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!

Here is the latest communication from behind bars by deposed Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty. One of her family members has just e-mailed this to two dozens of her supporters.

McCarty

McCarty, 54, is serving three-and-a-half years for misusing her county commission seat at the tough Federal Detention Center downtown Miami.

“ Hi Everyone,

We want to thank those of you who have been sending Mary cards and letters.  Please remember to include your return address on the envelopes. Also, there have been several requests to visit her while she’s down in Miami and she is only allowed her attorney or Mother at this location.

Thank you again for all your kind notes…with some luck Mary will only be at this location for another month or so before moving to a permanent facility.

All our best,

Mary’s family”

The list of  e-mail addresses this message was sent to includes: Florida Commission on the Status of Women member Claudia Barto; Former Delray architect Digby Bridges; David Burke, vice president of The Breakers; Palm Beach Gardens builder Dan Catalfumo; Conservative radio host Dick Farrell; Cliff Hertz, partner at the lawfirm Broad and Cassel; former Miami Dolphins tough guy Bob Kuechenberg; advocate for the homeless Ezra Krieg; south county political operative Dennis McIlwain; and Cyndy Stephens, assistant to the board of commissioners.

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Disgraced former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty has been transferred to a notorious federal prison that once hosted a deposed dictator and would-be dirty bomber.

McCarty's new home

A week after she was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for her role in a public corruption scandal and immediately taken into custody, McCarty, 54, was moved from the Palm Beach County lockup and driven to Miami’s Federal Detention Center.

And if she thought she had it rough on Gun Club Road, (where she bitterly complained about being cold, lonely and being served bad food in an e-mail to friends), wait until she gets a load of this Soviet-looking high-rise smack dab in the middle of downtown!

According to the federal Bureau of Prisons, the Miami FDC is an administrative facility. And ”administrative facilities are institutions with special missions, such as the detention of pretrial offenders; the treatment of inmates with serious or chronic medical problems; or the containment of extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates,” according to the BOP website.

To find out who else is housed with McCarty, and vote on our poll, look below (Read more…)

Two weeks before disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty is sentenced in a corruption scandal, citizens’ letters to the court about her punishment started trickling in.

Mary and Kevin McCarty (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

So far, eight people have taken the time to write federal Judge Don Middlebrooks.

Seven letters, peppered with words like “dishonor” and “political aristocracy” and calling her Palm Beach County’s version of The Godfather’s Don Corleone, asked the judge to throw the book at McCarty, demanding the “maximum.”

So far, just one, a school district employee, asked for leniency. But McCarty recently told friends she is expecting onslaught of more than 60 requests for a lenient sentence over the next few days.

In the end, McCarty is expected to get five years in a minimum-security prison camp for women – quite possibly the West Virginia facility that housed insider trading domestic diva Martha Stewart.

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

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp must really like Kevin McCarty.

Ryskamp allowed the disgraced husband of soon-to-be-jailed former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty to roam free for another three weeks even though Kevin was supposed to surrender to authorities Monday and star serving his eight-month sentence.

Because the feds have not contacted Kevin with information about his prison destination, Ryskamp signed a motion this week allowing McCarty to report May 26.

Ryskamp also spared McCarty the humiliation of being temporarily held at the Palm Beach County jail until he’d be transported to his permanent camp.

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For more of the story, click (Read more…)

Yet another West Palm Beach city commissioner is feeling the economic pinch.

Commish Kimberly Mitchell, who’s mulling over a run for mayor, soon could lose her day job.

Her bonds underwriting firm, the Chicago-based Loop Capital, is considering a strategic change in Florida.

Kimberly Mitchell

Mitchell is Loop’s sole representative in the state, at a time when the government bonds business has slowed to a crawl. So Mitchell’s scheduled to fly to the Windy City next week to discuss the firm’s new plan, which may not involve her.

“The issuance of bonds in the state is down 50 percent,” Mitchell said. “Loop is a small firm and their resources may be better allocated in a more active place.”

Bonds are financial instruments by which government raises capital, often for things like land purchases and construction.

Mitchell said the situation has nothing to do with the fact that Palm Beach County is re-thinking how it deals with bond issues. Former PBC Commish Mary McCarty is facing five years in prison partly because she voted to favor her husband Kevin’s bonds business.

“That hasn’t been part of the discussion,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell has underwritten bonds for the county and the South Florida Water Management District. Her fourth term as commissioner is considered a part-time job. Her City Hall pay is $30,000.

Earlier this year, her fellow commissioner Molly Douglas faced watching her home getting sold on the courthouse steps. She said she paid off her loan.

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Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine — celebrity, that is.

Disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty and Mark Foley, the former U.S. congressman who quit in 2006 when his suggestive text-messages to young pages surfaced, were name-dropping like there was no tomorrow at a recent luncheon.

They were loud enough that a bat-eared source overheard the two fallen Republicans from a nearby table at the Lake Park soul food emporium Pritchard’s.

(Read more…)

A Scripps Florida higher-up has been wining-and-dining soon-to-be felon and former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty in a strange show of support.

Ben Starling

McCarty, 54, is scheduled to plead guilty to a corruption-related charge later this month.

But that hasn’t stopped Scripps Director of Philanthropy Ben Starling from cozying up to the disgraced commissioner in an oh-so-public display of affection.

On at least two occasions this year, Starling invited large groups of friends to lunch with McCarty at, of all places, the Lake Park soul food emporium Pritchard’s.

Starling picks for those rendezvous a table smack-dab in the middle of the small, busy restaurant.

In late January, three sources told Page2Live, Starling gathered a group of about 20 to hang with the former south county Republican powerhouse. Among them: Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, who also knows a thing or two about the proverbial hot seat. (Read more…)

Mary McCarty leaves Middlebrooks' courtroom with husband Kevin a month ago

. . . Good luck to disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty when she’s sentenced on a corruption-related charge, possibly next month, by U.S. District Judge Don Middlebrooks. Wasn’t so long ago, circa 2005, that McCarty called “a sick, cruel joke” Middlebrooks’ decision to allow the building of the Scripps Florida research campus on Mecca Farms while prohibiting access to roads, water and power. Little did she know that her future, too, would once be in the guy’s hands . . .

. . . The CityPlace nightclub formerly known as Hotel Nightclub/Rock Lobby then known as Hotel will now be known as Lobby. With the name switch came with a change in looks, now Miami Beach-style. The West Palm Beach club’s frontman, Josh Sagman, tells me the owners were recently confronted by reps of The Cordish Companies conglomerate because it owns a Hotel nightclub in Louisville, Ky. So happens the Cordish’s nightclub name is trademarked. “They’re a giant company,” said Sagman. “We didn’t want to fight them. We were going to reopen with a different look anyway.” . . .

Pamela Goodman, the woman whom local Democrats asked Gov. Charlie Crist to appoint to the Palm Beach County Commission seat vacated by Mary McCarty, may have had a conflict-of-interest similar to the one that felled McCarty.

Pamela Goodman

Questions about Goodman arose in the private sector, as she helmed the giant clothing-chain Express. Goodman resigned abruptly from her $1 million-a-year job after an internal investigation.

“I did nothing wrong,” she said.

Goodman, 52, tells Page2Live she had an epiphany last month when McCarty resigned. McCarty’s expected to plead guilty to corruption-related criminal charges that could send her to jail for five years.

“I’m appalled by the the lack of integrity on that commission,” Goodman said about the accusations that McCarty’s decisions helped line the pockets of her bonds-trading husband, Kevin McCarty. “I was one of the first people who sent my application to the governor. We just need to improve government.”

Yet just before Goodman moved to Florida in 1996, if you believe a story in Forbes that year, it’s the purchasing habits of Goodman’s Express that could have been improved. Forbes claims that Express’ purchases of certain textiles cost parent company The Limited $15 million in markdowns.

According to the business mag, the fabric – at times of substandard quality and more expensive than similar products from competitors – came from Channel Textiles, a company owned by one Barry Goodman.

Yep, Barry was Pamela’s then-new hubby. (Read more…)