Armed with only a red plastic stapler, Ed Palino sits in his car outside a convenience store in Sarasota's Newtown district. Friday is the main distribution day for the Bradenton resident, his busiest of the week. He just needs a few more seconds before he's ready to deliver his papers.
"Actually, this stapling part does slow me up a lot," he says, reaching into the backseat of his white Pontiac Grand Prix. It's covered, flooded, with reams of newsprint. "I like to get it done the night before."
He has to get 100 copies stapled shut before he can unload them at his latest drop-off spot, the Express Grocery in Sarasota. The store's owner, like those at gas stations and convenience stores throughout Sarasota and Manatee counties, asked for the extra step. He was tired of customers devouring the thing before they ever made it to the cashier.
The stapling's tedious. But at the rate he's going, Palino should be able to hire someone to do it for him soon enough.
Along with Tampa Bay's Cellmates and Orlando's JAIL, Palino's Gotch-ya! is part of the fastest-growing media trend in Florida. Each issue lifts a week's worth of mugshots — some of the faces jaded, some silly, some downright sketchy — from local Sheriffs' websites. Doctors and teachers, grocery baggers and the old lady down the street — they're all here, pictured at their worst moments.
Palino, a 37-year-old with close-cropped hair and a grunge-rock goatee, grabs another copy and readies the stapler yet again. He knows that there's entertainment value to his paper — "Last week's, I called it my 'Grill-Off,'" he says. "Three guys, across the front, showing their grill. I mean, literally showing their grill!" — but for him, Gotch-ya! plays a more important role. Like publishers in Orlando and Tampa, he says the paper is a crime prevention tool.
And just a few months into its existence, Gotch-ya! has bail-related advertisers, neighborhood watch programs and reps from the Manatee Sheriff's Office singing its praises. It's helping to catch wanted criminals, the argument goes, and informing communities about just who might be lurking within. That's the kind of community-policing mission Palino wants to promote: neighbors helping neighbors.
But where some see justice, others see exploitation. Given the unsettling fact that the faces represent the accused, not the convicted, whether papers like Gotch-ya! or Cellmates make neighborhoods safer is unclear. Whom they're helping is even more ambiguous. Still, argues Palino, even if his paper's sole purpose is to scare citizens into following the law, Gotch-ya! has a certain usefulness.
"It's all about the repercussions to me," he says, as he's about to head into Express to deliver the papers he's stapled.
Palino speaks from experience: Currently on probation after a slew of arrests dating back to 2005, the area's greenest newspaper mogul has had his share of run-ins with the law.
But he's never had his own mugshot plastered on the cover of a newspaper.
Mugshots have long been national public record under the Freedom of Information Act. But until relatively recently, they were still out of easy reach for most people, tucked away in police databases. Then the Internet came along, followed by the Electronic Freedom of Information Act in 1996, and a slew of online records became accessible to anyone with a mouse and a landline.
Palino pulls mugshots from the Sarasota County Sheriff's website, which began posting them in mid-2001. The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office began posting booking photos in 2005, and Hillsborough's office has been doing so for about six or seven years, said a spokesperson.
As police departments across the country modernized their resources in the late '90s, a crop of e-zines began publishing celebrity mugshots. The Smoking Gun, established in 1997 by a pair of former Village Voice reporters and since sold to Court TV, continues to expand its exhaustive database of celebrity mugs featuring the likes of Paris Hilton, Marilyn Manson and Lindsay Lohan. More recently, mugshots.com started displaying the pre-prison portraits of artists and athletes, infamous gangsters and the FBI's most wanted.
And a little over a year ago, an Orlando entrepreneur figured out a different way to cash in.
Hoping to bring the craze out of Hollywood and into the 'hood, Devin James launched his $1 weekly newspaper, JAIL, in December 2006. He obtained Orange County arrest reports and trolled online police records — missing persons, sex offenders, standard mugshots — and watched his enterprise blossom into a runaway empire. As James told the Associated Press, within four months he'd already upped JAIL's circulation to 8,000 copies per week and started distributing to 175 locations in three counties.
Word of his success traveled fast. Soon, there were several papers in Tampa Bay, all following James' lead.
"This thing sells!" says St. Petersburg resident Dwayne Mayo, publisher of Cellmates. After starting the weekly in Pinellas County at the end of May (see sidebar this page), the former Bayfront Medical Center security guard watched circulation sprout "from 2,500 to almost 10,000 in a matter of weeks." Now he has four editions in place — and a team of hired contractors to deliver each one for him.
"I started out being the whole deal, the whole kit 'n' kaboodle," says Mayo. "Then it got so big I couldn't do it all myself."
Across the Skyway, Ed Palino needed some help himself.
In December 2005, Palino was the 35-year-old dockmaster for Perico Harbor Marina in Bradenton. He was also reeling from a rocky divorce.
Following a late night spent alone at a strip club — he'd been drinking a lot, he says, "because I was upset with the world" — he was discovered passed out in his car about a block away, the engine still running. The Bradenton police promptly slapped him with a DUI.
While he was getting booked, officers searched his car — and surfaced with marijuana.
A year's probation followed, plus a revoked driver's license and bus rides "downtown every day from work." Depressed, Palino was living in a houseboat in the Marina. Soon he was doing cocaine.
"At first it was nice and slow," he recalls. "Then it just got to the point where I was doing it all the time."
As he watched his boat become "a party spot," Palino also watched his waistline shrink. By the fall of 2006, he'd lost 35 pounds, failed six out of eight drug tests and stopped reporting to his probation officer. On Feb. 4, 2007, Super Bowl Sunday, officers found him holed up in a Bradenton motel with more than 20 grams of marijuana. In anticipation of a May court date, he got three months of supervised release.
"I got somebody who did listen," he says, describing the officer assigned to look after him before his court appearance. "I got help as far as drug counseling, and I worked out some of the problems of my life." Palino claims he's been drug free since February. Last month, his probation sentence was reduced by nearly half a year.
"There's a lot of people who don't want help, but there's a lot of people who do want help," he says. "And they just need a point in the right direction."
And that's the role he envisions for his paper.
"This is the real world," he says, "and [Gotch-ya!] might help, too. It's not only that you get arrested; but now you're gonna be put in this magazine, and people don't want to be seen like that.
"To me, it was kind of like something clicked in the brain — 'It's time to grow up.' And maybe if you see yourself in there, it's gonna click in your brain — 'It's time to grow up.' Because half the battle is admitting you did something wrong."
It was Palino's brother George who first hatched the idea. The owner of a delivery service, the 47-year-old father of three had delivered copies of Cellmates to Mayo in Pinellas. He knew it could work in Sarasota and talked his recovering brother into going in on a little family investment. "Once I told him, 'We're gonna do this,' it went rather quickly," says George.
They called their company Countertop Publishing. George put up the money and worked a connection at the Bradenton Herald for printing, leaving Ed to manage the paper's content.
Palino generally starts the assembly process early. Issues go to the Herald for printing on Tuesday morning for a Thursday-Friday delivery, so he tries to corral the various portraits from the sheriff's website each day they're published, leaving the weekend's worth for a Monday morning crunch.
Editing is done at Gotch-ya! headquarters — namely, Palino's parents' house in Bradenton, where he's been shacking up the last few months.
"I'm learning more and more every week," he says. He puts the paper together in his bedroom, usually dressed down to socks and shorts and always with an imposing Jimi Hendrix poster staring out from the wall above his desk. "I'm basically teaching myself as I go." And while Palino still types with two fingers on his new HP desktop and still calls friends in law enforcement for translations or advice, Gotch-ya! has come a long way from the first, 16-page attempt published on Oct. 4.
"If you look at the first issue compared to now's, it's so much better," he says. "I mean, everything's more aligned, everything's crisper."
And it's not just mugshots anymore. The latest issues have included a page of roughly 10 "Area Most Wanted" contributed by Manatee County Crime Stoppers, a crime prevention team the editor befriended around the time of his paper's inception; two pages of "most wanted" ads from Big Johnson Bail Bonds, a bondsmen company serving both Sarasota and Manatee counties; a page of local sexual offenders designated by Palino as "the most disgusting."
The formula is working. Since October, the paper has become the fastest-selling publication on the racks, duplicating the kind of success of JAIL and Cellmates by more than quadrupling its circulation in three months and increasing its distribution points from three stores to 61.
"Gotch-ya! targets the people that buy it," explains Jayston Graham, vice president of Big Johnson. "As far as apprehending our most-wanted, [it's] in all the right places."
Since Big Johnson started buying ads two months ago, it has become one of Gotch-ya!'s most enthusiastic backers. While the company has collaborated with other papers in the past — Big Johnson has advertised in the Bradenton Herald — Graham claims Palino's weekly, with its aggressive distribution tactics, is "a heck of a whole lot better." He adds that they've even gotten a few tips off of it.
"This magazine is so popular, they're keeping it in the back of deputy cars," says Graham. "I think eventually, it's gonna be unbelievable."
When Palino walks into Express with the latest edition, he's greeted like mainstream media — the major news source.
"Let's see the famous people in there," says one Express Grocery cashier to Palino.
Now done stapling, the newspaper mogul has just handed over his latest batch — and the cashier is all smiles behind the counter. He's almost out of the last issue, he says, and customers have been bugging him for days to get the next one.
"Those guys down the street think it's a glamour magazine," Palino says wryly. "They walk down the street, saying 'You seen me in the magazine this week?'"
"They're happy to be there," the cashier says. Hunched over the counter, his nose buried in Issue 17 of Gotch-ya!, he points to faces as though picking players for some delinquent all-star team.
He tallies 11 on one page and keeps counting. He stops when he reaches Number 31.
"Shit! What he did?"
"A little bit of everything," says Palino, peering in for a closer look at the last face. "Got beat up, too."
"I just saw him, two days ago, three days ago."
It's those connections that have spurred Gotch-ya!'s success and forced shop owners like Express' Bashar Itraish to order more copies. "People are curious about which of their friends and relatives are in it," he says. Itraish started with 25; now he buys 300 per week for his three stores.
While he recognizes the paper's "informational" potential for getting the dirt on some customers — "You get to know them by their real names," Itraish quips — the more common response seems to reflect Gotch-ya!'s entertainment value. And so far, Itraish says he's personally received no adverse reactions from customers. "They become a celebrity more than anything else."
The picture of John Fitzgerald Robinson featured on the front page of Gotch-ya!'s second issue doesn't look like someone apprehended merely for "trespassing after warning," as his booking description reads. Jaw clenched, his whole mug puckered into a scowl, Robinson stares straight back at the lens, a menacing mix of confrontation, rage and hurt. If not the chilliest, his is by far the cover's most intimidating face.
Meet Robinson on a cold January day, though, and the 43-year-old Newtown resident looks distinctly different. Currently homeless, Robinson still suffers from the rheumatoid arthritis he had when he was 5. Today, he's confined to a wheelchair and wrapped in a tattered jacket and winter hat. Moore's Grocery, one of the paper's hottest distribution points, sits a block away, a police car parked across the street.
"That whole thing is an insult," he says. "It made me seem bad to my friends. All I did was trespassing and asking for money to survive — now the whole neighborhood sees me like a piece of trash!"
Following numerous trespassing charges, all misdemeanors, Robinson was nabbed by the police again on Oct. 7 and locked up.
After 30 days, he was back on the street, ready to use the same excuse he had before: "I was on vacation." But this time, folks weren't buying it — they'd seen his face on the cover weeks before. People teased him, he says, and he felt ashamed that "the insulting stuff you don't want people to know" was spread before he got home to defend himself.
"I live on the street," says Robinson. "That's why I said I can't have them be disrespecting me."
And he's not sure he'll earn back his reputation anytime soon.
"Once they say something in the 'hood," he says, "it sticks."
"I think they're blowing a little smoke here," says Larry Lain, of the claim by Palino and other publishers that their papers help communities police themselves.
A self-described "media historian," the University of Dayton communications professor spent much of his early academic career researching how certain newspaper images might affect the reader — and devoted special attention to the psychological impact of mugshots.
In his eyes, Gotch-ya!'s function can't be entirely altruistic. "Gotch-ya! is in the business to make a buck," he says. They're printing the mugshots "for the sensational value, for the gossip."
Of course, Gotch-ya! isn't the first newspaper to publish mugshots. And in most cases, Lain argues, the purpose of featuring either regular crime blotters or mugshots is simply to manufacture intrigue. "There's a lot of literature that shows the ways the media shape our perception of the world," he says. "We want to think we live in a dangerous world, and so we're gonna seek out things that confirm our perceptions."
Some experts in neighborhood law enforcement believe the "dangerous world" could be handled in other ways.
"There are more effective ways to do community policing than sharing the mugshots," says Michelle Boykins. According to the spokeswoman for the National Crime Prevention Council, papers like Gotch-ya! have certainly been of use to law enforcement officials as they attempt to apprehend people, with features like Crime Stoppers' "Area Most Wanted" ads tipping them off.
They're just missing a few key "problem solving" tactics.
"When you're just dealing with who's committed the crime," Boykins says, "you haven't talked about how to solve it. In any community [policing] meeting, you don't talk about crime and who did it; you talk about how to prevent crime."
To improve its effectiveness, she thinks the paper would have to take on more of that responsibility.
"I would hope they go a little bit further as they refine the newspaper in terms of dealing with prevention and problem-solving," she says.
But for Palino, who has now printed nearly 20 issues and continues to increase circulation, responsibility lies with the people who show up in his paper. He hopes that with enough exposure, wanted or unwanted, they'll eventually learn from their mistakes.
"They've probably been warned a number of times, and I don't know what to tell them," he says. "You can't always feel sorry for them, either. I mean —"
He trails off for a moment. "Oh, that didn't come out right. But I mean, everybody's in there no matter what, basically. Some of them are very minimal charges — and who knows what the circumstances are."
Palino's disinterest in circumstances comes through in Gotch-ya!: From front cover to back, the paper is filled with Sarasota citizens. It doesn't matter if you were arrested in the city's bleakest, most crime-infested neighborhood or out on the beach — if you show up on the sheriff's website, chances are you'll make it to print. And if you do, it will be without any mention of what led to the charges.
But that doesn't mean the circumstances don't exist.
To this day, 22-year-old Aaron Eckardt isn't aware his face was among those featured in Issue 15. He might not be able to comment on what precipitated his "Driving While License Suspended" arrest, either.
He's too busy struggling to get a handle on his schizophrenia, says his father over the phone. As a byproduct of the legal guardianship his parents were forced to reclaim in court last year, Eckardt's license had been revoked. According to the sheriff's report, he knew he shouldn't have been behind the wheel, but didn't care. "I don't think it's right," the arresting officer remembered him saying. "So I was driving anyway."
"Here's a kid that's just trying to survive and — I don't know, whatever they do, posting his picture, it isn't gonna help him," says Eric Eckhardt. Bitterness, a sad kind of anger, dulls his voice.
Palino didn't know Aaron Eckardt was schizophrenic, but when he has been aware of an arrestee's backstory, circumstances became more important: He has opted not to put "a couple" people he knows into the paper. If he'd known about a case like Aaron's — those whose offenses were hardly capital and caused, perhaps, by medical circumstances — might he have offered the same treatment?
The editor hopes, ultimately, that appearing in Gotch-ya! will spur change in wayward people's lives. But what of those that don't need the paper to play that role?
The day Sarasota resident Sarah Kirmo was released from a weekend spent in jail for a DUI offense was the same day she left for Boca Raton, where she's still in treatment for alcoholism. The DUI was, she says, the second she'd received in 10 years. And when her friends told her the following week that her blonde mug had been selected for the cover, she felt more demoralized than rescued.
"I'm a little pissed about the whole situation," says the 28-year-old, corresponding from recovery housing. "No, it's just embarrassment. It's just really embarrassing."
Palino, too, was able to turn his life around without the Gotch-ya! treatment. He never had his face put in a newspaper — he credits his recovery to a probation officer, not to public shaming.
If Palino slipped up again, would his mugshot end up in the paper? Frankly, he's not sure. Maybe, he says, maybe not. "I don't think it would tick me off," is the closest he comes to an answer.
But as Gotch-ya! keeps growing, as people continue to wait outside grocery stores for the latest issue, as Palino spends more and more time stapling, perhaps these questions are irrelevant to the publishing sensation. They're not the ones he needs to ask.
"Everybody's got different reasons for looking at it," says Palino. "But as long as everyone wants to look at it, it's good."
Read about Tampa Bay's Cellmates publisher Dwayne Mayo here.
