Back on May 8, 2003, things got ugly on Dinner Key. Miami Commissioner Angel González was angry. He demanded more information about city police matters. Chief John Timoney would have to wait, González said. Timoney’s reaction? He didn’t say, “You’re bad. Fuck you!” as he did to a protestor at…
He never did it. No way. No how. Miami Police Chief John Timoney contends he couldn’t have said, “Fuck the Cubans,” on February 12 at 1:00 a.m. at a party sponsored by Ocean Drive magazine. Since New Times reported the quote in a February 16 The Bitch column, the chief…
Welcome, damas and caballeros, to Miami New Times’s first annual Bad Seed Awards ceremony here at the gleaming new — though still incomplete — $446 million downtown performing arts center. Among our fine crop of contestants are the sons and daughters of Miami’s most notable people. In fact all the…
Combining exotic glass with exotic plant life is, apparently, like mixing peanut butter with chocolate or rock with rap. People dig it. When the colorful, exotic sculpture of glass artist Dale Chihuly met the horticultural maze of London’s Kew Gardens last year, Brits went mad — in four months the…
Stephanie Teele is an ethereally beautiful woman. She has ocean blue, almost translucent eyes; gentle features; and a kind, modest face etched deeply with sorrow. As she looks north from a Brickell Avenue skyscraper across the city where her husband — long Miami’s most prominent African-American politician — committed the…
First a rock smashed the front window. Then, after a metal shutter was slammed shut, a bottle exploded against it. Then another. And another. A thousand Haitians burst through a police barricade one steamy summer Saturday in 1990 and swarmed a storefront off Biscayne Boulevard. Inside, as muscular Cuban-American shopkeeper…
Five weeks after the Miami Herald canned columnist Jim DeFede, his spot in the newsroom appeared, well, rather strange. A crash dummy in a baseball cap, jeans, and Nikes sat in his chair. Its left hand rested on the desk next to a bottle of Australian Chardonnay. Nearby was a…
Gail Bobb is a single mom. A pretty, prim 39-year-old native of Guyana, she moved to South Florida in 2001 with her two nearly grown kids, Frank and Theresa. “It was paradise,” she recalls with a Caribbean lilt. “At first.” Bobb padded the pavement for four months until, finally, she…
By now, most sports fans know that the Miami Herald on May 10 published an apparent blockbuster questioning the integrity of the nation’s premier equine event, the Kentucky Derby. And by now, almost everyone knows the Herald blew it. Commentators around the world have hit the paper for falsely insinuating…
Going to meet the imam It was 10:00 a.m. on a steamy, sunny morning just a few days after American soldiers began dying in Iraq. Zuhrah Abdu Akmed opened the door of her tiny Miramar house. She squinted as the aroma of curry and eggs wafted into the yard and…
Kingsley Barham seems an unlikely candidate for king of crass. The once-handsome, now-haggard 56-year-old sleeps on a sofa bed in a ramshackle Delray Beach home from which he barely escaped eviction in 2001. The State of California is after him for more than $75,000 in back taxes. And creditors have…
Swedish exec Peter Tsounis deals in yachts for a living. He wears expensive suits, flies first class, and carries hundreds of dollars in cash as well as twenty credit cards. So he was surprised recently when a cop slapped handcuffs on him and six lawmen surrounded him as he was…
MEMORANDUM March 7, 2002 To: Michael Satz, Kathy Rundle, South Florida prosecutors, police officers From: CES Re: Misplaced priorities It has come to my attention recently that you law-enforcement types have lost respect for a little something called the truth. No, this isn’t 9/11-related. Cops have been hassling reporters and…
Terror is nothing new to Walid Phares. The 43-year-old Florida Atlantic University associate professor grew up in Beirut and survived the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990. A Maronite Christian, he recalls witnessing the detonation of the first car bomb in his hometown in 1977. Indeed he’s lucky to…
Ricardo Ramirez doesn’t seem like he would scare easily. A burly Mexican American with a barrel chest, forearms thick with ropelike muscle, and a full beard flecked with gray, he carries a .45-caliber semiautomatic Beretta pistol and speaks in quiet, measured tones. The 41-year-old Southwest Broward resident is a special…
When it comes to diversity, Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen is a failure, a joke, a sham. Two years after taking the helm, the son of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents is under fire by staff members for failing to hire or promote Hispanics to top jobs. This is ironic…
A county commissioner, a top professional football player, a judge, a police major. It seems that to be anybody in Miami, you have to get caught in a prostitution sting on Biscayne Boulevard. The latest aspirant to infamy is schools watchdog Norman Lindeblad, who approached Hermina Salas, a police officer…
Hurricane season may be well under way, but county emergency workers and firefighters are still busy making preparations. This week — and for the next two — they will be moving into a new, $24 million headquarters in West Miami-Dade. The place is beautiful. Flat computer screens, satellite dishes, marble…
If you haven’t had enough post-Elian flag foolishness, consider these recent events attended by Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas. Several patriots claim they were turned away from a June 3 Homestead/Florida City municipal picnic at Harris Field for the following reasons: They were (1) carrying flags, (2) driving with flags mounted…
If you trust the folks who deliver your kid to school, read this! Back at the beginning of the 1998 school year, a disabled four year old named Christopher Trujillo boarded a school bus in Kendall. Driver Sylvia Holliman and aide Belkis De La Rosa were supposed to deliver little…
Build it and they will come, but just build it, seems to be the Miami Heat’s new philosophy…even if it means jamming too much construction onto public property and breaking a sacred promise to voters to provide open space. The team has approached city commissioners twice recently with plans for…
The Miami Herald’s talented capital bureau chief Steve Bousquet joined with several lobbyists, including former legislator Mike Abrams, to rank dozens of Miami-Dade legislators last week. And the results were pretty much what you’d expect. Veterans like Rep. Alex Villalobos and Sen. Ron Silver did well. Rookies mostly fared poorly…
