Oh, the delicious irony
Monday, January 12, 2009:
Art Nadel prepared to flea Florida by moving massive quantities of money that does not belong to him into private accounts.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009:
Art Nadel disappeared.

Friday, January 16, 2009:
News broke on CNBC that Nadel and a whole lotta cash are both missing. Within hours, the news was all over TV and the internet. The first mention of the story by the Gondolier or their parent company's web site wouldn't come until Wednesday, January 21.

In between those dates?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009:
On the day before Nadel started his excessively expensive vacation, his attorneys, Jeff and E.G. 'Dan' Boone, angrily and desperately tried to get council to agree to let Nadel build two hangars at Nadel's Venice Jet Center.

The Venice Jet Center -- that's the same building that formerly housed Huffman Aviation, the notorious flight school that trained Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah how to fly into buildings and such. Thus, for the second time this decade, an otherwise nondescript building at the Venice Airport has become a major crime scene of national and international importance.

This time, the Boones are embarrassingly involved.

I don't care who ya are, that there's funny.

Boones try to blindfold council, council tries to play Pin The Tail On The Boone, Boones cheat and keep moving around the room
In the video clip at the bottom of this page, Jeff Boone tried to convince council that the right to build the hangars has been pre-negotiated into the lease that had been signed by Nadel two years ago, the lease that had created The Venice Jet Center. Councilwoman Sue Lang and Mayor Ed Martin then asked Boone to read aloud the section that states exactly that.

Jeff couldn't find it, so he deferred to his father to answer the question. E.G. ' Dan' Boone then took the microphone, fumbled with his papers a bit, danced around the subject, got nasty with Lang, and never once read the section of the lease that supposedly guarantees Nadel the right to build the hangars.

Jeff Boone followed up on this act by stating that all of his father's bluster shows that the right to build the hangars is clearly already built into the lease.

That's one heck of a tap-dance.

Sue Lang countered that council may allow Nadel to build the hangars, but that it will require a bit of renegotiating of the lease as the lease allows for the possibility to build hangars at a later date if the city approves, but that's a far cry from a guarantee that the right to build them was a pre-negotiated clause.

Dan Boone promptly exploded like a kid in a retail candy aisle after his mother has told him that he can't have any. Boone is a testy little bugger when you try to pin him down on specifics, especially when he thinks he won't get his way.

Nadel couldn't make the meeting, as he was busy elsewhere preparing to defraud everyone who had ever written a check to him. However his second-in-command, Roger Jernigan, was there. That's Jernigan sitting behind the senior Boone in the video as Boone is trying to eviscerate Sue Lang. Shortly after Nadel's disappearance, the Boones claimed that they had little to do with Nadel, that Jernigan was mostly the attorneys' contact person. This was, no doubt, an attempt to distance themselves from Nadel and give the appearance that they only do direct business with reputable people. People like Roger Jernigan..... Hold that thought.....

Let's talk about Jernigan for a moment. Jernigan is a defrocked Sarasota Sheriff's deputy, the department's ex-helicopter pilot who had been stationed at Venice Municipal Airport. Jernigan was under internal investigation a couple of years back for a number of unlogged flights when the investigators discovered that he had submitted forged college transcripts in order to get a promotion to sergeant. Jernigan was fired (or allowed to resign, to be technically correct), but not before agreeing to pay restitution back to the department for the increased money that came his way due to the bogus bump in rank. Later, Sheriff Bill Balkwill would come under fire for accepting gifts from a health care provider company that would land a sweetheart deal with the county jail, thus tainting the entire department with the smell of graft. As for Jernigan? You gotta be pretty bad to get fired for corruption from what turned out to be one of the most corrupt law enforcement administrations in the state. The Sheriff's Office never finished their investigation into Jernigan's unlogged flight miles, leaving the rest of us to wonder: what the heck was he doing with a Sheriff's helicopter spending so much undocumented time flying over the Gulf of Mexico?

But I digress. Here's Dan and Jeff, in all their dog-and-pony show glory, trying to put one over on council at the January 13 meeting. Unsuccessfully. Thank God.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.