A Miami-Dade County bureaucrat who evoked Jewish mob king Meyer Lansky’s name to orchestrate shady deals ripped off taxpayers to the tune of $3 million in a decade. During an afternoon press conference yesterday, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle unveiled charges of racketeering, fraud, grand-theft, extortion and other white-collar…

If it wasn’t already official, it is now: North Miami has the sleaziest politics in Dade. Consider the town’s latest tangled web, which involves a finalist for mayor getting secretly recorded talking about her lady parts. In the days leading up to the May 14 city election, candidate Lucie Tondreau…

The company that won a hotly contested contract at Miami International Airport worth tens of millions of dollars a year is already in the doghouse with MIami-Dade County’s Aviation Department. On Tuesday, department director Emilio T. Gonzalez fired off a letter to Radames Villalon, general manager of Safe Wrap of…

The former head of a Liberty City non-profit agency that assisted veterans will spend 85 days in jail for stealing taxpayer money meant to help vets get back on their feet. Last week, 60-year-old Charles Leon Cutler was sentenced following his conviction in March on two counts of grand theft…

Ever since Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection retook control of the shuttered Coconut Grove Playhouse last year, the storied structure has been left to rot. And until the state closes a deal with Florida International University, Miami-Dade County, and Gablestage to open a new theater on the site, it will…

In the capital of medicare fraud, Miami therapist Paul Thomas Layman and his cohorts pulled off a doozy of a heist, stealing $63 million from the federal government through bogus mental health services. Now Layman will spend the next nine years in federal prison following his sentencing hearing yesterday. The…

Two years ago, Miami New Times was the first media outlet to report on a crew of scammers who swindled $2.4 million out of 15 real estate investors who believed they were getting sweetheart deals on foreclosed properties. The Miami-Dade Inspector General’s Office busted the delinquents last February. Now one…

At last week’s May 15 Homestead City Council meeting, Mayor Steve Bateman got testy with local business owner Michelle Pederson, prompting her husband Kevin to call hizzoner out. The back and forth occurred during the citizen’s comments portion of the council meeting after Homestead resident Mark Bell — hubby to…

The family that grew ganja together is now the family that pleaded guilty together. In the spring of last year, federal agents and Miami-Dade narcotics detectives dismantled a clan of marijuana growers that distributed thousands of pounds of high-grade weed from South Florida to New York City. Gilberto Santiesteban Jr.,…

National magazine journalism may be coughing and gagging its last breaths, but public radio is giving print reporters hope. In an email to supporters late last night, WLRN-Miami Herald News Director Dan Grech announced the station is reopening its Americas Desk. Even better: The desk will be helmed by Tim…

As Miami-Dade County moves forward with its $12.6 billion plan to fix the aging water and sewer collection system, Federal Chief Judge Frederico Moreno yesterday awarded a significant victory to the Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper, an environmental group that claims the county proposal does not address sea-level rises and catastrophic storm…

John Raimondo is a bit player in the 1999 epic three-part Miami New Times series “Pain & Gain,” which blockbuster Hollywood director Michael Bay turned into a passion project that hit theaters over two weeks ago. Starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the film recounts the absurd dark…

Now that the debate about using public funds to fix up Sun-Life Stadium is over, there is an even much bigger public works project that should have Miami-Dade taxpayers especially concerned. For more than a year, officials for the water and sewer department have been working on a $1.5 billion…

It’s not gonna be easy to follow the dictatorial footsteps of North Miami Mayor Andre Pierre. Throughout his tenure as the city’s head cheese, Pierre had done just about everything to attract the kind of attention usually reserved for a small nation’s despot. His campaign manager was arrested for allegedly…

An otherwise mundane Monday afternoon at the Richard Gerstein Justice Building was interrupted by a fiery calamity. A maroon colored Jeep parked in the public lot underneath the State Road 836 overpass caught on fire, sending plumes of acrid black smoke onto the sidewalk and street facing the criminal court…

For the past month, Riptide had been pounding the drum about Tremont Towing snatching cars from a private parking lot on 17th Street at Lenox Avenue in South Beach. Multiple residents have lobbed a laundry list of allegations at the lot, including that it’s meter is deliberately similar to the…