(Last updated: November Spetember 1, 2021)
3 Americas: More Truth Than We Can Handle
Chapter 02
The Florida Cocaine Connection
by DR Wolfe
{As I continue a full revision, this is one of the new chapters from my revised autobiography, “3 Americas”.}
(Includes strong language and some descriptions of sex)
Like so many other snowbirds from the north, in the early 1980’s my parents left the snow and ice of Michigan behind, and became permanent residents of the Sunshine State.
Within a few years, all three of us kids followed them down to Florida.
I was searching for a place to call home, but little did I know it would be impossible to leave the baggage from all those early years completely behind. The damage the State of Michigan and the federal government’s secret mind-control program did to me. It was deeper than I would realize for many, many decades…
Just prior to moving to Florida in 1981, I was playing in a band and two of us moved to Grand Rapids. Our bass player, Brett Mousseau who I knew from the blind school, introduced me to his brother Dan and his girlfriend.
When we first got there, we stayed with Brett’s brother. Dan was sleeping with this young woman, named “Tera”, or maybe “Tara”, who I soon learned was “happily” married. Apparently, her husband was a sailor and was gone out to sea. She was supposed to be staying with her parents in Grand Rapids while her husband was working off a ship, coincidentally based out of Jacksonville, Florida.
After Brett and me rented a house, she began coming over to our house and occasionally spending the night with Brett, who said Dan knew. So apparently, she was now sleeping with both of the brothers, and I’m pretty sure her husband had no idea, thinking his faithful wife was safe, home with her parents until he returned from duty.
Brett wasn’t much of a student, and he never developed any other trade or skill, I wasn’t surprised he gave up learning the bass too. And since Brett had given up playing in a band together, and I figured it was only a matter of time before this lady’s husband showed up with a gun, I decided to move out
I did leave a note for Brett, explaining my reasons for moving, with a phone number where I could be reached. My rent was paid up through the end of the month and as far as I was concerned everything was square between us. But that evening I got a angry call from Brett’s brother, Dan Mousseau, who started threatening me, saying I owed him $400 for next month’s rent since I didn’t give a thirty day notice.
Obviously, I told him where he could stick it. I had already made the decision I was going to move to Jacksonville, Florida. My parents had moved there about a year earlier.
Most of my years in Florida were spent living in Jacksonville. Although I also lived in Tallahassee, Orlando and Miami for a few years.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have goals and ambitions, but my sub-conscious mind had a different plan. So partying and keeping those bad memories out of view occupied most of my time.
And like any where else, I met a lot of good people, and had some great relationships, but the bad ones always seemed to out shadow, and out power, the good ones.
But when your life is deeply planted here in “Third America”, it isn’t easy to overcome so many messed up people, like:
* “Crazy Mary Dash”, who came home from the doctor one day to tell me the wonderful news that she was pregnant! To celebrate, my parents took us to dinner, and we shared the good news with everyone in the complex where we lived, located in downtown Jacksonville.
About six or seven weeks later, Mary told me she had a miscarriage, and we cried. Except, about two or three weeks later when her sister Joanie called from Miami, I found out everything she had said was not only a lie, but a damn lie!
I told Joanie the sad news, about losing the baby, and she said, “That’s impossible. Mary had her ovaries removed a few years ago, when she got married to Rick, because of her diabetes. Didn’t she tell you?”;
Then there was the time I brought a friend from work named Frank home to have a couple mixed drinks with Mary and me. Apparently, while Mary was mixing the drink for us she put on her sunglasses and dropped her artificial eye into Frank’s drink…and thought it was absolutely, hilarious!
Meanwhile, she got a job at the local junior college, as the Disability Coordinator. I wasn’t surprised someone named Paula Jones would hire someone like Mary Dash. But then again, she seemed to only hire women for this job, and so Mary did meet the minimum requirement.
I had already met five or six of the coordinators Paula had hired, and well, let me tell you a story about one of them–
Jacksonville is one of the largest land mass cities in the United States. So, not surprisingly, Jacksonville junior college had four different campuses, and four different coordinators.
One of the disability coordinator’s I met while attending school was named Lynn Southerland. She was in her mid-thrties, with two teenage boys.
One weekend she asked me if I could watch her boys, who were around twelve and fourteen. I agreed, although, I found out later they were probably to old to have a “baby-sitter”.
We talked about guy stuff and played their favorite albums. Later, they showed me their mom’s sex toys and they showed me this cannister that came from their mom’s closet, which was half way filled with weed. The older boy rolled a fat joint. And so, I smoked some of it with them–
After everyone went to bed, around midnight, or maybe one o’clock, her jealous ex-husband showed up. I had locked the dead bolt when I laid down on the couch, but I let him in anyway. I was thinking it would probably be okay, although she never mentioned him. But he immediately began accusing me of trying to get with his ex-wife.
Then around two in the morning Lynn comes home, and quickly goes into the bedroom and slips on a very short, thin nightgown, and sits down on the couch next me, close enough to where my hand was almost resting on her thigh. I told her that I ought to go home, and that’s what I did.
Then about a month later, Lynn shows up at my apartment with some boyfriend, and starts threatening me over a three and a half dollar phone call. I had probably made the call, and probably promised to pay it, but forgot.
But really, is this how a Disability Coordinator of a college should react over a few dollars? The only reason I even knew her was because of the fact I was a student at this same junior college, seeking an accommodation or two–
Obviously, she was furious because I didn’t want to sleep with her. But maybe, she shouldn’t have told me that she was taking penicillin for a venereal disease. YUCK!
About nine months later, after Mary and I split up, she moved into an apartment on the west side of downtown, with the help of her new boyfriend. Then about a month or two later she called me one evening and said she had been raped. She wanted me to come stay with her, so I did, but there was nothing sexual about our reunion.
As we snuggled together in her bed, She told me what happened. She said it was some guy she barely knew, and went out with to have a couple drinks. She said he was a friend of a friend, and his name was “Joe”. She said he grabbed her wrist and had forced her onto the bed, shortly after they came back to her place.
We made love the next morning while we showered, but I never saw her again after that–
But out of curiosity, I got a copy of the police report, which mostly confirmed what she said she told the police. The copy of the report, which I still have, described him as being a white, male, approximately five foot, six inches tall, with bright red hair;
* And then there was “Lying Maria Licata”. Who, during the three week summer break in August when I went home to visit my parents, I found out later she went out with a Tallahassee bus driver. I don’t think it was an accident when he began seducing her. Here’s what happened.
About a year earlier, in the presence of at least one eyewitness, I was dragged about Twenty or thirty feet down the street by another bus driver during a peaceful civil protest. I was protesting his refusal to pull into the designated lane when picking up passengers by sitting on the first step and placing my feet firmly on the ground. Refusing to move, I insisted that he have me arrested, so that I could document his failure to follow the alleged policy of his company, and the university, placing the life’s of disabled students at risk.
If you happen to know the campus, the incident I’m describing occurred directly across the street from the same sorority house where Ted Bundi had murdered four female students about a decade earlier.
A year before my infamous protest, I learned that Florida State University had spent seventy thousand dollars installing this extra lane, that could hold up to three and a half buses. When I spoke to someone from the university, they said it was done to reduce congestion and keep students further away from the traffic, while waiting for their buses. It made sense. It usually got pretty busy at that corner.
However, some of the drivers some of the time refused to use the lane if there was even one other bus parked there. This meant visually-impaired students, if they were fortunate enough to hear the bus, had to step off the curb and walk across the first lane of traffic to find out which bus had pulled up. This was before we had those automated bus announcements (that never forget).
The company claimed all of their drivers were pulling into the special bus lane, and not staying out in the second lane, as I claimed.
So the next time in happened I had enough, and sat down and notified the driver I was not going to move. If the police arrested me, it would be self-evident that the driver had not complied with the company policy. And it was always the same driver, John Smith.
Just like another infamous Florida bus driver, Ralph Cramdon, the driver closed the door on my body and began to drive away, with my feet hanging out in traffic.
The bus driver was arrested, although the charges were later dropped, they said because of his wife’s heart attack. But I think I made my point.
That September Maria told me she was pregnant, but never mentioned her “brief affair” with the bus driver.
The following May, the baby, Raymond Urilli, was born in the parking lot of the local hospital (and apparently, couldn’t wait another second to get into the world). The following day, when someone from the hospitol came in to Maria’s room, apparently to assist her in filling out the birth certificate, but Maria sent her away. When they apparently came back later, after I had left, Maria decided to leave my name off the birth certificate as being the father. I had no idea why she would do this.
And just after she left the hospital, she blocked my telephone number, making it impossible to contact her. And when I showed up at her apartment a few days later with a DHS worker, loaded with baby clothes and toys, she refused to answer the door. she also Apparently called the cops on me another time, although I had already left when they showed up, (and obviously, had done nothing wrong other than to attempt to visit a child who I believed at the time was mine).
When I began to fight for visitation rights, she had her sleazy lawyer, Roberto Fox, send my lawyer, Jeff Barker, a letter that included the following:
“We’re not saying that Don isn’t the father, but we’re not saying he is.”
I was shocked, and didn’t know how to take this. So naturally, I began fighting for a paternity test, which she refused, claiming it would be harmful to the baby.
Before all of this, when I was riding the bus over to Maria’s apartment, one of the drivers I knew began telling me this crazy story, for no reason. He said that he had taken this one girl to a local bar where he hung out, and took her right there on the pool table, in front of everyone (including a few city bus drivers). “Can you believe it?” He asked.
I didn’t realize at the time he was talking about Maria. I had just found out she was pregnant a month or two earlier (with my baby), and didn’t give his outrageous story a second thought, until nine months later when I figured it out.
Obviously, he didn’t care about Maria. He only wanted to get even with me, on behalf of his fellow driver. he wanted to make me look like a fool, with apparently, Maria’s help.
I didn’t care that she was dating someone else. Our relationship wasn’t all that serious, until she told me she was pregnant, and I was the father. But when she decided to tell me this, she had no right to allow me to believe it was true, unless she intended to keep that secret for the rest of her life.
And if this weren’t enough, as you will read a little later on, I successfully filed a discrimination complaint against Florida State University with the U.S. Department of Education, Civil Rights Division in 1992. In that complaint I outlined nine violations of the law involving the accommodations that were not being provided to myself and other students with disabilities who were current, or former-students of the university.
As I wrote about in the next chapter, seven or eight of the nine issues I raised were determined to have merit, and in each circumstance, the university was required to make specific changes to their programs, practices and procedures to accommodate students with disabilities.
The funny thing about this story is what a rather unattractive, female FSU student, named Cindy something said, who was supposed to be the student government’s disability representative (and who herself was partially-sighted). She referred to me during her interview with the Department of Education as being a “parasite”. Simply, because I felt the University had violated my rights by not opening their disability computer labs in the evening, and other similar issues that descriminated against students with visual impairments, issues that she should have raised herself, if she weren’t acting as a “parasite for the University”.
Unfortunately, one of the claims involving the university’s failure to provide accommodations to nursing mothers with disabilities was denied.
Months later, when I received a copy of the interviews conducted by Marcella Thomas and her associate, I learned that Maria had told them that I had more or less fabricated everything about her not being provided with these specific accommodations to nursing mothers with disabilities.
Not only was I surprised by her selfishness in not considering the consequences to other future nursing mothers with disabilities. Her complete dishonesty about what she told me, made it impossible for me to speak with her ever again…although I have spoke to Raymond;
* I don’t know if it’s true, but this is a really weird story. It’s about a woman I met a couple times at a bar I hung out at in the Arlington neighborhood, in Jacksonville, Florida. I learned about this years later from an old friend i knew from that neighborhood that I apparently had probably met, and almost slept with, serial murderer , Aileen Wuornos.
It happened at this local Jacksonville pub, that was a low end pool hall. “Aileen”, she said was her name, offered to come home with me. this was the second or third time we met, so I said “Why not.”
Except, if true, in the movie they may have changed some of the circumstances. The producers made this scene appear very different than what really happened, if this was her. So I’ll tell you about that night in Jacksonville, Florida:
One night after we had been drinking for awhile, Aileen and me left this pool hall, called “Mutt and Jeff’s. Ironically, it was owned by a couple rotten Jacksonville cops, who may have set this up, and paid her to come home with me-
So, after finishing our beers, we headed through the back alley toward my apartment which was about a block away. Then for no reason, she slapped me in the chest with her hand, which was apparently holding a twenty dollar bill. She laughed and told me she had stolen the money off a guy I knew who was sitting by us at the bar, who may have been an off duty cop.
When she refused to return to the bar, and give him back his money, I stupidly tried to take it from her and a struggle broke out, which, as I said, was not surprisingly inaccurately featured in the movie “Monster”.
When we walked out of the bar, you can believe this or not, but I had no idea Aileen [Wuornos] was a sex worker, and it’s possible the guy, who may have been a cop, gave her the twenty bucks to hook up with me. It wouldn’t be the first time a “friend” had offered someone money or drugs to have sex with me, and not told me about it.
The incident happened a few years before she started killing her clients, when she was hanging out at this same Jacksonville pub which was located just off the I-5 corridor, near Jones College.
If you watch it, the movie suggests that it was a fight she had with a “client” over money she was being cheated out of that motivated her to begin her killing spree. And this may be partly true, except if it were me, I didn’t know I was a customer when it happened, and didn’t know the money was given to her to have sex with me.
We had talked and drank for a few hours. And I remember this about her. She was funny and made me laugh. I really did like her, and when it happened I just figured we were a couple friends who were hooking up for the night–
So we ended up wrestling to the ground for a minute or two- Then after struggling to her feet, Aileen pulled away from me, breaking my grip, and ran back toward the bar.
Almost immediately, I began to imagine what she was telling everyone in the bar, and maybe, how I had tried to sexually assault her for no reason! So I decided it would probably be better to go straight home. Thankfully, I never saw “Aileen [Wuornos]” again after that, and found a different bar to hang out at;
So out of the many stories I may or may not tell about my crazy days living in Florida, I’ll start with telling you about the two years I spent living in Orlando. And how I was kicked out of the dorms at the University of Central Florida for smoking a joint in my room (even though I know for a fact there were hundreds of other students doing the exact same thing as me at that very moment — 9:30 p.m., on a Friday).
Why was I singled out by the university of Central Florida? Especially over marijuana? It didn’t make sense since I knew about several of the university’s employees who were snorting and selling cocaine to other employees on the clock (and never being drug tested)?
So, here’s how the Orlando nightmare began, and maybe why I was I was once again being targeted…
One evening, while sitting in my dorm room on a Friday night at UCF an uninvited “quad Leader”, or that’s what they called this little Nazi soldier, walked into my room and told me put out the joint I was smoking.
My door may have been ajar. But she didn’t ask me to shut the door, just ordered me to put out my marijuana cigarette. I was sitting at my desk, which was around the corner, by the window. Which meant, she was unable to see me until she had walked completely into the room.
even if my door was partly open, as she claimed. it would have been reasonable for her to politely ask me to close my door, even though it was Friday night and the library was still open. I really didn’t think anyone minded, because it often smelled like someone was smoking pot somewhere on the floor.
So, since I knew, or felt, it was an illegal search, since she didn’t knock; and since I already had two qualifying conditions that forced me to make this choice between these two perceived evils; and since, she was being such a bitch about it; as politely as possible, I refused her order.
So the Jewish elite who run this “public” university (and almost every other state university in America), decided to kick me out of the dorms for using marijuana, medically, in my own room, out of public view.
But really, the nightmare at UCF began that first night I stayed in the dorms.
Suddenly, I was woke up in the middle of the night by the feel of something, like a stick, poking me in my genitals. I instantly jumped out of bed and yelled, “HEY! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!”
At this time in my life I was completely night blind, so I would have had to find the light switch or search the room in the dark. And frankly, I didn’t know if he had some kind of weapon, so I decided to just get back into bed and deal with it in the morning.
My first roommate that summer was a guy from Africa. He seemed normal, and he spoke pretty good English. And, until then, we seemed to get along well…
So when it happened, and I felt something touching my privates, and I yelled, he never said a word. Obviously, he heard me, but still didn’t respond.
After giving him an angry warning about ever touching me again, with anything, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Except, about an hour later it happened again. This time I was awake, and I knew for sure it was some sort of poll or stick he was using to touch my butt!
I quickly got out of bed, and called campus security. When they came to my room, I explained what had happened, twice. This was clearly a sexual assault, yet the campus police seemed unconcerned–
And of course, my roommate pretended he had no idea what I was talking about.
When it happened, I called the quad leader on duty, who also came to my room. And because of my insistence, she quickly moved this guy to another room…and it was the last time I was around him, as far as I know. And I’m pretty sure this was the same quad leader who busted me eight or nine months later for smoking weed in my room!–
But what’s interesting, is that my RA never defended me, or my right to smoke weed in my room. After we met, he started calling me “Wild Man”. He said it was because of my hair, but maybe it was because my eyes never seemed to focus on people when I looked at them (or so I was told).
I stopped wearing glasses in High school, and only wore dark glasses when I went outside. And as I explain later, I did everything to memorize the campus so I would not have to use a white cane.
I kind of felt like , when he called me this, it would be like calling a black student “Watermelon Man”, because of the shape of his head. But I shouldn’t be surprised, since he left that fall for the Naval Academy. When he flunked out a few months later, he was back to being the RA for our floor.
And, if this weren’t enough, that same fall, this want-to-be mobster kid from New York named “Joe Benardo” (No relation to the former-New York organized crime figure with the same name, as far as I know) came into my room (with his “partner”, “Butch”) and stole my new roommate’s parking sticker.
Apparently, my new roommate left it on his desk, and Benardo, who I had just met a few days earlier, decided to stop bye my room. When he came in the room he, or his friend, must have grabbed it off my roommate’s desk.
Even though there was no other explanation as to what happened to the parking sticker, the useless campus cops, did nothing to Benardo or his friend. But instead, I apparently became a target for the campus cops (for smoking weed)–
I have known several people who were in, or had been in, the ROTC, so I think it’s a good program. I wouldn’t want to claim that all ROTC programs are similar to the one at UCF, but here’s when I think I became a target and where the problem might have begun. And when I became a target of the ignorant anti-marijuana bigots of Florida (who never saw a bag of cocaine or pill they didn’t like.
***************
Dateline: July 2019
JP MORGAN SHIP SEIZED BY COAST GUARD WITH TONS OF COCAINE ABOARD!!!
***************
Shortly after I came to UCF, I would run a few miles around the school track every morning, real early, It was located fairly close to my dorm, so I took advantage of the opportunity, because there were very few people out and about.
I would go running usually some time around dawn. So the only ones ever out there by the school track that early besides me, was the ROTC students.
Then one morning, after I had been running for a few weeks, some knucklehead from the ROTC group, who I suspect often saw me taking a little puff before I would run. deliberately parked his (or her) motorcycle in the first lane of the track where I was running (maybe to get that “pot head”, and be the “good little tin soldier”). It sure didn’t seem like an “accident”…
Needless to say, on the next lap around I ran face first into his bike and cut myself up pretty good. I hit the bike so hard, I knocked it down. Yet, not one of these want-to-be military bastards came over to see if I was okay. Hmmm…
I can honestly say, the MMJ sure came in handy that morning–
I did slowly get back up and, despite that my legs were bleeding from several places, finished the lap. As a result, I decided to never again run on the university’s track, which until then, was the safest place for me to run.
So, when UCF kicked me out of the dorm for using medical marijuana, later that year; and when the ROTC creeps from UCF tried to break my leg; and the University’s IT Department decided to inject me with cocaine; and one of my suite mates (the Student Body President) stole a $350 PA speaker from me; and after the University cops illegally raided my off campus home (and stole most of my medicine which was stashed in my back bedroom), my feelings about UCF changed significantly, and decided to get the hell out of Orlando before one of these thugs from UCF tried to kill me…
But apparently they never gave up–
So when I heard some of these sports talk morons say how wonderful this institution must be for helping a football player like this, with a physical disability, get threw school is a little sickening, given my own experience–
For example, while I worked in the cafeteria, the school quarterback, Dana Thyson, used to sometimes walk around with a broom in his hand. A couple friends from Indiana who worked with me used to joke about how Thyson would have all these hours on his time card, even though he was hardly ever around (pretending to “work”).
Ironically, about a year later an employee I knew from the UCF’s IT Department, Jim (a former-army clerk who often boasted of ripping off everyone, every chance he could), took me over to his cocaine dealer’s house to get some weed. It was a guy from Orlando named Roger Bisblinghoff, and they ended up injecting me with cocaine!
Luckily, I wasn’t infected with anything. But it’s interesting how and who these public universities enforce their “rules” against, when you consider the long-term consequences of these arbitrary practices, when it comes to drugs and crime–
At the end of the following semester, after I had lost my final appeal to stay in the dorms, Jim had helped me get into an apartment just below his. We had met a few months earlier in the UCF computer lab where I was working, testing out the university’s new Hulet Packer talking computer (which even back then, in 1985, was better and more stable than any talking computer available today).
Jim had smoked a couple joints with me a couple different times after work, and I quickly became part of his inner circle after moving off campus.
If the “pharmaJews” who seem to run all of the Universities and the state of Florida, really wanted to slow down the opiate crisis they would immediately legalize marijuana for everyone, so they wouldn’t have to ever associate with people like Bisblinghoff.
Current users of opiads may not benefit from legal marijuana. That point may be debateable , although I would suspect they use far less. But there’s no doubt that less people become opiad users, because they can get legal weed.
Other than a few knuckleheads, posing as Florida sheriff’s, everyone knows the “gateway drug theory”, just like bite mark evidence, and burn pattern evidence, has been completely debunked. It’s called “junk science.”
Although, forcing casual marijuana users to seek out cannabis on the black market, only helps to perpetuate the use of harder drugs. I think my story proves it.
I remember, they took me into the bathroom, and Jim held down my arm wile Roger carefully inserted the needle into my vain.
Instead of making any reasonable distinction between these two very different drugs, Florida currently has some of the nation’s strictest laws against the casual use of cannabis and one of the worst medical marijuana laws in the country.
Consider this- newly-elected U.S. Senator Rick Scott was elected to be Florida’s governor twice, shortly after his company was accused of “stealing” nine billion dollars from Medicare. And when the former-CEO was questioned under oath about the case, over a hundred times he answered, “I don’t recall”…
Although I didn’t figure this out until later, similarly, Roger Bisblinghoff was providing a lot of the universities employees with cocaine, and like Senator Rick Scott, apparently he was being well protected.
And I think that’s why, after I moved into a house a little further from campus (and away from “Jim the Jerk”), someone at the university sent the campus cops after me–
But I’m getting ahead of the story, and the Florida connection about why today I’m being tortured and slowly murdered by the government.
Being kicked out of the dorms was an immediate death sentence for me, as far as getting an education from the University of Central Florida went. this is because there were almost no sidewalks anywhere off campus. In fact, I was told, from time-to-time actual alligators could be seen wandering around the neighborhood. They were in the creek that run behind my house. Luckily, there was a fence.
So this tight-ass Dean of Students, and a handful of specially selected righteous assholes from the Student Government, posing as a jury of my peers voted to throw me (an almost completely blind student) out of the dorms for smoking a joint in my room!
I explained to them, that because of my near blindness I would not be able to safely travel to and from campus, and they were putting my life in danger by doing this, it didn’t matter to them (who not surprisingly, mostly Jewish kids from south and central Florida).
I barely had shadow vision at that time… But it didn’t matter, since I didn’t play ball, like Shaquem Griffin, and had no wealthy relatives to build them a library or buy me a degree (or put me on the rowing team).
One of the first roommates I had when I moved off campus was another guy from Africa. Despite what happened with the other roommate from Africa, I had no ill will toward him. He was a graduate student, and seemed like a pretty nice guy. He liked to laugh, so I figured he couldn’t be too bad–
Boy was I wrong. Turns out, he was taking suit cases to Africa loaded with American cash. He told me how he was able to smuggle the cash past customs, and sell it when he got to his country. All I know, it sounded illegal, and I didn’t want to be involved. Just knowing about it, was probably a crime.
I became very nervous, wondering when the FBI would break down the door. But he made it easy for me when I got the phone bill.
I had a $150 deposit. But the phone bill was over $400! Although he said he would pay it next week, I decided not to wait.
With the help of a friend, I changed the lock while he was gone, and put all of his belongings on the lawn. When he came home that night and called the police, I showed them the $400 phone bill and told them about his money laundering skim.
I never heard anything else about it, from either the police, or him. I did end up losing my phone over it…
Not that this is all that unusual, where the disability resource people had some personal issues. Most disabled students who need a significant amount of accommodations wouldn’t be surprised to hear this, but the lady who ran the disability office at the University of Central Florida turned out to be a real weirdo. Kind of like the lady out of that Stephen King movie, “Misery”, played by Kathy Bates. What was her name?
When I was 23-years-old, I decided to transfer to UCF. Except, I also decided to no longer use a white cane, and depend entirely on my shadow vision to get around. This was probably a big mistake, but here’s why–
There is almost always an automatic response that almost all Americans have when they speak to a person who is holding a white cane. And almost every blind person has heard and felt this subtle discrimination, and knows exactly what I mean–
So, despite the protection it provided, I struggled with this dilemma every day, yet refused to give in.
A few days after I arrived in Orlando, and discovered the cafaeteria was closed, the disability resource lady offered to take me to get some dinner when she got off work since there were no restaurants within walking distance. It really was a complete commuter school back then.
When I got in her car I noticed it was really hot. So after we pulled away I waited for a few minutes to see if she would turn on the air conditioning. It was early June I think, and it had to be about ninety-five degrees outside. But when she didn’t turn on the air I took upon myself to roll down the window.
Then, just like in the movie, she starts screaming at me, telling me not to touch the window!
And why in the world would she act this way, you ask? Well, she explained ‘Because it was going to mess up her hair!’ So I quickly rolled the window back up, and as I recall (since I’m not Rick Scott), we only said a few things to each other after that…
Knowing the power these “support people” have over the lives of those of us with disabilities, I did what she asked, Since I was now a prisoner in her car and couldn’t get back to the dorm by myself even if I had wanted to. It’s so surprising how many times this has happened to me throughout my life, being held captive by the threat of others, implied or otherwise. Or where they use a motor vehicle to test my blindness–
So, rather than sitting down somewhere and enjoying a hot meal in the fine city of Orlando, and giving me a chance to pick her brain about my new living environment, she took me through a drive through and then quickly dropped me back off at the dorm.
And wanted to talk to her about the sexual assault I experienced in my room, and what I should do abut it? However, I was left with no one to turn too. And this was how my first week on the campus of the University of Central Florida began–
When I mentioned all of this to another disabled student, I remember they laughed, and said something like, ‘Her hair is so short you couldn’t mess it up with a leaf blower’. I always remembered this funny comparison, because I remember I could hear someone nearby, who was using a leaf blower.
I suppose this is why, when I heard about the disabled football player from UCF being drafted by Paul Allen and the Seattle Seahawks in the first round, I felt it was important that the record was set straight about Orlando’s University of Central Florida (ironically, also the home of my sick friends from Disney, who I write about in the next chapter).
You see, I think to make sure the American people knew that this is not how “they” normally treat people with disabilities at UCF. Unless they can get something out of them, like they apparently did with Shaquem Griffin…who is obviously a great athlete, who happens to have an impairment–
After leaving Central Florida, I went back to Michigan for a couple years, and ended up working at a seafood place in east st. Clare Shores called the “Blind Fish”. Which is kind of funny, because I ended up playing in a band with a bass player who worked there, named “John Fish”. But that’s not what we called the band, although maybe we should have?
One of the people I worked with was a guy that had spent a couple years in prison, named Johnny Ford. One night when we were both working this extremely wealthy couple, based on their jewelry , said that they had lost their child’s silver spoon.
The manager made us, the two lowly dish washers, dig through the trash looking for the missing spoon. The whole time, they glared at us, like hungry hawks. Like we were criminals who had stolen the silver spoon from the rich little brat. We never even got a thank you or any sort of tip, for digging through that muck.
Johnny was especially ticked off by the rich snobs, who always drove over from Gross Point to eat at Bobby Moore’s Blind Fish. Moore had a small circus, with several elephants that he brought down to the restaurant once or twice a year. His customers were all wealthy people, who would barely talk to the valet, let alone one of us dishwashers.
Johnny began whispering in my ear, “Don’t eat the mash potato’s tonight.”
I always said, “Yes sir, Mr. Ford, and never asked why.”
Next time he would say, “Don’t eat the clam chowder.” Or he would say, “Don’t eat the coleslaw today.”
And I would always answer in the most respectful voice possible, ” Yes, thank you Mr. Ford for that valuable information.”
I don’t know if he put any of his bodily fluids in the chowder or mash potato’s for the snobs from Gross Point, but I always followed his advice to the letter. Why take a chance, I thought?
I returned to Florida a couple years later, and finally got my associates degree. The fall after that, I transferred to Florida State University, and my career as a citizen journalist and a sleuth began–
As you can see, I’ve always been a non-conformist and a whistleblower, and officially began my career in the alternative media in 1990 as a reporter at the Florida Flambeau in Tallahassee.
My first big story involved the unlawful use of one of the city’s official voting booth. I got a tip that an employee with the city’s election’s office had rented out one of the city’s booth to a local book store. Apparently, the owner was using the booth to charge $5 for a five minute view of Madonna’s infamous beaver shot from Pent House Magazine, one week prior to it’s official release…and no one else at the city knew anything about it. Hmmm…
Another fun story I did involved a fifteen-year-old freshman who was studying chaos theory. Turning the interview he explained that he was working in one of the university’s special advanced mathematics lab that was learning how to use controlled chaos to predict (and maybe even determine) the future…
I have to wonder, is that what’s going on in America today, with all these shooting and crazy stabbing incidents, where eighteen month old babies are being axed to death? Maybe it’s not just the meth that’s doing this to some of us Americans, Sergeant Jansen? Although, we know drugs have always been a good excuse to kill or destroy someone, like Jordan Case or me–.
I also scooped the Tallahassee Democrat, the local corporate, Jewish owned paper, on another big story.
It involved two Florida State University graduate student divers who had been trapped inside of a cave out in the Gulf. Unfortunately, one of the divers was unable to get out and died. As a result of another story I had done earlier that year involving the Oceanography Department, I was able to get a personal interview with the other diver, describing the horrible tragedy in detail.
So, along with writing several significant stories for the Flambeau, two of my front page articles led to the arrest of a local gender-impaired, Jewish professor named Daivid Ammerman. As part of a foundation that was operating out of Tallahassee, Ammerman was operating a local child trafficking ring that targeted young African-American boys. Sound familiar?
Lucky for Ammerman, they weren’t little white boys (without defects or disabilities), or he may have gotten twenty or thirty years in prison. Instead, because they were only impoverished, black boys, Ammerman only got sentenced to six months in the county jail. And no one else involved in his foundation, who sponsored these over night trips, was ever indicted. Even though, the foundation was providing him with the resources to find these young impoverished, African-American boys, who Ammerman could regularly drug and molest. Sounds a lot like the Sandusky case, and his foundation, doesn’t it?
here’s how it happened. I got wind of Professor Ammerman from a couple individual’s at the Florida State University Disability Lab, where I would often hang out and write my articles.
I overheard them talking about an article in the Tallahassee Democrat about this guy Ammerman winning an award for having allegedly helped all these local black kids “get off the street.”
Without saying anything specific, as I listened I could tell they weren’t happy by the article. And without coming out and saying it, they suggested there was something real sleazy about this Ammerman guy. So I came up with a plan…
With the help of my editor, Ron Matus, I decided to make Professor Ammerman a real “hero”! Not only did the article about this “amazing” man cover most of the entire front page of the Flambeau that day, starting at the top. Ron agreed to let me include an additional side-bar article, also all about the amazing Ammerman, and one of the possible victims. Although I didn’t want to embarrass the kid, so neither article included anything about what I suspected was going on.
However, as I predicted (and hoped would happen), one of the victims was so outraged by my article, knowing what he knew about the truth, he went straight to the cops. The following day, he told the Tallahassee police everything about what Professor Ammerman was doing to him and some of the other boys, apparently under the nose of Freddie Groomes and Angela Richardson. Who are apparently a couple very well dressed African-American women.
Until then, none of the victims were willing or motivated enough to talk to the police about it, even though this apparently had been going on for a couple years, and maybe longer.
Similar to what’s been happening here in Oregon, my landlady began sending her maintenance people into my apartment in Tallahassee when I would leave. They would come in, according to a neighbor, and steal and/or vandalize my property. And maybe plant cameras and listening devices. And when I complained, I was evicted.
To my great disappointment, our editor at the Flambeau, Ron Matus, decided to leave the paper and move back to California.
Then what one of my fellow reporters referred to as a “creepy little Jewish German”, named Dave Bryant took over as editor, and within months the paper completely crashed. Both the bustling newsroom and advertising department disappeared almost over night.
I don’t know if he was Jewish, it may have been a joke. I didn’t realize back then the tremendous control the “Jewish Cabal” had over the police and the media, even the alternative media. I do know he was German, and extremely arrogant, like a lot of Jewish people, like Marc Abrahms and Harvey Weinstein. And he married a woman from Germany, who also may have been Jewish.
And then, along with the paper’s “advisor”, Jerome Stern, a Jewish writer and professor from Florida State University’s English Department, arranged to block me from writing and publishing any further articles, as though they were ordered by someone more powerful to get rid of me.
Before this started happening, the President of Florida State University, Dale Lick, had been very supportive of my advocacy efforts on behalf of disabled students and sent me a personal letter saying so. In fact, in his personal letter he specifically called out the extremely arrogant African-American University attorneys, Angela Richardson, and one of the Vice-Presidents, Freddie Groomes, who was voted one of the ten most well-dressed black women in America.
Along with a formal complaint of discrimination, I sent a copy of Lick’s letter to the U.S. Department of Education, Civil Rights Division, which is what likely led to President Lick being demoted by the University back to the English Department the following year, in 1993.
The University claimed President Lick’s removal had nothing to do with any of my investigations. Except, the US DOE ruled that Seven or eight of the nine items listed in my complaint were found to be valid violations, and I believe President Lick’s letter was crucial to this finding.
As a result, the University was forced to make numerous changes, including, for example, giving disabled students twenty-four hour access to the accessible computers, similar to what non-disabled computer science students had been given.
Can you imagine what its like having twenty visually-impaired students sharing two computers, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and still be able to academically compete against sighted students?
So, after being warned by a friend, who knew that my article had outed the Tallahassee Police and this powerful Florida foundation who was funding the professor’s “molestation program”, I began making plans to get out of town…and out of Florida. For better or worse, I took his advice.
I quickly packed up and quietly (severing all of my personal ties) and moved to Atlanta, formally transferring to Georgia State University a year later.