Michael J. Mooney writes about the people and places that populate the unseen margins of our society. A former Mayborn Scholar and student of George Getschow’s, he once took a series of prostitutes out on “all American” dates to places like the bowling alley, miniature golf course, and ice cream parlor, and wrote about the horrifying stories that comprise their daily lives. During his reporting, he has lived in a bed bug-infested homeless shelter for addicts, interviewed the last sexual surrogate in Florida, crashed with depraved college Spring Breakers, and mingled with real life blood-drinking vampires. While at The Dallas Morning News, he carved out a beat that consisted of punk-rock evangelicals, gay rugby players, stand-up comedy, classical music, and a Klingon prom. He won 2008 Florida Press Club awards for Best Sports Writing and Best Health Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association. In 2006 Mooney won the Hearst Newspapers Nonfiction Award for Literary Excellence for a story about the improbable dreams of the women working in a rundown Fort Worth strip club. His writing has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio, D Magazine, Associated Press and other newspapers, magazines and literary journals. One of Mooney’s narratives published in D Magazine, The Day Kennedy Died, will appear in the 2009 anthology, The Best American Crime Reporting, edited by Jeffrey Toobin. Mooney is a staff writer at New Times, a Village Voice Media alt-weekly based in Fort Lauderdale.

http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2009-04-02/news/the-trail-from-a-6-million-french-art-heist-ends-in-suburban-south-florida/