I didn’t know quite what to expect from 95-year-old Charlotte Leibel, master graphologist, when I visited her at her Rebecca Towers efficiency apartment on South Beach. Frail-looking, soft-spoken, and wearing a magnifying glass around her neck, she didn’t appear to be someone who could penetrate to the depths of my…
Celebs mind their p’s and q’s What’s pop star Jon Secada really like? One person who says she knows the answer to that burning question is graphologist Charlotte Leibel, who was asked by New Times to analyze anonymous handwriting samples from Secada, singer Albita Rodriguez, and other lesser-knowns, including one…
Inside a cramped studio apartment on South Beach, a tiny 95-year-old woman in white polyester pants and a white jacket is watching some of the preliminary skirmishings in the O.J. Simpson trial on TV. Hunched over in her rocking chair, peering intently at the screen, Charlotte Leibel, like millions of…
Nudists of the world unite! That, in fact, is exactly what happened when Miami Shores resident Richard Mason, president of South Florida Free Beaches, sounded the alarm over a bill to restrict public nudity that’s being considered by the House Criminal Justice Committee in Tallahassee. “This is more than a…
I must have the Freedom Tower!” Don Gilbert is standing next to his dining-room table, which is piled high with the leaflets, photographs, and postcards that give voice to his dream of a campaign to promote peace and freedom. “If I get that tower, then I’ll be somebody, and people…
Like a growing number of other young men in the Miami area, Capems Franaois has a taste for jet skis. In fact, police say, he liked one particular jet ski so much he stole it twice. By the time the cops chased him down, his alleged victims and pursuers were…
In my line of work I’m often required to meet with high-level sources. But rarely are they as high-ranking as the ones I met through Lawrence Furman, the psychic and magician who allegedly channels “entities” from other dimensions. My interest in a psychic reading wasn’t very elevated: I was hoping…
Standing before the audience gathered around him on the Lincoln Road mall, he looked like someone from another century. “Would you care to see some stealing, lying, and cheating — and magical effects?” he asked of some passersby. Dressed in an oversize top hat, a purple and tan vest, and…
The Lincoln in the parking lot turned out to be a key clue, but it wasn’t enough to close the case of the invisible candidate. When the votes were tallied on September 8, Andres Rivero had defeated the reclusive Isaac Klayman in the District 107 Democratic primary, garnering 60 percent…
Like many tips, this one came at the racetrack. But it wasn’t about a horse. At a Hialeah Race Course fundraiser for Gov. Lawton Chiles, a young lawyer in suspenders came over with a story to tell. “Looking for something interesting to write about?” said the hotshot. “Check into the…
It always starts with a voice in the night. “Switchboard of Miami. How can we help you?” “I’m tired, I’m real tired,” the caller says softly, his words a bit slurred with fatigue and liquor, and on this Thursday night the volunteer who answers the call in the switchboard’s fourth-floor…
Nearly 70 years ago, when it was built, the small red cottage on NE 89th Street was a well-to-do child’s toy, a playhouse constructed by a father as a gift for his nine-year-old daughter. Next week a wrecking ball is slated to turn it into a back yard. “After twelve…
It’s always a privilege to see a great performer at the peak of his form. Those who have witnessed Baryshnikov dance or Michael Jordan defy gravity on his way to the hoop understand this, and the experience remains permanently etched in their minds. Here in Miami, connoisseurs of another endeavor…
A few months ago, while Walter Reynoso was having a cup of coffee in the federal courthouse downtown, he was approached by a distraught cafeteria worker who recognized the Coconut Grove criminal lawyer. Martha Rodriguez, a Nicaraguan immigrant, began crying as she told Reynoso about her son, who was being…
During Pow Wow, the May 21-25 international tourist trade show sponsored by the Travel Industry Association of America, Miami wasn’t taking any chances. Especially with Germans. When Frankfurt tour operator Doris Treffkon got off the plane at the start of the convention, she was met by two security guards. One…
In the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau conference room high above Brickell Avenue, staff members sometimes display an oversized flow chart that shows how the public-relations catastrophes of the early 1980s nearly ruined tourism before the dramatic recovery in recent years. Still, despite its reminders of such bad news…
It looked like the beginning of the end for Temple Beth El. Here it was, the first night of the Jewish High Holidays in September, and the temple’s last-ditch appeal for new members in the North Bay Village News seemed to have fallen rather flat. “Dig deep into your hearts…
