Disputes — even legal battles — over real estate transactions are far from unique in South Florida’s out-of-control market. So when real estate broker Elio Rodriguez sued developer Wayne Rosen over a $1.4 million commission he says he was bilked out of, it wasn’t news. But State Circuit Court Judge…

The Players A sinewy man in white sweatpants, white baseball cap, and an oversize white T-shirt sits on a picnic table next to his sullen, black-clad counterpart. The diamond studs in his ears sparkle as he talks on a cell, intermittently yelling at some basketball players. “You got to square…

The staff at Jackson Memorial Hospital routinely performs miracles. Real, true, bringing-people-back-from-the-precipice-of-death miracles. At Jackson, through the 400 or so organ-transplant surgeries performed every year, the surgeons and nurses revive the hopes and bodies of people who would have been unsalvageable a couple of decades ago. One of those people…

The City of Miami’s former archaeologist says she was fired for not being friendly enough to developers. “Citizens … should be aware of what they are trading in for this ‘new city,'” says Alison Elgart-Berry, Miami’s first (and so far only) city archaeologist. Elgart-Berry has a doctoral degree from Cornell…

ArtCenter/South Florida has, by most accounts, been blessed by visionary leadership, talented artists, and good luck. But there has also been turmoil — ArtCenter has burned through three executive directors in two years, and several board members have also abandoned ship. Some say chairman Richard Shack’s commanding nature is causing…

Miami’s skyline is spiked with construction cranes. Drive down Biscayne Boulevard south from the Julia Tuttle Causeway and that’s what you see — that and small armies of orange-vested construction workers cutting across the roadway or stopping traffic so cement trucks can back into the busy boulevard. For the average…

Homestead’s Main Street is an encomium to the ideal of the small town, an open invitation to tourists more interested in quaint Americana than South Beach glamour. But by early afternoon on any given weekend day, the street becomes populated by a crew of leering, shirtless drunks and a few…

This year marks two milestones for Seaquarium. Virginia Key’s landmark marine theme park has been a Miami fixture for 50 years, coasting on its storied past as the setting for the Flipper television series in the early Sixties. It is also an anniversary date associated with another intelligent sea mammal:…

Miami-Dade’s southwest suburbs could belong to Anywhere, U.S.A. Trade the royal palms for dogwoods and the Peruvian bakeries for Vietnamese diners, and you could mistake Kendall and the Hammocks for suburban D.C. or Chicago or LA. The same SUVs pull into the same strip malls anchored by the same chains…

Nine months ago the Homestead City Council agreed to let a business group take over the moribund Homestead Sports Complex, a 6500-seat baseball stadium with adjacent athletic fields. More precisely, the complex is a financial sinkhole that cost about $18 million in hotel bed-tax revenues to build, costs Homestead an…

Juan Carlos Cardenas idly twirls a spoon, then holds it still over his plate of rice. He sits in silence at Puerto Sagua restaurant on South Beach, as if inspecting the funhouse reflection of his goateed face in the spoon. He sits still for so long you’d never know he’d…

Religion, as a subject of public discourse, has been hijacked by political analysts who talk about faith mostly in the context of political battles or culture wars. Christianity, according to the commentariat, is a set of values usually aligning with a political platform which ¨the people¨ can vote for or…

Turf wars over drug territory have sent the homicide rate in Overtown up 120 percent from last year, according to Miami Police Department figures. Between January and November, eleven murders had been reported in the beleaguered neighborhood, as opposed to five homicides during the same period in 2003. “Drug dealers…

NE Second Avenue is Biscayne Boulevard’s back door. The gritty street snakes quietly through Miami alongside the main thoroughfare, occasionally catching spillover from Biscayne’s midnight parade of low-rent hookers and penny-ante drug dealers. But the street has a split personality: From 20th to 54th streets at noon on any given…

The weeks leading up to November’s presidential election saw Miami-Dade County swell with an unending inflow of lawyers from both parties, election observers, human rights-watchers, and activists of all sorts. Locals got in on the excitement as well, working to get out the vote on behalf of their candidates. The…

The weeks leading up to November’s presidential election saw Miami-Dade County swell with an unending inflow of lawyers from both parties, election observers, human rights-watchers, and activists of all sorts. Locals got in on the excitement as well, working to get out the vote on behalf of their candidates. The…

Doran McDonald’s decision to stay in the U.S. and receive quality medical care prompted Royal Caribbean to set in motion the federal government’s immigration policy machinery.

The Florida panther is a beautiful creature, endowed with leonine dignity and feline grace. As with all big predatory cats, our local panther is made even more alluring by a furtive sense of menace. If the panther has become an appealing symbol for the environmental movement, it is also evocative…

The strange death of U.S. Customs inspector David Berkofsky almost sounds like a riddle, the kind of thing crime writers or medical examiners would bandy about: Two men with a history of personal animosity walk into a room. No one else is present or within earshot. Only one man comes…

Neith Nevelson looks like a refugee from some war-torn Balkan village. A black cloth wrapped around her body serves as a dress, a scarf adorns her head; her paint-stained hands and perpetually bare feet are browned by the sun and gnarled as tree roots. She sits on her porch in…

This past April, when Rene Rodriguez retired as director of the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, his surprise announcement was accompanied by a florid memo to County Manager George Burgess in which the housing agency’s achievements were extolled, while the media’s criticism of his stumbling efforts to provide housing for poor families…

No one passes through Biscayne Park on their way to another destination. Shaped like an isosceles triangle, the placid village just north of Miami Shores is hemmed in by the Biscayne Canal on the west and FEC railroad tracks on the east. It can be hard to find even if…