On October 3, 1994, the The New Republic magazine published an article titled “Our Man in Miami,” written by freelance journalist Ann Louise Bardach. The story purported to be a sweeping compendium of facts about the life of Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, Miami’s multimillionaire business executive and chairman…
At half past nine on Easter Sunday evening, April 7, Gina Cunningham drove south on Miami Beach and turned right from Euclid Avenue onto Fifth Street. She was headed for Tap Tap, the popular Haitian eatery/art gallery she co-owns, but she was about to get sidetracked. It began when Miami…
The questions began shortly before 9:00 that morning and continued for ten hours, ending in the early evening. The three opposing lawyers took turns grilling the woman before them, probing her private life, searching for inconsistencies. She sat calmly through it all, gazing every once and awhile out the window…
Ray is handing out flyers on Washington Avenue at four o’clock in the morning, looking for girls the way his boss told him to: young, but not too young. Pretty. Sexy. Girls with other girls. Girls without guys. Girls who are alone. Girls who look like they might be up…
Charles Intriago has cultivated his reputation as a crime fighter. Early in his career, as special counsel to then-Florida governor Reubin Askew, the attorney wrote a law that facilitated statewide inquiries into political corruption and organized crime. Later, as a federal prosecutor in Miami, he was responsible for the indictment…
Ralph Heyndels is sipping an espresso outside the Miami Beach Books & Books on Lincoln Road, trying to explain the unlikely phenomenon occurring at the nearby Alliance Cinema. Largely at Heyndels’s behest, intellectuals from four continents have gathered to debate, discuss, and dissect the idea of gay desire. They have…
One of the few things that all members of Dade County’s contention-ridden AIDS community can agree on is that the AIDS-related service bureaucracy has run amok, propagating organizations, acronyms, and red tape at a rate that rivals the virus’s own spread while impoverished AIDS sufferers spend their days shuttling from…
The subpoena landed on the judge’s desk with an offensive slap and was quickly whisked away to the office of the county attorney, where it became the object of some consternation. As long as anyone in the office could remember, no lawyer had ever had the temerity to attempt to…
In keeping with the absurdist temor of U.S.-Cuban relations over the past 35 years, at the very moment President Clinton was approving harsh trade sanctions against the island last week, Cuban technicians were putting the final touches on the national website of the Republic of Cuba. Their handiwork can now…
Applications for political asylum, when done right, are painstakingly prepared. Immigration attorneys quiz their clients about minor details, seeking to firm up wavering memories and uncover contradictory recollections. They focus on dates, places, action, in a laborious effort to mine fact from a bog of anecdote. Did the applicant belong…
For refugees seeking political asylum in the United States, a bureaucratic event called the “individual merits asylum hearing” is a defining moment. At the hearing refugees are invited to appear in small, sparsely furnished courtrooms located in one of downtown Miami’s federal buildings and to recount, under oath, tales of…
The Cuban flag parts down the middle like a curtain, opening onto sunlit scenes of Havana. A bus driver in a spanking red and white uniform sits patiently on a concrete stoop. A man takes a gusty toke from his cigar and a smoky haze envelops the Capitolio, the former…
There’s nothing like going shopping with someone else’s money, and there’s no one like Thomas Kramer, the German financier who has sunk millions into South Beach real estate, to teach South Florida how it ought to be done. The 38-year-old self-described asset manager has been buying chunks of prime property…
The Dade County Property Appraisal Department uses a mass-appraisal system, dividing the county into a grid of one-square-mile areas that are examined for changes in property values at least once a year. County appraisers employ a variety of techniques to verify values: They examine recent sales, as well as sales…
Jose Milton became nearly a half-million dollars richer on June 20. The well-heeled Coral Gables contractor didn’t win the lottery, cash in an exceptionally prescient stock investment, cut a lucrative real estate deal, or come into a windfall inheritance. Like thousands of his fellow Dade Countians, Milton simply appealed the…
It had been one of Dave Shaw’s best trips to Havana. Clear skies. A steady wind. “No worries,” as the Key West sailboat captain liked to say. That is, until Shaw pulled up to the Texaco fuel dock at Key West’s Conch Harbor on Saturday, December 9, and was greeted…
Office Depot, that seminal source of cut-rate office supplies, now offers an additional amenity: clerks guaranteed to speak in soothing syllables of good old American English. Miami’s streets may resound with a cacophony of foreign tongues, but amid the cases of paper clips and the reams of Xerox-quality bond on…
Fire sales are generally reliable indicators that a business is in financial trouble, whether the firm in question is a mom-and-pop hardware store or the Pentagon. In fact, weeks before the federal government shut down this past Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense sent out flyers to international purchasers of…
Throughout the summer, as Miami Beach officials negotiated one of the biggest land deals in city history, there were hints of unease. Hard-knuckled planners and high-paid attorneys dickered endlessly. Architectural experts were consulted. The citizenry was sounded. But no amount of discussion about development rights and design guidelines could assuage…
Talk show host Pedro Sevcec is tramping through the Peruvian jungle, camera crew in tow, impeccably dressed, right down to his tan safari vest. “It is a symphony of greens,” he observes of his surroundings, reaching for a poetic metaphor that nevertheless eludes his grasp, “here in the river basin…
Rising from the clutter of condos along the shoreline of Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach are two great, white, Y-shape relics of Sixties block architecture. Touted as the largest apartment complex in South Florida, the 1277-unit Morton Towers has been featured in the Latin American version of the popular show…
As Capt. Dave Shaw can tell you, it’s a straight shot from Key West to Havana. Just keep the compass pegged to 225 degrees, kick back, and pop a Budweiser. No worries. During the past twelve months, Shaw has made more than a dozen trips to the “large island 90…
