Humoring woman behind the badge

TAMPA UNCUFFED E-mail: Amy Herdy Christopher Goffard

© St. Petersburg Times
published June 13, 2002

To those in legal circles, the man who appeared at City Hall the other day had a familiar face. Folks slapped E.J. Salcines on the back, saying, "How are ya, judge?"

For those who don't know, in the mid 1980s Salcines was Hillsborough state attorney and one of Tampa's most popular politicians when he became the target of a federal investigation. He was never charged, but the investigation cost him his office.

After that, Salcines built a successful private law practice until 1998, when Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed him to the 2nd District Court of Appeal, a $123,000-a-year judgeship.

None of that mattered to the Tampa police officer behind the counter who stopped Salcines as he walked past.

"Please sign in, sir, and get a badge," Officer Donna Noblitt said to Salcines, who looked surprised.

As a small throng gathered, Salcines, 63, obligingly penned his name, taking visitor badge number 1038.

He then turned to one of his admirers.

"She wanted to strip-search me," Salcines joked. "I said at my age, it could be fatal."

WHOLE LOT OF LITTER: To make some money, Noel Rivera-Reyes told some Tampa truckers he would dispose of their tractor tires at a landfill in Orlando, deputies said.

He never made it that far.

Instead, deputies said Rivera-Reyes, 42, illegally dumped dozens of the monster tires at various locations in Tampa and Hillsborough County.

Environmental deputies (and yes, there are such people) interviewed witnesses for a description of the suspect and his truck, and soon they had their man.

Then they told him to clean up his mess. All 5 tons of it.

"We advised him it would behoove him to get them cleaned up," sheriff's Lt. Rod Reder said. Evidently Rivera-Reyes, charged with three felony counts of littering, agreed.

Reder said deputies planned to oversee the cleanup.

"It's a quality-of-life issue," he said. "We don't tolerate illegal dumping, especially of this magnitude."

CALM AFTER THE STORM: For those who watch the Hillsborough County Courthouse primarily for tales of judges with libidos run amok, male judges who wear ladies' underwear or comport themselves like cat burglars, the Menendez Era has so far proved a boring one.

All to the good, says the Florida Bar's Young Lawyer's Division, which has named Chief Judge Manuel Menendez the state's Outstanding Jurist of 2002. In a news release last week, the Bar noted that Menendez, "in a very short period of time, helped bring renewed respect to the local judiciary."

In a somewhat charitable reference to the scandals that convulsed the courthouse under former Chief Judge Dennis Alvarez, the Bar added that Menendez assumed his job at a time of "uncertainty and instability." The Bar also noted Mendendez's involvement in continuing legal education.

Menendez, who became chief in April 2001, accepted the plaudits with few words: "It was very nice of them to say those nice things about me."

WHAT'S IN A WORD?: It was a word you don't often see on a police report.

From the June 5 daily incident log about an armed robbery, the description of one of the suspects read as follows:

"Suspect #2 was only described as being a b/m with a "nappy" Afro hair and wearing a navy blue shirt."

Nappy?

We asked Joe Durkin, spokesman for Tampa police, about it.

While he was not able to find the sergeant who wrote the entry, Durkin said the use of quotation marks around the word nappy said to him the sergeant was quoting a witness.

Was the word inappropriate?

"I don't believe so," Durkin said. "When someone describes someone's afro as being "nappy,"that gives me the indication it is unkept or disheveled in appearance."

An informal poll gave us differing opinions: Some considered nappy to simply mean a messy afro. Others found it insulting when a white person used it to refer to a black person's appearance (the sergeant who wrote the entry is white).

We asked Darryl Rouson, head of the NAACP in St. Petersburg, if the word was considered offensive.

"I don't think anymore," Rouson said. "There may have been a point in our heritage when it was used in a racially derogatory manner. My initial feeling is, not anymore."

Actually, Rouson said, "Hair straightening is out today. Nappy is in."

-- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Have a tip about cops? Call Amy Herdy at 226-3386 or herdy@sptimes.com. Have a tip about courts? Call Christopher Goffard at 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com.

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