Miami-Dade County officials have pulled the plug on politically connected electrician Hector Pio Ortiz, whose company, Horsepower Electric, has won $24 million in county contracts over the past five years. As reported here January 13 (“Kicked Back and in the Green”), Horsepower was close to securing a nine-million-dollar, no-bid deal…

For the past five years, Forrest Gordon and other Redland residents have peppered county Commissioner Dennis Moss with requests to allow them to vote on incorporating to form Miami-Dade’s 32nd municipality. Some Redland dwellers want independence from county rule in order to protect the 64-square-mile rural area in the unincorporated…

A blithe middle-age white man on a red bicycle zooms across the intersection of NE 78th Street and Biscayne Boulevard. He is dressed in a pair of denim shorts, a black polo shirt, white Converse sneakers, and a black baseball cap. Tinted glasses conceal his wide, piercing blue eyes. The…

Hector Pio Ortiz is a made man. The electrician owns a Hialeah company that routinely wins multimillion-dollar contracts from Miami-Dade County to install and maintain traffic and street lights. Over the past five years county commissioners have awarded Ortiz’s Horsepower Electric eleven contracts worth about $24 million. Now Horsepower Electric…

Early in the evening on December 29, several residents of the Greens apartment complex in Doral came upon what appeared to be a Muscovy duck massacre on the banks of the property’s manmade lake. There they found five of the waterfowl in the throes of agonizing deaths. “There was another…

Walkiria Ramos is frustrated about not being able to send her seven-year-old blind and autistic son to class at Edison Park Elementary School in Miami. Ramos claims that since December 1 public school officials have been slow to provide the special care second-grader Joel Rodriguez requires in order to function…

“See, this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers — motherfuckers who thought they ass would age like wine.” — Marsellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction Two boxers in full protective gear meet at center ring inside a cavernous warehouse transformed into a boxing gym. They tap each other’s gloves…

It takes a lot to make some people in North Bay Village hide their faces and hang their heads in shame. Consider the recent sightings of former Police Chief Irving Heller at city hall. Earlier this year, Heller resigned when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began investigating allegations that…

Miami Commissioner Johnny Winton has trouble understanding how anyone can take Xavier Suarez seriously. “He brought this city to its knees!” Winton cries. “He is an absolute opportunist, not to mention an irrational and dangerous man!” From his downtown Miami business office, an incredulous Winton recalls that Suarez had journalists…

For fifty years, the roar of battered, crumpled, home-made stock cars has beckoned gear-heads, racing enthusiasts and curiosity seekers from Homestead to Lantana and everywhere in between. For the weekend racing warriors who pull into the Hialeah Speedway towing their mechanical stallions on flatbed trailers every Saturday afternoon, nothing beats…

The arrest last week of Miami Commissioner Art Teele on assault charges following a wild car chase brought to a climactic close one more scene in the drama that has become his life. The saga began more than a year ago with state and federal agents launching corruption probes into…

Miami Beach resident Jeff Bradley is legally blind. The 53-year-old freelance writer is among the thousands who, through necessity, rely on public transit to get around Miami-Dade County. “I drove a car until 1985, when I lost my peripheral vision,” Bradley says. “I live on the Beach because it’s easier…

For 60 days, beginning the first week in November and lasting through the first week of January, a thicket of towering pine trees along the Palmetto Expressway at Bird Road comes alive with the dazzling sparkle of some five million Christmas lights. It’s Santa’s Enchanted Forest, the holiday-themed amusement park,…

Life could hardly get any worse for Mario Barcia. He’s unemployed and broke. He and his wife have crammed themselves into the home of a relative. A court order prevents him from physically setting foot outside that home. His wife is expecting a baby within weeks. And he is facing…

In the front yard of his salmon-colored, single-story house across the street from Brownsville Middle School, mechanic Lorenzo Jones, 49, slouches on a white lawn chair, holding a cup in his right hand filled with Coca-Cola and Jim Beam. Jones’s bloodshot gaze is focused on the apartment buildings next door…

Taimira Perez eases herself onto the navy sofa in the living room of her townhouse in Miramar Gardens, a private residential community of predominantly low-income property owners in the city of Miami Gardens, near the border of Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Leaning back wearily, the 41-year-old rubs the back of…

Depending on your point of view, Fane Lozman, during the scant thirteen months he’s lived in North Bay Village, has either wreaked havoc on the town or single-handedly saved it from its worst demons. First was Lozman’s confrontation with Adolph “Al” Coletta, one of the city’s most prominent and influential…

After an acrimonious North Miami City Council meeting last October, the rancor spilled into the parking lot of city hall at 776 NE 125th St. Mayor Josaphat “Joe” Celestin accused David Burns and other community activists of being racists. “He also had the audacity to say that he was going…

When it comes to protecting his business interests at Miami International Airport, local entrepreneur Pedro Pelaez counters threats with the ferocity of a Lennox Lewis left hook. In 2001 Pelaez lost a bout with the Miami-Dade Aviation Department when his now-defunct company, Quick Packing, Inc., failed to gain a lucrative…

In the past few years the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department has been battered by charges of discrimination and harassment — an embarrassment for a county system that prides itself on striving for diversity. Now three black men claim that racism kept them from making it through the department’s training academy…

On the morning of November 26, Taimira Perez was on a stakeout in front of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office on NW Twelfth Avenue. The plucky, Cuban-born street vendor had gotten word that North Bay Village Commissioner Bob Dugger was turning himself in to law enforcement authorities. State prosecutors had…

Miami Police Chief John Timoney seems to have concluded that the best way to get the media at his side is by having the media by his side. During his four years as Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Timoney became a national celebrity. During the 2000 Republican National Convention, he granted reporters…