Carl Hiassen

[telebob x]

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- A city official known as "Mayor Loco." A con artist who performs 
plastic surgery on several patients before being unmasked. An extortionist 
who threatens housepets. A commissioner who sees pornography in a photo of 
vegetables.

Sound like characters from a Carl Hiassen novel?

Try characters from Carl Hiassen's real life.

These people -- and assorted real estate developers, convicted felons, 
government officials, Bible thumpers, and theme-park executives, some of 
whom are difficult to tell apart from the others -- make up the cast of 
characters in "Paradise Screwed" (Putnam), a collection of Hiassen's Miami 
Herald columns. Southern California may have a reputation as the flake 
capital of the United States, but based on Hiassen's work, the swampy 
flatlands of Florida seems to have oozed past the Golden State when it comes 
to offering a slough of greed, corruption, chicanery, and flat-out bizarre 
behavior.

What is it about a state that attracts such a motley crew?

"I can't explain it," the 48-year-old author of "Sick Puppy" and "Strip 
Tease" says in a phone interview from his home in the Florida Keys. "I think 
in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and 
to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story 
in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it 
must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something. It's very, very 
strange."

A voice of 'reasonable and proper disgust'
That strangeness has been good for Hiassen. He seldom has to work hard to 
come up with ideas for columns -- or novels, for that matter. Granted, there 
are those rare mornings when there are no indictments, no dead voters, and 
south Florida looks like "a normal place."

Most of the time, though, goofy events abound, and "It's like shooting fish 
in a barrel."


His take on the Sunshine State: "All paths of slime and disreputability seem 
to lead here."

Hiassen says the line with an overlay of jokiness, but underneath, he's dead 
serious. A Florida native, he's genuinely upset about the depletion and 
abuse of the state's natural resources, and has taken on Disney -- a bete 
noire he blames for a host of ills -- in both his columns and a book-length 
essay, "Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World."

Hiassen makes no apologies for his aggressive tone.

"By and large, (the topics are) something that has now gotten the attention 
of the general media down here, but nobody is coming out and saying the 
obvious thing -- (like) 'the guy's a crook,'" he says. "That's where I come 
in. You have to have some voice of reasonable and proper disgust over these 
things. ... That's the great thing about having your own column. You can be 
irreverent when everyone else is trying to be Peter Jennings."

He credits luminaries such as Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko and Murray Kempton 
as influences. From them, he learned not to be afraid and to say exactly 
what he's thinking, Hiassen says.

"When you're given a newspaper column, you're not being paid to sit on a 
fence and scratch your chin and say 'On the one hand this' and 'On the other 
hand that,'" he says. "You're getting paid for your opinion. So don't be a 
candy-ass about it: What do you think?"

An 'honor and privilege'
Hiassen still writes two columns a week for the Herald. The rest of the 
time, he's working on a book, he says.

He had help going through the 15 years' worth that make up "Paradise 
Screwed." A friend at the University of Florida, Diane Stevenson -- she'd 
edited a previous collection of Hiassen's work -- did the initial culling, 
and then the two of them selected the 200 or so pieces for the book.

Re-reading the columns was enlightening, he says.

"Some of the lowlifes (I wrote about) are still skulking around. They're 
just as sleazy as I predicted," Hiassen says, noting that he once worried 
that he was too harsh on some people. No longer. "I should have drop-kicked 
some of these people another 10 yards."

In some cases, he gets that chance in his novels. His new one, "Basket 
Case," is due in January, and this time he takes on the hand that feeds him 
-- corporate media. "I won't be making any friends in the corporate suites," 
he says.

By now, Hiassen could easily retire from newspapers and write his novels. 
Most of his works have been bestsellers, and Hollywood has snapped up a 
couple, too.

Sure, Hiassen says, he's pondered giving up the life of an ink-stained 
wretch, but that's all.

"Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that 
there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed," he says. "And what 
better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, 
because you're on the front lines. ... (I) have this tremendous honor and 
privilege and this forum of writing a column, and I'm pretty lucky because I 
work for a darn good newspaper, and by and large they leave me alone.

"When that day comes (that it's time to go), I'll be happy to step aside," 
he adds. "But right now, I still get off a good one now and then, and 
there's so much that needs to be written about."


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