The first friend I made in Elizabeth, New Jersey was a white kid named Billy. As a New York transplant my Dominicano look wasn’t too popular with Jersey folk. I had an afro, wore dress pants, a collared shirt, and black leather shoes with little gold buckles. Most of the kids just wanted to know what my thing was. Billy and I couldn’t have been more different, but we got close pretty quickly. Despite the fact that Billy’s parents wouldn’t allow him over my house, my grandmother allowed me over his. She took one look at Billy’s blonde hair and blue eyes, and at his mother’s middle class American manners, and pronounced their household safe. “Where are you from?” Billy’s mother asked, referring to my grandmother’s heavy accent. “I thought you were black.” On that day I couldn’t have imagined how many times I’d have to answer that question in my lifetime. “We’re Dominican.”

Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez will be investigated as part of a Justice Department corruption probe, CNN reports.

The AP reports Dominican Republic officials have arrested a woman carrying over $70,000 in her stomach—inside of her stomach!—and over $69,000 in her suitcase.

A US Airways flight from Philadelphia to Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, was held upon landing yesterday after a sneezing passenger joked about having been to Africa.

No, that isn't Charlie Sheen's shoe closet. Running shoes stuffed with nearly five pounds of cocaine were discovered in an abandoned suitcase left at John F. Kennedy Airport last Thursday, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced today.

Two men filed lawsuits today against Teresa and Joe Giudice, other members of the Real Housewives of New Jersey cast, and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in the Dominican Republic after a physical altercation at the hotel in February. There's always drama!

Sex tapes: Not just for D-list celebrities anymore! Puerto Rican drug lord Junior Capsula (real name: Jose Figueroa Agosto) has one featuring multiple women, and it's "selling like hotcakes" in the Dominican Republic. Guanabee put together a PG clip:

Alleged drug lord Jose Figueroa Agosto was arrested yesterday in Puerto Rico, ending a 10-year manhunt and, like fellow smuggler Christopher "Dudus" Coke, Figueroa was arrested wearing a wig. He previously escaped from prison four years into a 209-year sentence.

Oh, there was so much hubbub when Boykin Curry and Celerie Kemble, the most adorable rich people in town, hatched their scheme for a smarty-pants playground in the Dominican Republic! (Weirdo New Yorker summary here.) Moby was in on the deal—and so was Alex von Furstenberg! Now it seems that the golf course on the still unfinished little utopia is being rented out to whores? The brothel next door apparently held a golf tournament on the grounds of the utopia. Boykin and Celerie better hope the National Organization For Women doesn't go to the D.R. because they will flip their wigs over this.