Word: roofer
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...they rebuild homes wrecked by Hurricane Andrew. By night they drink, fight, smoke crack and sometimes kill. In the squalid roadside camps they call home, shotguns and 9-mm pistols abound, as do the tools of their trade: roofing knives. In one case a roofer's throat was cut so deeply he was nearly decapitated. In another a roofer shot and stabbed a drifter 100 times. Soldiers who patrolled the area say they saw a roofer bite off another man's ear, then spit...
...Hell is the most notorious encampment. About 150 people live there, sleeping in battered trucks, under leaky plastic tarps, in tents pitched by piles of gelatinous garbage and broken beer bottles. The men wash in a , contaminated canal nearby, some lathering up naked by the roadside. Police found a roofer shot in the face and left to die within yards of the camp; a dead body was found floating in a canal not far away. "The price of life around here is less than a 12-pack of beer," says Estes, a 34-year-old woman from Indiana who lives...
...sheer size of South Florida's devastation makes the area an ideal place to hide from the law. Last month police picked up an escaped child rapist working as a roofer. Many workers admit they don't want to give their names to reporters for fear of tipping off police back home. One Atlanta roofer confided that he came to hide from courts seeking 12 years' worth of child support. "It's a good place," he said, "to make money without anybody asking a lot of questions...
...roofers claim they are getting a raw deal from the locals. "There are plenty of good guys down here working," says Michigan roofer Chester Steele, a Vietnam veteran who serves as unofficial mayor and peace enforcer in Camp Hell. He contends that workers get ripped off by trailer parks (typical charge: $800 a month for a 1950s-era trailer) and hotels ($55 a day for a room without TV or hot water). Contractors regularly skip out on them, leaving them without...
Anthony Knighton has only vague memories of beatings by his father, a roofer who now lives in Deerfield Beach. His sharpest memories of childhood are of neglect more than fear. After his mother died when he was three, Knighton, the youngest of six children, shuttled among various relatives in Georgia and Florida. By the time he was 15, he had moved 30 times. "It seemed like nobody cared about me," he says, "so I guessed I had to do for myself." Joyce Moore, 27, a cousin who lives in Delray Beach, Florida, recalls that "people would say he could come...