Booby Tube Trap Filed Under: News Steven McLLain was lugging a discarded Toshiba television across the Venetian Bridge on a breezy evening this past February 12, when Miami City Police NET Cmdr. William Alvarez stopped him. When Alvarez asked McLLain, a lanky 56-year-old homeless man, where he got the boob…
On a cold February night, as big rigs chugged in and out of the secluded industrial loop that is NW 79th Avenue, a half-dozen young men swathed in diamond jewelry and baggy clothing sipped Dixie cups filled with Hennessy in a warehouse parking lot in Doral. The air outside the…
Miami, like the human body, is mostly made up of water. Still, many of us never get further than the occasional dunk in a few yards of shark-infested surf. Simply put, none of the 53,290 boats currently registered with Miami-Dade County belong to my friends. Poor, boatless bastards like me…
Hey, Super Bowl tourists. The only topic the sports pages, TV, and Internet want to discuss before the February 4 Super Bowl is Peyton and Rex. The unstoppable offense versus the brick wall defense. Chi-Town versus that other pueblo next door. But forget about that stuff. Down here we have…
Super Brawls Filed under: Flotsam Last week they outlawed tailgating at Dolphin Stadium. The reason might be all of this past year’s fun and frolicking in the parking lot. In 2006 the Dolphin Stadium precinct of the Miami-Dade Police Department received hundreds of calls for lost property, vandalism, theft, narcotics,…
Go on let ya top down, fuck it blow a couple grand/Treat her like an animal, make her do a handstand/Club Rollexx (lex), you can stunt yo/I stood on a Rolex smokin’ on a blunt hoe. — Rick Ross, “For da Low,” Port of Miami The video for Rick Ross’s…
The iron and concrete Sweetwater City Hall and Police Complex feels like some kind of futuristic frontier outpost. The forbidding building juts out of the tiny swampside town’s one-story landscape of small homes and gritty shopping centers like a stumpy obelisk. An inflatable Santa Claus and a few strings of…
Room with a View Filed under: Scene “Kramer. Thomas Kramer. I have told you zis zree times already!” bellowed a voice that instantly drowned out any conversation previously enjoyed by the ten people waiting politely inside the elevator car. “You are just too slow viz ze list!” And with that,…
Shanty Talk Filed under: News One should always be wary when city officials declare they are “listening” to the people’s problems. Activist Max Rameau knew this on Wednesday, when Miami City Manager Pedro Hernandez journeyed out to Umoja, Rameau’s five-week-old shantytown for the homeless in Liberty City. “I’m here to…
You know things have gotten bad when Tom Waits is singing songs about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Waits, who earned his stripes in this world as the songwriter from another, will soon release a three-disc set called Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. The music will be accompanied by a 94-page book…
The “ghost trains” of Miami’s failing Metrorail fascinated author Joan Didion twenty years ago. A “people mover” then in the works was meant to salvage a “mass transit system that did not effectively transport anyone,” she wrote in her book Miami. Today Didion would no doubt relish a ride on…
A minipark marks the center of an East Allapattah neighborhood, just off NW Twelfth Avenue. Gray wooden stumps, a few oak trees, and a small sandy playground dot the grassy square. On languid summer afternoons, local kids swing and slide on a blue and yellow jungle gym. Cars are parked…
Mo’ Ammo Filed under: News Following the ambush of two narco cops by AK-47-toting thugs in Opa-locka, Commissioners Barbara Jordan and Audrey Edmonson drafted a resolution at a Halloween meeting, urging the Miami-Dade Police Department’s special units to consider carrying more serious firepower. Commissioner Jordan, who met with the officers…
Sticky Lingers Filed under: Flotsam Tired of dodging — or stepping in — those ubiquitous black lumps of desiccated chewing gum that pepper every urban landscape? A new invention out of Germany uses a high-pressure apparatus to vaporize the once-indelible clumps through steam and eco-friendly detergent. And there’s only one…
Fahrenheit 451: Cast in the, er, glow of the recent public-school book-banning controversy (Vamos a Cuba) and fresh off its selection by the Florida Center for the Literary Arts as this year’s “Big Read,” Fahrenheit 451 lights up GableStage at the Biltmore in its Southeast premiere. Adapted for the stage…
Every Thursday, hours before quitting time, a curious handful of men duck out of Miami’s construction sites, banks, and police stations to beat the rush-hour traffic to the edge of town. They take the Tamiami Trail out past strip malls, suburban subdivisions, and a few hundred yards of thinning wetlands…
Mark Mitnick, a portly, even-tempered 43-year-old bachelor, had worked as a grocery clerk, card dealer, bartender, factory worker, airman first class, and assistant manager at Pizza Hut. In October 2001 he spotted an ad in the newspaper for a job as a Wackenhut security guard. He had the necessary experience…
Imagine that a prehistoric Mongol demon commandeered Tom Waits’s notorious throat and a fistful of Martian instruments for a possessed joy ride through a weird western canon (“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Ramblin’ Man”). Kuvezin and Yat-Kha (who took their name from a long, kotolike zither) hail from the…
The chase is on. Juan “Iron Twin” Urango, a Colombian-born fighter hunting for a world championship, marches forward and swings at his opponent, Naoufel “Chocolata” Ben Rabah, with a huge left arm. Rabah jukes him and pops off a pitty-pat of punches. Urango lashes out again; Rabah ducks and leans…
As midnight approached this past Monday, Radio Mambí host Ninoska Pérez Castellón cautioned against speculation of Fidel Castro’s death. But on Calle Ocho, no one seemed to be listening. Block after block teemed with revelers waving Cuban flags, leaning on car horns, dancing on SUV roofs. From the sidewalks, onlookers…
Marshall Robert Bellin can’t win. On a recent balmy Saturday evening, the 63-year-old architect stepped from his 2001 silver Porsche Carrera at a Coral Gables home. On his wrist shimmered a $20,000 diamond-encrusted gold Rolex Daytona. Suddenly 24-year-old Moses Max Sejour emerged from a side street, pistol in hand, face…
At 11:00 p.m. on the Abbey Brewing Co.’s eleventh anniversary, Brad Berkman, a middle-age man with bulging biceps and a shaved head, wobbled slightly at the bar and muttered, “I wanna smack someone in the face.” “No you don’t,” laughed Ray Rigazio, the Abbey’s owner and operator, hugging the man…
