They don’t look like the kind of people who come down to the Oaks, he thought, familiar from somewhere. The Greek restaurant. He drank off the rest of his strong sweet coffee while it was still warm. He snapped his fingers twice to get the waitress’s attention—a very local custom—and shook a pseudo-Camel out of its package. He lit it with a wooden match and got a sudden rush of THC. Real tobacco must have been something.
He had been staring for a half hour at the image of the Gainesville Sun for 24 November 1963, the last time a president had been assassinated. Maybe getting back to work would cut through the feelings of despair and helplessness. He had gotten up to the year before the year he was born.
He tried to ignore the old-fashioned but seductive Dave Brubeck chordings and rhythms, and toggled through the two old newspaper articles that were relevant to this part:
Local government found itself in a condition beyond chaos when, in the fall of 2022, the mayor, two city commissioners, and the entire county commission wound up in jail for violating a cluster of real-estate laws, mostly about zoning and eminent domain—but really about bribery on a stunning scale. The result of their machinations, the Alachua/Archer monorail, changed Gainesville irreversibly, in ways that not everybody agreed were bad.
City revenues declined as industries moved north to Alachua and south to Archer, for cheap real estate and tax relief. But the net result was to give the city back to the university, making it again the college town it had been for most of the twentieth century.
There was a short but intense crime wave in 2023, which led to a five-year suspension of the fraternity system at UF, when it was discovered that four of the fraternities had aligned themselves with individual street gangs. They would pinpoint lucrative robbing sites and then help the boys hide and “fence” the stolen goods. In exchange, they took a percentage of the ill-gotten gains, and bought alcohol for the boys (at the time, the drinking age in Florida was twenty-one), as well as illegal ammunition, which is what led to the discovery. The federal program of “tagging” ammunition had begun secretly, and the so-called Gunfight at the Gainesville Garage was one of the first times it had been used as evidence.
Two policemen and five members of a gang called the Hairballs died in the altercation, and the gang’s ammunition was traced to a member of the Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity, who, under interrogation, detailed the depth and breadth of the fraternity’s involvement with the gang, and implicated the three other fraternities…