Florida Man Seeks Teenage Female for Fun Adventures with Frequently Indicted Tax Collector/Embezzler/Trump Minion

The competition is intense and the choice is always subjective, but everyone has their favorite Florida Man story. But this thing with super-Trumper Matt Gaetz and his tax collecting home boy is so spectacularly and so ludicrously Floridian it will soon eclipse a couple of my all-time favorites.

Until Gaetz I was fond of the tale told by a Florida Highway Patrolman who pulled over a Cadillac exceeding 100 mph on Alligator Alley, i.e. I-75 from Naples to Ft. Lauderdale. According to his report, upon stopping the vehicle he noted that the driver was both “intoxicated … and naked” and that the three women passengers were likewise, “intoxicated … and naked.” Florida: the Wisconsin of the South.

Perhaps better is the tale of the extremely Trumpy couple in a Tampa-area Medicare-related business. The dude was the company’s super salesman and the Mrs. was the receptionist for the small office. She was the cheery face of the company. Family values and other assertions of all-American patriotism and rectitude were standard parts of their conversations, along with lamenting the hell-on-earth sewer being propagated by liberals, socialists and pretty much anyone who didn’t genuflect to the godliness and glory of Donald Trump.

So it came as a bit of surprise to learn that the couple’s side-hustle was running a Mom and Pop porn site, featuring the Mrs. as the main attraction Pop as the cameraman/director and a half dozen of their buddies as the eager and willing props.

Hey! Free country! Drain the Swamp!

But come on, the steadily accumulating details about Gaetz and his buddy the Florida tax collector (a can’t-make-it-up filigree) are so sleazy, so shameless and so … so … Florida in all its humid corruption it would take your breath away if you weren’t laughing so hard. And the fact that no character in Congress had coiled himself tighter around Donald Trump’s cankles than Gaetz — to the point he was “dating” Trump’s daughter makes it more delicious than a sweaty trucker’s cap filled with deep-fried gator bites. (Apparently that relationship has cooled. Gaetz recently proposed to his latest girl friend while relaxing at Mar-A-Lago. The girl friend just happens to be the sister of the guy who invented the Oculus virtual reality head set, is worth $700 million and has been an unapolgetic Islamaphobe and alt-right Trumpist on social media.)

Here’s more on Greenberg. And still more.

If you haven’t paid full attention to this farce, not only is Gaetz under investigation for having sex with under-age girls, but his buddy, the tax collector, is now looking at … wait for it … 33 separate federal charges, including sex trafficking as well, mail fraud and embezzlement from his tax collecting job. (The latter may be part of every Florida government official’s job description, I’ll have to check that.)

Everything about Gaetz screams “rich, entitled asshole”, which explains why so many of his Republican colleagues seem happy to let him flail and rant to Fox News about “extortion” … while simultaneously rolling Tucker Carlson into his sewer and defaming a prominent Florida attorney (I say “prominent” not necessarily “respectable”) in the same berserko interview. .

But since I’m always interested in “Where do you get these guys?” I Googled around a bit for Gaetz’ old man, Don Gaetz, politely described in news stories about his um, troubled, off-spring as “a wealthy Florida businessman and prominent state politician.” And that is true, as far as it goes.

The good and wholesome part about the old guy, is that he was born in North Dakota and educated in the great evangelical tradition at Concordia College right over there in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Then he moved to Florida.

It was down there on the Redneck Riviera that he made his fortune in … wait for it again … the for-profit hospice business. A unique health service niche for which his company was eventually indicted for Medicare fraud — over-charging the government, charging for people with no need for hospice care, etc.. i.e. the usual Florida business model . The case was quietly settled out of court in the way that most well-capitalized fraud cases involving prominent politicians usually are.

Oh, and did I mention that old man Gaetz cashed out by selling his pricey, government-supported hospice business for close to a half-billion bucks to an Ohio firm best known as the parent company of … Roto-Rooter?

At death’s door? We’ll handle that and get that nasty grease glob out of your pipes!

Florida. For-profit hospice Medicare scams. Sex trafficking teenage girls. Embezzlement. Mail fraud. Defamation. Face-planted puckering into Donald Trump’s gold-leafed rump.

Even Carl Hiaasen hasn’t rolled all this into one character.

15 thoughts on “Florida Man Seeks Teenage Female for Fun Adventures with Frequently Indicted Tax Collector/Embezzler/Trump Minion

  1. You link to everything and not the porn site? How do you expect to create decent clickbait?

    The Gaetz story is so weird and chaotic it almost defies understanding much less explanation. None of it, however, seems unlikely in the fetid confines of Florida.

    My favorite Florida Man story, though, is the six-year odyssey of one of the state’s more recent residents, the king-in-exile of Mar-A-Lago who I refer to as “Fat Florida Man Who Used to be on Twitter” or FFMWUTBOT for short. I’m seeing how long I can go without using his name.

    OK, “favorite” is maybe the wrong word.

    Fix the porn link.

  2. You spoiled it. April Fool’s day is supposed to be for outrageous exaggerations, improbable propositions and the tricking and tweaking of the gullible–not factual reporting on Florida hustlers and politicians.

    This is beautifully written! And the truth is stranger than the work of Carl Hiaasen.

  3. Lost in my frayed memory is whether it was Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry who, while just reporting the colorful happenings in Florida, would say like a Vonnegut refrain: “You can’t make this up.”

    • I’ve been asked if this will only make Gaetz more popular in Florida? I say he has Rubio’s job by acclimation if he wants it. He’s the embodiment of the Florida dream.

      • well, isn’t the Florida Dream of Florida Man sex with a 17 yr old girl?

          • Speaking of Zoos…..especially in Florida, they get weird!

            This is a great Zoo story:
            https://www.amazon.com/Zoo-Story-Life-Garden-Captives/dp/1401310532
            The director of this zoo “borrows” animals from the public nonprofit zoo he runs to stock his private for profit animal park, and only gets caught when a bunch of monkeys escape and start to terrorize the surrounding neighborhoods. FWIW, no one ever caught the monkeys–they are still out there!
            Very well written, started out as a 12 part newspaper story…..

  4. Others have tried to capture the weird-sleaze and can’t-be-real aspects of modern Florida politics, but you are the first to have nailed it.

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