Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

What potential tourists really need is some useful advice, because the rules down here are definitely different.

RULE NO. 1: You must remove your Beretta shoulder holster before going swimming.

RULE NO. 2: You must get wounded in a place you've never been wounded before.

RULE NO. 3: At spring break you must never stand for too long beneath a hotel full of drunken college kids.

RULE NO. 4: You must never stop on Interstate 95 to ask directions from a teenager holding a cinderblock.

RULE NO. 5: You are required to watch at least one sunrise, because that's what time the 10 P.M. Metrobus finally shows up.

RULE NO. 6: You must never light a cigar with 12 drums of pure ether in the back of your car.

RULE NO. 7: You must never wear your beeper into the sauna.

RULE NO. 8: You are required to take home at least a dozen giant Bufo toads as souvenir doorstops.

RULE NO. 9: You must stand in line for three hours outside Joe's Stone Crab, only to be mistakenly rounded up in a Border Patrol sweep of South Beach.

RULE NO. 10: You must never wear a tie to your arraignment.

RULE NO. 11: You must never, ever use your turn signal while changing lanes.

RULE NO. 12: You must never open your front door to a gang of armed men wearing police badges, black Ray bans and rubber Ed Meese masks. You must never believe them if they tell you all Florida cops drive unmarked Maseratis.

RULE NO. 13: You must never carry correct change when going through a busy tollbooth, and always spend as much time as possible chatting with the cashier about which way Sea World is.

RULE NO. 14: At the first sight of an actual Florida alligator you must pull off the road and feed it enormous bags of Toll House cookies until it grows so tame that it eats your dachshund.

RULE NO. 15: You must not be alarmed to discover that two entire floors of your hotel have been rented out to the federal Witness Protection Program.

Auto trunks are no place to park bodies January 21, 1987

Bust our buttons! This week's crime news brings another unique distinction to Dade County: The Car-Trunk Murder Capital of the United States.

Last year local automobile trunks yielded a record number of homicide victims (12), a statistic provoking comment from no less an authority than Dr. Joseph Davis, the unflappable chief medical examiner.

"Years ago," he reflected, "if you found somebody dead in a trunk, it was unusual. There was a great deal of interest. Now it's a ho-hum thing."

Your basic car-trunk case goes like this: Some poor soul is out walking his poodle or pulling into the shopping mall when he notices a Foul Odor emanating from another car.

Next the police are summoned, the trunk of the offending vehicle (usually a late-model, luxury sedan) is pried open and therein discovered one or more extremely dead persons who, more likely than not, have had a passing attachment to the narcotics trade.

A seamy spectacle, to be sure. "Not a pleasant scene to go to," says Metro-Dade detective Al Singleton.

"It's a bother," Dr. Davis agrees. "Another thing that's annoying … now you find a car parked at the airport—stinks to high heaven—and for some reason you have to wait six hours while they go find a judge to get a court order to open the thing up! Everybody knows there's a body inside."

Twelve car-trunkers out of 438 homicides is scarcely an epidemic, but for 1986 it certainly puts us at the head of the pack, per capita. (Admittedly, national statistics are somewhat elusive in this area. Believe it or not, most large metropolitan areas don't keep a separate category for car-trunk murders.)

Assuming that the illicit drug business will be with us for a long time, and assuming that a natural by-product of the business is murder, we can only conclude that the problem of corpse disposal will also persist.

On behalf of all hard-working homicide cops and coroners, I'd like to make a public plea for a moratorium on car-trunk murders.

1. It's a lazy and unimaginative method of getting rid of dead drug dealers. Granted, a few old Mafia traditionalists still use car trunks, but only because New York has so little open space for regular dumping.

2. The car-trunk method is rude and very annoying to everyone else in the neighborhood. It is the homicidal equivalent of not picking up after one's self.

3. It ruins a perfectly good car. A dead body in the trunk destroys the resale value of any automobile, with the possible exception of a Ford Pinto.

At the risk of sounding heartless, I really don't give a hoot how many dope dealers are killed by other dope dealers, as long as the deed occurs in private and poses no threat to the innocent.

Dade County had its famous spate of public machine-gunnings a few years back, but lately the bad guys have been more considerate about where they settle their disputes. A common preference is the remote dirt-road executions that my police friends so sensitively refer to as "Krome Avenue Specials."