The most vehement critic of the Orlando
MBI was always the Orlando Weekly and the agency managed to
silence the newspaper's investigative reporting with the October 2007
arrests of several advertising sales employees for selling ads to
escorts and unlicensed massage therapists that offered more than the
law allows.
Many around back in 1996 could testify
to the fact that this was not a new strategy for the MBI, myself
included. The War on publishers of ads for adult business began with
the Yellow Pages Fiasco, discussed in Memoirs, in 1996, when Sprint Publishing was
threatened with a RICO case over a refusal to remove the “escort
services” category in the Central Florida yellow pages. Sprint did
remove the category, stopping the presses (literally) on the 1997
directories printed and distributed by November of 1996.
Someone stated to me back in 1993-94
that Orlando was a testing ground of some sort in relation to the
eradication of anything involving adult business or vice, from
gambling and bingo to escort services and X-rated movies. I believe
it. The MBI's War on Adults has spread throughout the US these days
with the attacks on Craigslist (an MBI priority before anyone else
ever touched it) and now on Backpage.
Enjoy Bingo?
The MBI would have liked to make sure
that you would never enjoy bingo in Orlando; however, Philip Furtney
of Ontario fought the agency from 1995, until he died in late 2007,
while in-process of a civil suit against members of the MBI Governing
Board to retrieve his stolen property. Furtney's brother Bruce, on
behalf of the estate, carried-on with the suit and won a judgment. As
far as I am aware, Furtney's estate finally collected from the State
of Florida.
I would like to keep Philip Leroy
Furtney's criminal and civil cases alive in our memories forever and
do so with the inclusion of links to posts on this blog. Never forget
what the MBI is capable of:
The Bingo Racketeering Case
The Great Bingo Fiasco
Most Bizarre Racketeering Case Ever
True Investigative Reporting of a
Renegade Agency
Over the years, the Orlando Weekly
and its investigative reporters were often nipping at the heels of
the dogs at the MBI. Retaliation is hell and the Weekly and its
employees paid dearly for placing the agency in the public eye. One
day last week I did a search for MBI articles written by Weekly
reporters and each link was dead. A fear of sorts gripped me at the
discovery, a fear that all the solid online information concerning
the vicious pursuits of the MBI was being deleted and removed. Whew!
It didn't happen and a few days later the links were all working. One
other thought I had was that perhaps the Weekly had
commissioned a book – that would have been wonderful; it would
become a bestseller overnight. (Idea for the Weekly to help
make-up for lost revenue!)
To keep the information out there I
have compiled a list of important Orlando Weekly stories about the
MBI over the last 10 years. Whatever the Weekly did last week with
the links has made it so that the articles are on a dark red
background with dark blue text – if you highlight the text it is
much easier to read. They are in no particular order and searching
the Orlando Weekly for stories on the MBI revealed 135 results so
these are my picks:
The Morality Police (scroll to view 2
images, 1 of the MBI director in 1989 and the other of Hitler's SA
and both concerned over morality – scary stuff)
The MBI busts heads and Rich Crotty attempts to smile (smoke shop raids)
Our little Gestapo (MBI = "Central Florida's Church Lady with a Badge") (love this story!)
Score one for the MBI (about my federal
civil suit being tossed with a twist at the end)
Something's Fishy (bad behavior of
agents at a strip club)
Dirty Politics (on the Video Exposé
takedown)
Legal Haze (smoke shop raids)
The links I have included reveal what
the MBI really is, but there are many cases that even the Weekly
was not aware of and many defendants that have suffered at the hands
of the overzealous agents of the Metropolitan Bureau of
Investigation. Few appreciate this agency in Orlando – the citizens
did not ask for this whacked task force to eliminate all that is
adult in Orlando. I will leave it to you to figure out what monster
enterprise did.
I have written about a variety of cases
in Memoirs that are not in any Weekly articles. In the past
couple of months I've discussed the Orlando federal conspiracy trial
of the 11 defendants from Eastern Europe on this blog – this is
indeed an MBI case. MBI is not a local agency. I am not clear on how
the agency has changed since former Director William Lutz retired,
though at the conclusion of Memoirs I did believe there had
been a significant change. Well, I have changed my mind.
I consider it important to keep the
information out there and perhaps if I had given away free copies of
Memoirs a couple of years ago after it was published, the most
recent case involving the Eastern European defendants would never
have happened; maybe, just maybe, they would have passed on Orlando. If not for the arrests of the Weekly employees in late 2007, there would be many more articles of cases that are now buried by the MBI.
If you are an adult that likes to
gamble, play bingo, visit smoke shops, rent X-rated movies, read
X-rated books, get a massage with a happy ending, patronize strip
clubs, or call escorts... well, Orlando is not the place to be. We live in a fantasy land for children here - think about it - Disney shut down Pleasure Island (the nightclub theme park) in late 2008, after 20 years, because of demands by visiting families. The
MBI has not been dissolved yet, with emphasis on yet, and we can only hope that one day...
If you do not like me, realize that it is the MBI that made me the person that I am today. I like who I am, but if you don't, well, you should know that I used to be a nice, mild-mannered woman. More than a decade of continuous harassment, interference in my life, and a show trial that rivaled many in the Stalin era did it. Change can be a good thing. I learned to kick back.
If you do not like me, realize that it is the MBI that made me the person that I am today. I like who I am, but if you don't, well, you should know that I used to be a nice, mild-mannered woman. More than a decade of continuous harassment, interference in my life, and a show trial that rivaled many in the Stalin era did it. Change can be a good thing. I learned to kick back.
