From the mailbag a few Readergraphs:
Mariella Smith usually writes about the environment or more to the point, what we are doing to it in the southern reaches of Hillsborough County. This one was a little different.
“You hit the nail on the head in your column today (2/15/08). My husband and I know Brian Sterner personally. As awful as it was to watch the one deputy dump him on the ground, the really sickening part was the way all the other deputies just walked around nonchalantly, this is is S.O.P. Not a single double-take. No one went over to ask’What’s going on?’ And that one creep smiles. If this is just one rotten apple, where was the shock among the rest of the staff?’

- On a completely different subject Bob Dwyer wrote in to comment on the column marking the 25th anniversary of the arrest of three county commissioners for bribery.
“I certainly remember the day (Jerry) Bowmer et al were taken down. I was a supervisor in the Tampa FBI office. My baliwick was directing violent crime investigations so I did not get involved in the comissioners’ case but I can tell you it was botched up in a very major way from the start. You can lay that at the feet of the egotistical US Attorney Bob Merkle.
“First of all, the case was a gift. A guy walked in, said he was being shook down by Jerry Bowmer and what should he do. He was wired up and in very short order we had Bowmer on tape in an extortionate conversation. Bowmer, of course, was a moron and rolled over immediately. Where to go from there?
What should have been done was to wire him up and let him roam around the county for the next six months or longer, recording hundreds of criminal conversations. Did that happen? No. Why? Because Merkle knew the legitimate venue for the case was the Organized Crime Strike Force and he wanted the glory for himself. So Bowmer was sent in the next day with the marked money, the busts went down and the cat was out of the bag. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that if Bowmer had been wired there would have been a wholesale cleaning out of county government.