North Miami City Clerk Michael Etienne might have just committed the most wholesome theft of public money in American history. Sure, people steal a few thousand dollars in taxpayer cash all the time — but instead of using that money to cover something heinous, like dog-track gambling debts, Etienne legit stole some money to stare at Abraham Lincoln’s giant head…
Bribing the head of an entire nation’s anti-corruption task force is apparently cheaper and way less glamorous than you might think. Luis Gustavo Moreno Rivera, who was the director of Colombia’s Office of Anti-Corruption, admitted in court today that he could be bought with about $132,000 and that he’d taken a portion of that money inside a bathroom at Miami’s Dolphin Mall.
Raymond Odigie Uadiale, age 41, is great with computers. Good enough to be hired by Microsoft as a network engineer. And good enough, according to the feds, to run a virus scamming ring that seized computers via a fake warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, charged people a $200 “fine” to unlock their desktops, and warned users they might be sent to prison if they didn’t pay up.
The Dream Defenders, a Florida civil rights group formed near the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, has helped turn the GEO Group, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s single largest contractor, from a largely unknown private prison firm hated by justice-reform activists into a toxic company from which even some Republican politicians are now refusing donations.
Last Friday marked the “United the Right 2” rally in Washington, D.C., an extremely sad, Pepe-the-Frog-filled, neo-Nazi march to commemorate the time last year that a bunch of white supremacists killed a civil-rights protester in Charlottesville, Virginia. But Pepe, his chubby racist-frog-meme buddy Groyper, and the rest of the bizarre,…
Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart is not exactly known in local political circles for being particularly bright. But, in what might be the single most-boneheaded thing he’s done ever, the congressman on Tuesday tweeted out a photograph of himself at an anti-Nicaraguan-President Ortega rally — posing with a man in a…
Miami Dolphins wide receiver Kenny Stills has been kneeling during the national anthem to protest the racist American justice system for portions of the last three NFL seasons. Stills is extremely serious about his activism — in February, he took a road trip in an RV to meet civil-rights supporters…
Earlier this year, real-estate analyst Peter Zalewski warned that South Florida developers had so overbuilt luxury condos for the global 1 percent that it would take an estimated four years to sell them all. At the rate condos were selling in downtown Miami, he found, the 505 available units would have taken nearly 6.5 years…
Democratic North Miami state Sen. Daphne Campbell is a lawmaker so ethically compromised that her own Miami-Dade County Democratic Party today suggested she might be a Republican in disguise. Her latest reelection campaign seems in shambles — after a string of utterly absurd headlines, including getting caught passing around…
Diego Maradona: the man, the myth, the infamous cocaine user, the probable friend to Italian mobsters, the guy who got extremely drunk at the 2018 World Cup and had to be carried away by handlers — the legend. Like many of the athletes deemed the “greatest ever” in their…
In 2014, Miami Police officers chased a 21-year-old graffiti artist named Demz who was tagging a wall in Wynwood during Art Basel. During the pursuit, the cops ran the artist over, killing him. The officer who ran over Demz, who just happened to be the son of a Miami-Dade prosecutor,…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group — the single largest contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — absolutely does not want anyone to accuse it of caging people or separating families. GEO is so upset by such allegations that it threatened to sue Dream Defenders, a Florida civil rights group, all…
Even in 2018, it’s a shock to actually hear cops admit to straight-up framing black suspects as a matter of policy. That’s exactly what’s happened in Biscayne Park. In June, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment alleging that Raimundo Atestiano, the former chief of the tiny Miami-Dade town, had intentionally framed…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s single biggest contractor, with more than $400 million worth of deals to run private prisons, including the Broward Transitional Center, a site housing “low-priority” detainees. As the Trump administration has ripped families apart and jailed immigrants with no criminal records, GEO has come under heavy fire…
Maurice Symonette’s story is baffling, to put it mildly. Symonette, who also goes by the name Michael the Black Man, somehow went from being a part of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult to getting acquitted of murder charges himself to being a staple at Donald Trump’s presidential rallies…
America largely phased out the use of privately run, for-profit jails and prison facilities in the early 20th Century after the public realized the practice of making a profit from caging people was a particularly heinous piece of the capitalist economy. But amid a government privatization push under Ronald Reagan, the idea came back. Two private-prison firms — California’s CoreCivic and Florida’s GEO Group — dominate the for-profit human-caging business today.
When Vincent Gaines was sentenced to five years in prison on robbery charges in June 2013, state officials recommended he be placed in a mental-health unit because he had regular visual and auditory hallucinations. So Gaines was transferred to the Dade Correctional Institution in South Miami-Dade County, where he was placed on a “boneless diet” that left the five-foot-nine man 40 pounds lighter — dropping from 190 to 151 — in just 18 months.
Compared to wind farms and solar parks, nuclear power plants are, in general, extremely expensive to operate and terrible for their surrounding environments. Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Homestead certainly has not done good things for the local water supply. The power plant’s infamous canal system…
Last month, Miami’s federal prosecutors unveiled a string of indictments in an international scheme to funnel a staggering $1.2 billion out of Venezuela’s state-owned oil firm and then launder that money in South Florida. In fact, prosecutors believe that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is wrapped up in the scheme, the Miami Herald reports.
Marco Rubio, a surrealist art project that accidentally became sentient and was elected to the U.S. Senate, spends a lot of time tweeting about how America needs to get “tough” on Vladimir Putin. If you need someone to sponsor an extremely lame amendment “trolling” Putin by renaming the Russian embassy’s street in Washington after a dead Russian dissident, Marco is your guy.
Last week, the Hollywood Police Department conducted a useless, money-wasting “sting” on an adult store, where they arrested 13 men who were masturbating or having consensual oral sex in private, locked rooms. Rather than ask why the hell HPD thought it should be arresting gay men for no reason…
Miami’s cost of living remains relatively similar to that of other major, rent-crunched cities, such as Seattle and Boston. But — as New Times repeats so often it has turned into our meditation mantra — the county’s median household income level, which hovers around $43,000, is significantly lower than that of any other city of similar size and relative level of economic importance.
