Debra Flynn sits in the cool night air on the covered wooden porch that encircles her historic home. She is taking stock of her surroundings. Three cats perched on wicker furniture watch her. On the side of the house, a horse named Rocky happily munches hay. In a corner of…

Across Hialeah in the early morning darkness of October 21, more than 125 people awoke with the same purpose and pulled themselves from bed. Drawn from the ranks of the elderly and the unemployed, they shared a 7:00 a.m. rendezvous and, unknown to them at the time, a full day…

Interstate 95 is at a standstill. Venezuelan businessman José Campos Cerrados stares angrily at the rain splattering on his windshield. After dropping his wife, Lourdes, at the hotel, he had taken to the highway like a fool. This traffic is one of the reasons they shouldn’t move to Broward, he…

Not long ago a group of politically connected builders seemed to have a lock on developing a commercial airport at the old Homestead Air Force Base, a 1632-acre tract located between two national parks in South Miami-Dade County. But after nearly two years of preparation, the U.S. Air Force next…

Outside the Grand Ballroom on the second floor of the Intercontinental-Miami Hotel, crystal chandeliers perched high above the hallway illuminate the Spanish-language television network Telemundo’s cocktail reception. Several hundred guests talk shop while nibbling hors d’oeuvres served on silver platters; conversations center on marketing and television. Most of the crowd…

It’s 12:15 p.m. at Mary’s Restaurant on NE Second Avenue. The only meal served here is lunch, so this should be the busiest time of day. Yet the fourteen-seat eatery has no customers. Owner Osvaldo Perez and barmaid Luisa Serrano sit and stare out the front window. It’s been 30…

It is the waning afternoon hours of a special election day, July 29, and the scene at the Spanish-language radio station WQBA-AM (1140) is frenetic. It’s GOTV (Get Out the Vote) time — the final push. Inside the broadcast booth long-time political consultant Herman Echevarria and the mayors of Sweetwater…

Time is running out. By December Coral Gables must vacate a yard where municipal vehicles are repaired and the city’s public works staff is housed. In a hard-fought April 1998 referendum, Gables voters agreed to lease the site to the Rouse Company for a new megamall. Construction of a new…

This is the story of a runaway money train called Sugar Hill. Fueled by your federal tax dollars, it has gobbled cash — almost three million dollars — on a seemingly unsupervised six-year journey of outrageous waste and incompetence. To date all it has produced are unfinished buildings, shoddy workmanship,…

The airboat zips along channels that weave their way across miles of saw grass. The destination is a tree island in the distance jutting from the water like a desert mirage. Onboard are two groups of scientists intimately involved in an ambitious and costly plan to fix the ailing Everglades…

The fourth hole at Crandon Golf at Key Biscayne is particularly treacherous. There are brackish ponds surrounded by mangroves on both sides of the tee. An errant drive can send a ball flying into muddy oblivion. But it’s not just water that presents a threat. A duffer who recently hooked…

The lights on the telephone silently flash red. The phone rests on a table in a soundproof room inside the radio station La Poderosa (WWFE-AM 670). Until recently, five days a week, Col. Matias Farias sat hunched over the table before an extended microphone. The retired U.S. Air Force intelligence…

Imagine Biscayne National Park in 2019. Dozens of planes from an airport at the former Homestead Air Force Base rumble overhead each day. On weekends an ever-growing flotilla of fishing boats, Jet Skis, and racing craft whine and roar through the emerald-green water. Festive music blares and partiers shout. This…

Miami-Dade County’s Eleventh Circuit Court Judge Eleanor Schockett grew testier by the minute. At the request of the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, she scheduled what she thought would be a two-hour emergency hearing at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. As the hearing passed its fourth hour and barreled toward a…

Almost six months after a state board approved purchase of the 8 1_2 Square Mile Area, the plan is as good as dead. Dexter Lehtinen, former U.S. Attorney in Miami and counsel for the Miccosukee Indian Tribe, Inc., has spearheaded the effort to slay it. Gov. Jeb Bush has also…

About two dozen men and women are assembled around a conference-room table in a small building on the campus of the Southeast Fisheries Science Center on a Friday morning in late February. Even though pictures of endangered turtles and a plastic cast of a 300-pound tuna hang on the wall,…

Clutching reins in one hand, cigars in the other, the two horsemen ride at an easy gait. Three other riders trail a few paces back. The group is crossing SW 152nd Street, so far west that Everglades National Park is just a half-dozen miles to the south. The horsemen are…

Sporting a Jimmy Johnson haircut and a bolo tie, Richard Hoagland gazes down at the Miami Circle from the Sheraton Hotel garage on Brickell Avenue. He has been one of the strongest advocates of saving the now nationally renowned ruin, appearing often in news accounts and demonstrations at the site…

In 1995 Miami voters defeated a proposal to convert a sizable chunk of Virginia Key into an eco-campground. Few of the developers, city officials, and environmentalists who bloodied each other in forums before the election, believed the vote would be the last word on the subject. The chance to cash…

Sixty-nine-year-old Francisco Hernandez is taking his daily walk in the early-morning stillness of Amelia Earhart Park, just outside Hialeah. He passes vultures perched, fat and lazy, on picnic tables. He proceeds toward the southwest end of the 515-acre expanse where, for the past four weeks, workers have been laboring for…

Eric Bohnenblost backs up his truck until it’s just touching the long, bulky trash bin. At the moment he’s collecting debris from a window-screen manufacturer in Opa-locka, though his job takes him all over South Florida. On a typical day, he could drive from a Miami fabric-cutting factory to a…