. Corruption was her crime. Three and a half years the sentence. The e-mail: “Mary landed in Bryan Texas over the weekend.  Any cards or letters should be sent to the following address: Mary Ballard McCarty, Register #: 73341-004, FPC Bryan, PO Box 2149, Bryan, TX 77805. Should you have any questions regarding visitation, commissary funds, sending magazines/books, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”

Commissary funds? Or sure, let me send her five bucks right now!

Eleanor Squillari (Courtesy Vanity Fair)

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff spent some of the billions he stole from clients in South Florida and elsewhere on sexy massages and escorts, according to a story in the upcoming Vanity Fair.

Eleanor Squillari, 59, Madoff’s secretary for more than 20 years, co-authored a story in the June issue in which she reveals the sleazier side of the part-time Palm Beacher.

Among other revelations: Madoff’s wife, Ruth, tried to exude perfection for her man and watched him like a hawk when beautiful women were around; he kept an address book with the names of a dozen massage parlors; Squillari caught him perusing the escort ads in a magazine; Madoff often tried to pat Squillari’s butt; and he’d make a beeline to her desk after going to the bathroom and telling her, still zipping up his pants, “You know it excites you!” 

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