Word: buddings
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...cannabis, but to a more potent effect. France, Germany and Austria have recently outlawed the sale of Spice, and the U.K. now plans to ban not just that specific cannabis substitute but all synthetic cannabinoids - a class of designer drugs structurally resembling cannabis - hoping to nip offshoots in the bud. (See pictures of stoner cinema...
Which makes the sheriff more inclined to believe that Gonzalez - who is charged with shooting Byrd "Bud" Billings and his wife Melanie in their spacious home as he and six others allegedly robbed it the night of July 9 - was hired to commit the murder by resentful local business rivals. In police documents released this week, Gonzalez says one used-car dealer, Henry "Cab" Tice, told him that he and other dealers wanted the 66-year-old Billings "whacked" and asked him to do the job. (Gonzalez claims he refused - although he boasted to police, without offering details, that...
Tice denies involvement in any conspiracy, insisting to a Pensacola television station this week that he "never wanted any harm to come to Bud or Melanie." Still, Morgan says Tice and "three or four other people" remain "persons of interest" in the investigation. Tice, 63, a former business partner of Billings, has acknowledged that he "hated Billings" and that they had a rancorous falling out over thousands of dollars Tice owed Billings' loan company, Worldco. (Tice, in fact, has been charged with grand theft after Billings turned him in last year for allegedly writing Worldco $17,000 in bounced checks...
...just did not like Billings at all" and who described the deceased as a loan shark. But the sheriff believes "the pieces are coming together." Billings, like his competitors, many of whom owed him money, inhabited a Florida panhandle business world that resembled a tawdry cable TV drama series. "Bud Billings was a very hard-nosed, unyielding businessman because he had to be," Morgan says. "He was in a high-risk business, loaning money to the kind of people who can't get it anywhere else...
Still, Morgan says he doesn't buy into the idea "that Bud Billings brought this on himself." He points to the fact that Bud and Melanie "opened their home and fortunes" to their adopted brood as proof of their charitable side. But even that admirable domestic picture has come under scrutiny in the murder's wake: Billings, who was arrested in 1989 for adoption fraud, tried earlier this decade to copyright his adopted children's names in a bizarre scheme to extract money from Florida's Department of Children & Family Services. He had also recently thrown two of his teen...