Patrick Williams doesn’t look like a decorated high school teacher who speaks seven languages, has taken his students abroad, and has earned prodigious praise from school board brass. He wears a gray-and-white camouflage wife-beater, yellow-and-blue surf shorts, and white sneakers with no socks. His teeth are capped in gold, and…

View a slideshow from several busted grow houses around South Florida. On October 18 at 10:22 p.m., Betty was watching television in the living room of her pleasant three-bedroom home in Lehigh Acres, a rural community of 90,000 that’s about 12 miles east of Fort Myers. Her four-year-old daughter Nina…

View a slideshow from the October 13 game between the Hurricanes and Georgia Tech at the Orange Bowl. When Stewart Patterson heard the University of Miami Hurricanes would be playing their last football game in the Orange Bowl November 10, he decided to head for the M-I-A. Funny thing —…

Vote for Nudity! Filed under: Politics Times are tough, Miami. We’re talking World War III tough. We’ve got our hand so far up Iraq’s ass we can feel around and tell what it had for breakfast. The president of Iran has taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves…

Another No-Confidence Vote for Timoney Filed under: News Cops and little old ladies go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Take the recent letter e-mailed to the City of Miami’s police union by two elderly women from Lyme, Connecticut. “We have read with dismay that the Miami PD is ‘outgunned’…

The Wheels of Justice Filed under: Flotsam The other day, while whipping through the parking lot of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, Riptide came across a sleek egg-shape ride stamped with the unmistakable portrait of the county’s top crime fighter: Katherine Fernandez Rundle. Painted in a futuristic, fast-forward blue-and-white scheme,…

On March 2, 2004, a crisp spring morning around 9:00, Surfside Police Det. John Davis left the station in a blue Crown Victoria. Accompanied by a fellow officer and three agents from the Florida Department of Revenue, he headed for a four-bedroom, two-story house on a corner lot at 1116…

Rudolph “Rudy” Crew is a busy man these days. While doing the $325,000-a-year job of running Miami-Dade County Public Schools, he has been on tour promoting his new tome, Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools. Since its August 7 release, he has been interviewed on National Public Radio,…

The Debate You Didn’t See Filed under: News Mr. Griff, a middle-age man with loose cornrows and baggy brown pants, sits in a green plastic chair and orders students not to cut through the parking lot at the University of Miami campus. He’s been there since 8:00 a.m. It’s now…

The Lexus Leprechaun Filed under: Flotsam Early last week the embattled John Timoney suggested that a friendly guy, of Irish ancestry, could walk into a Lexus of Kendall dealership, make friends with the owner, and be granted an indefinite test drive. Well, he didn’t say that. But he expected everyone…

Check out this sad, sad e-mail exchange. It allegedly took place at Christmastime 2002 between cyber-Casanova Abel Lera and a county hall boss named Benigna Marko, a.k.a. Bennie. It smells like a breakup. Benigna: I know you will be strong — please be. But I will not! I know myself…

Burger Sting Filed under: News It can’t feel good to get scolded by a nine-year-old. How about 100 of them? Burger King vice president Steven Grover might feel like he’s been sent to the corner after receiving several dozen handwritten letters of reprimand from children accusing his company of being…

“Happy” Mother’s Day, for $2.99 Filed under: Flotsam One night, back in 1999, at Monty’s on Miami Beach, Erik Goldman mused over the men buying cocktails for potential sheet-mates, and tallied up how much it costs for a guy to get laid. His calculation: $200, including dinner and drinks. There…

For the past two years, two months, and ten days, out on the western fringes of Miami-Dade County, Lionel Tate has been sitting inside a prison cell at the Everglades Correctional Institute for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit. In fact two South Florida private investigators allege DNA evidence…

It’s July 13, and in an effort to evade the brutal midafternoon sun, Cesar Ramirez cools off in the shade of a tree near the entrance of Allapattah Middle School. The wiry Puerto Rican waits for his daughter Amanda to emerge through the turquoise-color doors. From 8:00 to 4:00 Monday…

Last year a 42-year-old convicted felon with a history of fraud stole my identity. Though Thomas Barrett Stringer admitted to spending lots of money (an estimated $4000) in my name — renting a car, opening two credit card accounts, and connecting three cell phones — the cops can’t bust him…

Slinging Mud in the Land of Sand

Danny is an addict. “He first experimented with marijuana and nitrous oxide when he was thirteen,” says his ex-girlfriend Jessie, a petite, curly-haired brunet with a tender voice. “He graduated from cocaine to crack in his late teens and hasn’t stopped since.” Since 1999, Danny has been arrested six times…

The Go-to Guy for the Gun-Shy Filed under: Flotsam The bulletproof window near the entrance of the Opa-locka Police station features what looks like a poster for a shitty rap concert: Ten hundred-dollar bills fan out to form a backdrop for a thousand-dollar bill, Grover Cleveland’s green mug obscured behind…

Investigative journalist Mike Kirsch remembers undercover cops pinning him against his car in Cicero, Illinois, in the late Eighties, when he was working for a CBS affiliate. He says the officers were miffed that he was investigating a tip that they’d accepted favors from some neighborhood hookers. In 1996, while…

Souto Steamed Over Suit Support Filed under: News In their battle to stop Jorge Perez’s luxury condo project on land owned by Mercy Hospital, supporters of Vizcaya have drawn the ire of Miami-Dade County Commissioner Javier Souto. Last week Souto introduced legislation ordering the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens Trust to…

Bazooka Babes Filed under: Culture In a lush field somewhere deep in the heart of Homestead, a gorgeous brunet in a brown bikini lies atop a camouflage tarp, cradling a .50-caliber sniper rifle. The firearm’s muzzle is as long as her deliciously toned, boot-strapped legs. Despite the brutal heat and…