In Florida: The Rogues of Tabloid Valley

Unlike its ritzy neighbors, Palm Beach and Boca Raton, Lantana is a sleepy, unassuming little town on Florida's east coast. On closer inspection, however, the place has subtle marks of distinction. Like Dawn's News & Smoke Shop, where the daily selection of newspapers from around the world rivals that of any five-star hotel in London, New York City or Tokyo. The papers are bought and avidly read by a rambunctious colony of 200-plus British and Commonwealth expatriates who make their homes in Lantana and the surrounding area.

These are no ordinary immigrants to sunbaked Florida. They are top tabloid journalists from Fleet Street -- most of them Englishmen, Scots, Australians and Canadians -- lured to the U.S. by the inflated salaries at the Lantana- . based National Enquirer. (Starting pay for a reporter: $50,000 a year, with no experience required, except an apparent aptitude for spying on the celebrity species.) The Fleet Streeters began arriving in droves during the 1970s, enough of them to field cricket games, fill dart rooms and prompt some local eateries to include bangers and mash on their menus. Their presence in turn encouraged other tabloids to set up shop nearby -- the Globe, the National Examiner, the Sun and the Weekly World News (son of Enquirer, to the irreverent) -- transforming Lantana and its environs into the tabloid capital of America.

"The Brits were kids in a candy store," says Malcolm Balfour, a South African by birth and former Enquirer editor who now works out of Lantana for the New York Post and Bild Zeitung, a West German daily. "The Enquirer meant plastic cards that would take you to the best hotels in the world." Enquirer Owner Generoso Pope Jr. was never satisfied with his staff and fired reporters often. Nonetheless, seduced by the sunshine, many of the dismissed staffers stayed on in the Lantana area, working as free-lancers for other tabloids or mass-circulation dailies abroad. Some found lucrative opportunities outside the tabs. Mike Irish launched a real estate company; Len Stone founded Mr. L's Men's Boutique, a clothing store.

Come Friday nights, the boisterous gang congregates at the neighboring bars, the Hawaiian, the Whistle Stop or the Red Lion (a pseudo pub), to swap leg- pulling tales and practice one-upmanship by inventing sidesplitter headlines. Billy Burt, editor of the Examiner, proffers the classic example of HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR as the quintessence of a tabloid art form. Balfour opts for convolution: THE TOASTER POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL or, better, THE DOG THAT SHOT ITS OWNER. All voice serious concern that unimaginative headlines -- GIRL, 11, BECOMES GRANDMOTHER -- are replacing zany eye-catchers -- CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS USED MAP PREPARED BY SPACE ALIENS -- that reflect the best work of twisted minds. Ex-Fleet Streeter Sheila O'Donovan, known to Examiner readers as Lovelorn Columnist Sheela Wood, praises what she considers America's restrained tabloid sensibility. She quit a Hong Kong tabloid in protest after the editors put a large blob on the front page with the headline 20 CARS CRUSH CRAWLING CRIPPLE.

The most frequently gossiped about reporter in Tabloid Valley is Brian Hogan, a grizzled Aussie with Peter O'Toole eyes and a seemingly infinite ; capacity to imbibe. Once a renowned master of stunt journalism ("The reporter is the catalyst for the story," explains Hogan, straight-faced), he has been reincarnated as the editor of the Get Rich News, the valley's latest contribution to supermarket racks. Hogan's favorite sidesplitter is a simple story titled "X Rays Can Be Dangerous," about an X-ray machine with loose hinges that collapsed on a patient and killed him.

Balfour, once Hogan's editor at the Enquirer, asks him, "Remember when I sent you on the bread-and-water bit?" Hogan's ice-blue eyes glisten as he reinforces himself with a Guinness and recalls the caper: "I was a proper bum, with mud on me, crummy clothes, tacky shoes. In East Hampton ((N.Y.)), I went to a swank estate, and the maid pulled a gun on me the size of a howitzer." Balfour adds, "The White House turned him away. Gracie Mansion told him they didn't give out bread and water." Hogan whispers, "Only Burt Reynolds' dad, in Jupiter ((Fla.)), gave me a meal." Then there was the time Hogan donned a gorilla costume and checked into an empty cage at the Baltimore Zoo, with the help of authorities. Sufficiently sauced, Hogan nearly suffocated under the suit, but no one would pay attention to him until he hurled bananas at the crowd. Finally, a kid screamed, "Mommy, a blue-eyed gorilla!" and the crowd recognized that it was looking at no ordinary gorilla. The Enquirer photog went to work documenting the event.

Mike McDonough, a Lantana free-lancer, counters by recalling the night he watched an intrepid Brit scale the facade of a hotel in Freeport, the Bahamas, to bang on Howard Hughes' window. "That is the closest anyone ever came ((to Hughes))," he claims proudly. Ace Tab Photog Jimmy Leggett, a wiry Scot, remembers a "scheme to drill a hole down into Hughes' coffin to get a picture of his face." Another plot, in the '60s, involved renting a submarine to surprise Jackie Kennedy and little Caroline yachting in the Mediterranean. Leggett admits with a wink, "Neither plan made it past the second glass of ale." Balfour once sent a reporter to find paradise. The intrepid investigator rang up $10,000 on his expense account by visiting Tahiti, Hawaii, Uganda and Scandinavia. Finally, he found a remote island. Unfortunately, the paradise prohibited tourists, and the story was killed. "Once we had so many Brits on the road that three reporters, all sent by different editors, were bunked at the same first-class hotel in Hong Kong," recalls Burt.

When it comes to capers, Balfour cheerfully claims responsibility for THE DOG THAT REFUSED TO DIE. An abandoned dog in Hannibal, Mo., had survived being tied to a tree for three weeks by eating the bark. The local pound tried to put the dog down with a lethal injection. The animal was later found twitching in a heap of dead dogs, and the pound injected it again. When the Enquirer heard the story, it ran a contest to save the dog. "We brought him to Lantana and put him in a motel room, but he destroyed it by eating all the furniture," says Balfour.

"Coming from Fleet Street, we didn't think anything was extraordinary," laughs Burt. "It was the American journalists who thought we were unusual. Most of them are corrupted by journalism school into dreary, humorless utopians out to save the world. They are Puritans who should stay on Plymouth Rock. Ghosts? The occult? We don't say these stories are true; we just report them." The methods tabloids use to substantiate their sometimes unlikely stories are often ingenious. To prove UFOs have been frolicking in Wisconsin, reporters will wrangle a policeman or pilot to say "Sure." And in a pinch, some editors have been known to put an authority on a subject in Eastern Europe to elude verification.

The crowd agrees that Fleet Streeters, able to weasel their way into anything, are the best practitioners of stake-out journalism. "We don't take no for an answer," says David Wright, an Englishman who is the Enquirer's current ace reporter. Wright once posed as a florist's messenger, delivering roses to Megan Marshack, the staffer who had been with Nelson Rockefeller when he died and was holed up in her apartment trying to avoid the press. "I nearly had to buy the truck to get the setup right," he recalls. John Blackburn, an American who at one time was a rewrite man for the tabs, agrees that the "Brits have guts. They do things Americans wouldn't do, like taking a picture off a mantelpiece when there's been a death in the family." But Hogan defends his kind: "Listen, mate. When a world-class story in Monaco erupts, the Brits will still be sent. They charm the pants off people with their velvety lilts."

Many of the Fleet Streeters have created their own free-lance agencies so they can work from their home offices. "Celebs prefer phoners," says Neil Blincow, ex-columnist for the Enquirer, now owner and operator of the Palm Beach Press. "They don't have to get dolled up, and if the interview gets nasty, they can cut you off." Boutique Owner Stone marvels at his chums' newfound nesting instincts. "Boy, our crowd has matured," he says. "Thank God, on a full moon we still break out."