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Coffee Talk (Tampa)
Nice investment
By our estimates, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Donnie Abraham and his wife, Tunisia, profited handsomely from the recent sale of a home in Odessa's Lake Alice Estates.
The couple sold the 9,297-square-foot house earlier this month for $2.8 million to Erick Maillard. The sale follows Abraham's decision this summer to retire after 10 years in the National Football League. He spent the first six years of his professional gridiron career with the Bucs and the last four with the New York Jets.
Abraham and his wife purchased the lot at 17925 Spencer Road in the spring of 1999 for $225,000. Three months later, they borrowed $865,000 from SunTrust Bank to build the house, for an investment of nearly $1.1 million.
Excluding proceeds from refinancing, it appears the Abrahams walked out with a pre-tax profit of about $1.7 million.
Witness to evil
As Saddam Hussein's trial started Wednesday, Greg Kehoe was in New York, far from Iraq. But the Tampa lawyer's mark must have been felt in the courtroom.
Kehoe, a former assistant U.S. attorney who previously investigated Bosnian war crimes, served as the regime crimes adviser in Baghdad for nearly a year. He and his international staff investigated Hussein's alleged crimes. Their work included the exhuming of mass graves with the corpses of women and children killed at the dictator's direction.
Some were taken from their homes in the middle of night, led to their execution. They had no trial, no hearing. Their crime? Some were killed for telling a joke about Hussein, Kehoe told the St. Petersburg Bar Association earlier this year.
Kehoe, now a partner at James, Hoyer, Newcomer & Smiljanich PA, was appointed to the Iraqi position by former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
In March, Kehoe told the late Peter Jennings of ABC News: "I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen women and children executed, defenseless people executed in this fashion. I mean, look at a woman holding a 2-year-old child with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. I can't find any reason that would justify that."
Fifth Third on the Block?
Pity Southern Exchange Bank's customers in the Tampa Bay area. We mean First National Bank of Florida customers. Check that, they're Fifth Third Bank customers now.
For the fourth time in less than three years, this confused bunch could be called somebody else's customers.
Bank analysts are asking: Is Fifth Third in play?
One of them is the Bay area's own Richard X. Bove, who follows the industry for Punk Ziegel & Co. Fifth Third Bancorp had a poor third quarter. The bank's Cincinnati-based parent missed Bove's earnings estimate by a penny a share. The company's 71 cents a share in the third quarter was four cents below its showing in the second quarter.
Without much good news to impart, Fifth Third's conference call was "more sober than the usual," says Bove.
All of which leads some industry observers to believe Wells Fargo & Co. or U.S. Bancorp could be moving in to take over Fifth Third.
Bove knocks down that speculation as quickly as it has been raised. Wells Fargo prefers non-bank financial services concerns right now and U.S. Bancorp publicly denies any interest in swallowing a big bank at this time, according to Bove.
Instead, expect Fifth Third to redouble its push for deposit growth in Florida, particularly in those markets inherited from First National Bank of Florida.
"Since I live in Tampa Bay, one of the markets the company has targeted, I can attest first hand that Fifth Third is blitzing this market," Bove writes in a recent report. "Anecdotally, it seems that the company advertises more on television than all of the banks in this market combined."
For the record, Bove resides in Pinellas Park - and, pending any near-term hurricane landfalls, on dry ground.
Early Grinch
Count Dave Anderson among those who think retailers aren't going to ring in the new year by ringing up many sales during the holidays.
The chief investment officer at Gold Banc Corp.'s trust subsidiary says: "The American consumer, at which we have steadfastly marveled, may finally have become 'tapped out.'"
Personal debt, including mortgages, has more than doubled since 2001 and continued Federal Reserve Bank hikes in short-term interest rates should make repaying some of those obligations costlier.
Throw in higher energy prices, steeper minimum monthly payments required by credit card issuers and the paltry savings of Americans, and Anderson has a prediction in his latest newsletter. "We could have our first negative year-to-year Christmas selling season in 20 years," he writes.
No major hiccups
Pinellas County Clerk of the Circuit Court Ken Burke says his first 10 months in office have gone smoothly and he expects customer service to continue to improve.
Those who've periodically used the clerk's office know that the wait to view a file or talk to a deputy clerk can sometimes be as long as 20 to 30 minutes. But Burke says that time has now dropped.
Whenever a line forms, deputy clerks fill the available stations to help, like they used to do at the checkout at K Mart.
"The people who are the heavy users, they seem to be very pleased," Burke says.
In other court news, official records are now available free online, at least for the first 50 clicks. And lawyers can view probate files, including documents, online dating back to 1999. They have to pay for the service and be a lawyer of record in the case they view.
Burke, who took time from a Fort Lauderdale seminar on investing public funds to speak with Coffee Talk, says he's been impressed with the work ethic of the employees in the clerk's office.
"That's a tribute to Ms. Karleen DeBlaker," he says of his predecessor.
Oops
The middle name of a co-owner of Florida Estates Winery in Land O' Lakes was misspelled in our "Grape Expectations" cover story last week. Our apologies to J. Crayton Pruitt, a retired St. Petersburg heart surgeon.
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