The arms deal was scheduled to take place around noon on April Fool’s Day, 1993, in an empty Miami warehouse, one of hundreds of anonymous buildings cobbled together out of steel beams and aluminum siding and hastily erected during one of South Florida’s spurts of growth. Luciano Maiello, a Brazilian…
Thick incense spreads throughout the church, pressing against the air-conditioned freshness, pushing it back, away and out of the room, until the coolness is saturated with a smell so thick it has the texture of velvet. It’s a choking aroma, one that will sink into the red carpet and cling…
If you’re a Metrorail rider, you’re accustomed to inconveniences. Track work, trains that run late, fellow passengers whose hygiene practices leave something to be desired, garbage cans that aren’t around when you need one. Better to hum along with Gloria Estefan on your Walkman, practice your deep-breathing exercises, read the…
Province of Asti. Maldonado. Lamentin. Fujisawa. Kaohsiung. Montes de Oca. The names are virtual incantations, mellifluous evocations of exotic faraway climes in Italy, Uruguay, Guadeloupe, Japan, Taiwan, and Costa Rica. But these international metropolises bear an inextricable local link. More than mere tourist destinations, each has been adopted as a…
Now you see them. Now you don’t. Such is the ephemeral nature of officers’ disciplinary records at the Metro-Dade Police Department. Thanks to the strenuous negotiating efforts of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the union that represents Metro-Dade cops, black marks are periodically purged from departmental personnel files. According to…
The Metro-Dade Police Department has nearly completed its program to have all 4300 employees — sworn officers and civilians alike — view a training video explaining the department’s sexual harassment policy, which was adopted in 1985 and revised several times since then. According to the video, any act or statement…
Sgt. Niki Lawrence lives in a world that has been diminished. Placed on compulsory unpaid leave from the Metro-Dade Police Department, she spends her days alone in her Deerwood Estates home north of Metrozoo. After 22 years of police work, Lawrence survives on just $250 per week in unemployment benefits,…
A registered nurse with 23 years’ experience, Lizabeth Ekalo likes to describe herself as a “patient advocate.” She urged the patients under her care at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center to question their doctors, to educate themselves, to take charge of their own health care. Her philosophy:…
El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, is an odd hybrid of American and Latin journalistic conventions. While El Nuevo is considered to be autonomous by the Miami Herald Publishing Co., which produces both newspapers, it is, in fact, a supplement of the English-language paper. The confusion is…
Former Metro-Dade police officer Pat Yodice and her housemate Mary Butt had just finished dishing out slices of a birthday cake when some uninvited guests showed up at their Sunday afternoon backyard barbecue. A swarm of law enforcement types — members of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s vice squad, agents…
He’s tried that several times before, of course, and it hasn’t stuck. Tonight, though, will be different. Tonight will be the end of the bad and the beginning of the good. “Your last memory must be your most beautiful,” he murmurs, his decorum flawless despite the tortured symptoms of withdrawal…
A local physician who stands accused of molesting patients under his care has agreed to voluntarily relinquish his license to practice medicine in Florida. Allegations against Dr. Homer L. Kirkpatrick, Jr., first surfaced this past July in the form of an open letter that appeared in a newsletter published by…
An ageless philosophical question: If a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a noise? How about a brain teaser with a local angle: If Miami’s only daily newspaper invites a Cuban official to town and doesn’t report the visit, is it still news? Barbara Gutierrez, editor of…
A small man with close-cropped hair sits behind a conference table at Mercy Hospital, clenching a pen and glowering. The room, located on the sixth floor and overlooking a glistening expanse of Biscayne Bay, is sprinkled with about twenty people, most of them infected with HIV, the virus that causes…
The dead manatee lay on Watson Island. At dawn its carcass would be retrieved by a state biologist and shipped to St. Petersburg for a necropsy to determine the cause of death. Such is the destiny that the state government has mandated for deceased sea cows in an effort to…
Arcs of water crash over the sea wall protecting the Cuban coast and splash onto the asphalt roadway, endangering cyclists and the stray Soviet-built Lada. On any other Thursday night, the nocturnal denizens of Havana’s Malec centsn would have already staked their claims. Lovers, hustlers, adolescent rockers, hippies, penniless professionals,…
The shafts of light formed a luminous triangle above the darkened beach, drawing curious onlookers from the terrace of the Cardozo Hotel and stirring the population of senior citizens from ancient contemplations. As a crowd gathered, light artist Sidney Smith set his work in motion. Beams ricocheted off mirrors angled…
After decades of precarious voyages across the Florida Straits, madcap raids against Cuba, and relentless lobbying in Washington, D.C., Cuban exiles have gradually become known as a people that puts its money where its mouth is. The depth of el exilio’s passion for freedom and a liberated Cuba has cowed…
Forget about that oceanfront condominium on Collins Avenue your real estate agent assures you is a steal. Toss away the floor plan for that new split-level out west. The true real estate values in Dade lie in a more humble section of the county: Little Haiti. That’s where a select…
There’s so little time to stock up on champagne and caviar for New Year’s Eve and so few places in South Florida to purchase the requisite provisions. You can go try your luck at a gourmet emporium like Epicure or Gardner’s, or maybe scoot up to Macy’s in Aventura. Or,…
Police officers patting down black teenagers in Overtown and Liberty City hardly makes for headline material. That’s what bothers John de Leon. The Dade County assistant public defender says he inadvertently discovered a City of Miami Police Department search policy — which involves ordering youths to remove their shoes –…
Forty people — including one New Times staff writer — are standing in line at a Miami Beach drugstore early on this Saturday morning. They haven’t come to get their prescriptions filled, though. Today is September 17, and at 10:00 a.m., throughout South Florida, Ticketmaster will begin selling the 45,000…
