Let’s all take a moment to formally congratulate state Sen. Frank Artiles, who has long been one of Florida’s worst politicians, for shooting himself directly in the foot and all but guaranteeing he’ll never win an election again. After years of filing hateful, anti-LGBTQ bills, allegedly punching college kids in the face, smearing Black Lives Matter activists as terrorists…
Police unions are paid to defend cops who find themselves ensnared in legal trouble. That’s the basic reason those unions exist. But there’s a bit of a difference between providing legal support to a cop accused of shooting an innocent man and what Dade County Police Benevolent Association President John Rivera did last week.
Jose Felix “Pepi” Diaz (not to be confused with Miami-Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz) was fired after two episodes on the reality show The Apprentice in 2006. He’d been tasked with coming up with a business proposal for Gillette, which was trying to sell some sort of five-razor-blade monstrosity to insecure men. Diaz ended up sleeping in on the day of his pitch and was fired for lack of leadership.
Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta ran the largest smuggling ring of the Miami’s cocaine-fueled heyday. The two high-school friends built a $2 billion trafficking empire, which snaked through multiple banks, states, properties, and even one speedboat-racing league. Though “Willy and Sal,” as they were known, were eventually caught and convicted after nearly a decade of court proceedings in the 1990s, Willy’s brother, Gustavo “Taby” Falcon, vanished 26 years ago before the feds could lock him up.
If it comes to fruition, American Dream Miami would be one of the largest malls in the nation. The $3 billion project is the definition of South Florida largesse: In addition to offering the standard list of luxury shops, American Dream would include an ice rink, a lake for submarine rides, a water park, a theme park, and an indoor ski slope.
For all the debate, tears, and fury that President Trump’s short-lived “Muslim ban” caused, the public actually knows surprisingly little about what happened at airports. The exact techniques Customs and Border Protection agents used before courts quashed the ban have remained secret. And since the ban was suspended in February, Muslims across the nation, including Miami’s Muhammad Ali Jr., have been detained illegally anyway.
Donald Trump is so rich. Big-league (bigly?) wealthy. So wonderfully wealthy that he apparently owes a Miami paint store $300,000 for work at his Trump National Doral Miami resort. So wealthy he’s been fighting not to pay that $300,000 since last year. So wealthy that his lawyers officially lost an appeal yesterday and now he’s gotta pay that $300,000 or try to appeal all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, made history yesterday. For the first time in her 24 years on the job, she charged a Miami-area cop for an on-duty shooting when she filed attempted manslaughter charges against North Miami Officer Jonathan Aledda, who shot Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man, in the leg last year.
Miami’s top prosecutor, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, has faced a tidal wave of criticism from police-reform activists this year for her reluctance to prosecute cops who kill on the job. Today, Rundle did something she’s never done in her 24 years in office: charged an officer for an on-duty shooting.
Nothing can happen in Miami this year that will be funnier than Ben Carson getting stuck inside an elevator today. Nothing. There is no single image more hilarious than the look on Carson’s face as he walked through the elevator’s metal doors at Overtown’s Courtside Family Apartments and then realized they weren’t going to open. Carson and Miami-Dade County Public Housing Director Michael Liu were trapped inside the elevator for a solid 20 minutes this morning while firefighters searched for a way to free the two.
Rarely is it worth calling the cops over anything less than $20. Too much can go wrong to bring police into a fight over something worth the cost of a fancy sandwich. Candace Padavick, a Miami Beach resident, says she lived that very nightmare in 2013: After she couldn’t pay a $16 cab fare in cash, Padavick’s cabbie called the cops. Padavick, in the meantime, went inside to take a shower, and her doorman paid the cabbie.
Miami residents were already skeptical about mega-developer Moishe Mana’s plans to pave over a huge portion of Wynwood and build a gleaming micro-city in its place. Mana, who splits his time between Manhattan and the Magic City, is the largest single landowner in Wynwood. For years, he’s been fighting to…
Jack Seiler once served as the mayor of Wilton Manors, a Broward city with the second-highest proportion of same-sex couples in the whole country. Seiler, a Democrat, now serves as the mayor of nearby Fort Lauderdale, which has its own long history of LGBTQ support. In fact, South Florida as a…
The North Miami Police Department appears to be in disarray: In the past two years, the department failed a critical accreditation test and shot Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man. After audio emerged last week of the department’s chief describing widespread dysfunction among his cops, North Miami officials have been desperately trying reassure the public that the force is fixing its problems.
The Hyperloop at first sounds like one of Elon Musk’s crackpot ideas. Musk, America’s premier huckster polymath, claims his Hyperloop can get travelers the 380 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes by shooting passengers at 780 mph through frictionless pneumatic tubes.
Florida’s mostly Republican legislators can barely pass basic laws like tax cuts or budget plans without tripping over themselves or spiraling into intra-party screaming matches. They’re so bad at writing their own laws that, as the Miami Herald astutely pointed out last week, gigantic companies like Florida Power & Light have to write laws for them. The current Legislature is a Stygian pit of bad ideas.
If you were to take the words of Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Rep. Ted Deutch, and pretty much any other Democratic congressperson in the Sunshine State at face value, Donald Trump is an unstable, proto-fascist warmonger, uncontrollable narcissist, and serial sexual predator who should never have been able to come near any sort of missile-launching device.
Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man, was simply trying to help Arnaldo Rios Soto — an autistic man holding a toy truck — out of the street last July when North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot Kinsey in the leg. Now, yet another officer involved in the case has told investigators that Aledda was warned before he shot that neither Kinsey nor the autistic man had a gun, according to a transcript of his testimony obtained by New Times.
Carlos Beruff has virtually no political qualifications. He’s rich, openly racist, and good friends with Florida’s governor. The real-estate developer and major political donor ran for U.S. Senate against Marco Rubio last year and lost. In that time, he called Barack Obama an “animal,” called for a ban on all immigration from the Middle East, and reveled in being dubbed the “Cuban-American Donald Trump.” Voters heavily rejected him.
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s uniquely unqualified secretary of education, isn’t particularly good at thinking on her feet. Asked why there ought to be guns in school during her confirmation hearing this year, she infamously opined that schools might need to protect themselves from bears.
Earlier this week, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office released an hourlong interview by North Miami Police Chief Gary Eugene — a move that sparked a new media firestorm over last July’s police shooting of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man lying in the street with his hands up. In the interview, Eugene describes a police department in disarray…
Charles Kinsey’s shooting went viral last year thanks to shaky cell-phone footage that showed the unarmed behavioral technician with his arms in the air, begging police not to fire just before a North Miami cop shot him.
