On April 30 it looked like Ebony and Ivory had finally gotten it together. Miami Beach commissioners okayed an agreement that effectively ended hotel developer R. Donahue Peebles’s seven-year-old business dispute with the city. Peebles has always contended that Miami Beach officials bear some of the responsibility for the $15.8…
Politics in Hialeah is not for the faint-hearted. It’s intense. It gets up close and personal. It galvanizes the entire city. And it is played by a strictly enforced set of rules. As most people know, Mayor for Life Raul Martinez, the undisputed high priest of Hialeah, writes those rules…
On a crisp December afternoon in 1994, a month shy of his retirement as a U.S. probation officer, Michael Pizzi, Jr. made one last call to an ex-con on federal parole. Pizzi was still assigned to the South Florida High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force (HIDTA), a consortium of…
Cournisha DeMonick won’t get to see justice served in the slaying of her boyfriend, Jerry St. Pierre, one of several young men murdered in North Miami’s Eastside vs. Westside Haitian gang war last summer. On March 11, an unknown assailant in a gray Ford Taurus gunned down the nineteen-year-old DeMonick,…
In twelve years, Jorge Lewis went from intern to top dog reporter at Spanish-language television station WSCV, Channel 51. He covered some of the biggest stories of our time — Elian Gonzalez, George W. Bush’s presidential election grab, and 9/11, to name a few. Lewis, a salt-and-pepper-haired man with a…
On February 13, Guy Coghlan and his wife strolled out of the baggage claim area in front of Concourse A at Miami International Airport, trying for a taxi. The middle-age couple had just arrived from Surrey, England, via British Airways; they were on their way to visit an old friend…
Despite the efforts of Miami-Dade Aviation director Angela Gittens to reform Miami International Airport, the brewing set-to over a prepaid phone card vending contract shows that it’s business as usual at MIA. Contracts get awarded to individuals with the most political juice; prominent among the rewardees is big-time lawyer/lobbyist Chris…
On a Thursday afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, real estate developer R. Donahue Peebles sat at his desk in the Coral Gables office of his firm, Peebles Atlantic Development Corp. Linen drapes softened the sunlight entering his spacious windows, but obscured the view of the lush green skyline. “Don,”…
Does John Renfrow suffer from a severely impaired memory? Or does Renfrow, director of Miami-Dade County’s Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM), just want people to believe his memory is shot? Either way, it wouldn’t be good news for the complex and fragile ecosystem he is supposed to be protecting…
On Friday night, December 13, Miami-Dade County Commissioner Dorrin Rolle pulled his Mercedes-Benz sedan into the carport of his residence in one of Liberty City’s more middle-class sections — the corner of NW 90th Street and 10th Avenue. As he left his car, according to Rolle and Miami-Dade County Police…
Chuck Martinez, Willy Bermello, and Peter Yanowitch, the masterminds behind the Grand Prix Americas — the three-day racing extravaganza that commandeered the streets of downtown Miami October 4-6 — have boasted that 75,000 to 100,000 people attended their event, pumping more than $28 million into the local economy via ticket,…
Rev. Al Sharpton was midway through his Haitian/Refugee/Solidarity speech on the steps of the Torch of Friendship at Bayside Marketplace during last Thursday’s downtown protest rally, when he began rambling on about “Little Efrain.” At first people looked at each other and scratched their heads: “What can the ninny be…
Judy Johnson, ex-general president of American Postal Workers’ Union Local 172 (representing 3500 employees), was pacing the floor of the Scoreboard Bar & Grille in Doral, talking intently on her cell phone. Two weeks had elapsed since she and her colleague, Warren Pearlman, were suspended pending a hearing — she…
It didn’t take long for Gov. Jeb Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to hightail it out of Aventura Station 8 last week, after spending just fifteen minutes glad-handing dozens of Miami-Dade County firemen wearing bright red “Jeb!” T-shirts (supplied by their union, Local 1403 of the International…
On July 29, 1999, Miami-Dade County residents dealt Alex Penelas a political ass-whuppin’ he would never forget. An angry 234,309 people, a resounding 30 percent of registered voters, turned out on a special election day to overwhelmingly defeat, by a 2-1 margin, the Penelas-led “Transit Not Tolls” campaign to raise…
Two weeks before the recent general election, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Capt. Stan Hills is on his cell phone talking to political consultant Armando Gutierrez. The conversation is about last-minute changes to a radio ad asking voters to abolish the Miami-Dade Fire Board, which had run afoul of International Firefighters Association…
It’s Saturday afternoon, October 5, just before the start of the inaugural Grand Prix Americas, the brand-new ultra-chic three-day motorsport extravaganza that commandeered the streets of downtown Miami last weekend. The heat’s unbearable on this stretch of Biscayne Boulevard — from NE Third to NE Sixth. Curvy, Latina TV actress…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami’s Brain Matter Miami underwent significant change between 1990 and 2000, not least of which was the city’s poverty rate: It grew with such exuberance that Miami climbed from fourth to first place among the nation’s most impoverished big cities. That’s…
On July 23, Sharon Franklin went to the Miami-Dade elections office in the Stephen P. Clark Center in downtown Miami to register as a candidate for the Country Club of Miami Community Council. One of fourteen local zoning boards that approve (or not) applications in unincorporated Miami-Dade, it had been…
