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In January 2003, curators at the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela discovered that a 1925 Henri Matisse painting, worth $3 million, called Odalisque in Red Pants had been stolen and swapped with a forgery—at least three years earlier.On Tuesday, Pedro Antonio Marcuello of Miami and María Martha Ornelas, recently arrived from Mexico City, met with buyers at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel who’d agreed to purchase the long-missing painting for $740,000. Ornelas revealed the Matisse rolled in a tube she’d traveled with and the buyers revealed themselves to be undercover FBI agents.Art Basel put Miami on the art world map. The problem with being on the map, however, is that, well, you’re on the map. Before Basel Miami began ten years ago, this might have been an unlikely location to fence fine art. In Florida, if you bring us the industry, we’ll bring you the associated scam.This is why we can’t have nice things.Welcome to This Week in Florida.- Prior to last year’s crackdown, Broward was the “pill mill” capital of the world. The county had more pill mills than McDonald’s (seriously). Last weekend, the Broward Sheriff’s Office unveiled a program for residents to trade in their prescription meds for gift cards. In promoting the event, their website revealed that between June 2010 and May 2011, 79 percent of overdose deaths in the county were from prescription drugs. Eighty-five percent of those were accidental.
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