A nice crowd of about 600 gathered at the Gulfstream Race Track near Ft. Lauderdale Wednesday night to hear me speak. Drawn by a promotion by my local radio affiliate, 850 WTFL, they were fans. Indeed many were intimately familiar with my decades of work on television. Transplanted New Yorkers who relocated to the Sunshine State to avoid winter and high taxes, many had followed me since the Eyewitness News days of the 1970's, or the skinhead brawl and 'Al Capone's Vault' debacles of the 1980's.

The initial reports of the crime was hideous and unbelievable, three teenage sex slaves held shackled and imprisoned apparently by three grubby, seedy, horribly abusive middle-aged brothers. The kidnapping and decade-long captivity of those young women in a boarded up hell house in Cleveland is bad enough. How could they rob those girls of their freedom, their youth and this substantial hunk of their lives?

At a speech delivered to an audience of cops at Police Headquarters this week, outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a man on fire. He blasted critics of the NYPD's controversial stop and frisk policy, including the various Democratic candidates who want his job. With the election just six months away, several of the mayoral hopefuls seem to be basing their entire campaigns on a wholesale overhaul of the policy that allows cops to pat down potential suspects.

The 11 million undocumented living among us cannot get a break. Two weeks ago, they were bursting with optimism, freedom beckoned, liberation from their tense, sometimes terrifying existence hiding in shadows dodging immigration authorities. Then, almost before the ink was dry on the press release announcing the "Gang of Eight’s" long-awaited compromise to legalize their status and let the sunshine in, the Boston bombings changed the conversation.

The week started ugly, with Monday's Boston Marathon massacre. Things didn't get much better. Just as the airwaves filled with those heart-wrenching images of torn and bleeding runners and spectators and conflicting reports about whether they had a suspect in custody, we got news of the U.S. Capitol being evacuated in the face of an onslaught of poison pen letters to the president and key senators sent by a guy who worked improbably as an Elvis impersonator.