South Florida’s weird crimes featured in new TV series

WLRN recently launched a series of fiveminute shorts that highlight some of South Florida’s weird and infamous true crimes.

The episodes, called “South Florida Crime to Crime” air at 8:50 p.m. Tuesdays following the BBC crime series “Death in Paradise” on Ch. 17.

The shorts are inspired by the South Florida Crime Museum, a tourist spot in Lauderdale-bythe-Sea that was opened by Fort Lauderdale attorney and crime history buff Chris Mancini in 2017.

The museum, which Mancini is expanding to another location soon, features collectibles from the early 1900s to the late 1990s that Mancini has accumulated through the years from friends in law enforcement. (His items range from chain cuffs and police riot gear to even an old Florida electric chair.)

Mancini is featured in the shorts talking about the crimes. The series’ next episode, “Predictions of An Assassination,” airs Sept. 25. That segment will look at how, days before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, “an undercover Miami police informant met with a right wing radical racist, Joseph Milteer in a downtown Miami Hotel where he predicted the whole conspiracy in perfect detail,” according to WLRN.

Viewers will be able to listen to excerpts of the surveillance tapes.

The Oct. 2 episode, “The 305 Goes 007,” looks at how South Florida has been a haven for spies since World War II. And the following week, the show will explore a 1950’s theft ring that involved female employees at Miami’s former Southern Bell Telephone Company, who stashed rolls of quarters in their bras in the counting room. The case was known in the news as “Case of The Clinking Brassieres.”

The shorts may also run on WLRN Radio in the near future.