Mario Gonzalez was confident he would never be caught. Indicted in 1989 on federal charges of drug trafficking and weapons violations, he knew the cops were looking for him. He’d even seen his own picture on television, where he was described as a violent fugitive. But the 28-year-old Gonzalez never…
That a liberal bastion like the New York Times would command Congress to turn off TV Marti came as a surprise to no one. In an editorial published October 1, the Times referred to the controversial television project as “the limp blimp,” and noted that it had consumed $67 million…
After only a week in South Florida, Minh Nguyen was pretty much ready to pack it all in and move back to Washington, D.C. On September 20 a thief broke into his friend Darryl Strawser’s South Beach apartment and stole all of Nguyen’s belongings and nearly $5000 worth of camera…
Not that anyone outwardly disliked the proprietor of the Americana Bookshop in Coral Gables. (No one we at New Times know of, anyway.) It’s just that Detrick, founder of the Miami River Yeti Watch and chairman of the West Zion Primitive Neo-Dionysian Church of Elvis Slim and Triumphant, was a…
When she read the Miami Herald’s June 27 Tropic magazine, the issue with anti-gay crusader Ralf Stores pictured on the cover, Carol Parker knew she had the makings of a good column. As a regular contributor since 1991 to the South Dade News Leader, a twice-weekly newspaper based in Homestead,…
On May 25, two weeks shy of his 80th birthday, Robert S. decided it was his day to die. He had read Final Exit, the treatise on suicide and how-to guide for the terminally ill, and he had determined that killing himself was the best solution to his faltering health…
In less than five months, the tea dance has become an institution. Or at least as much of an institution as anything can be in the mercurial world of South Beach. Initially held at Aqua, the restaurant in the Winter Haven Hotel on Ocean Drive at Fourteenth Street, the tea…
When Conchy Bretos was recently fired as executive director of the Dade County Commission on the Status of Women, a brief uproar ensued. The dismissal of the one-time county commission candidate prompted three days of headlines and a critical editorial in the Miami Herald. The Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs…
For 34 years Lillie C. Evans Elementary had been an all-black school. That changed last year when thirteen Anglo and eighteen Hispanic students, as well as nearly a dozen suburban black children, volunteered to be bused to the Liberty City school of more than 700. Some of the children came…
As fourth-term Democratic Rep. David Skaggs walked to the podium on the evening of July 1, he was still bristling over the events of the past few hours. Cuban American politics had arrived with a vengeance in the halls of Congress, and it had just cost Skaggs’s Colorado district $23…
Since the time of its invention more than a decade ago, the gamma knife has been hailed for its ability to remove brain tumors that are considered impossible to reach through conventional surgery. Developed in Sweden, the instrument uses radioactive cobalt to excise tumors with gamma radiation, without incisions or…
Just for a moment or two, imagine yourself alongside the renowned architects who were flown in to town this past week by German developer Thomas Kramer and his company, the Portofino Group. For six days, you, along with town planners and local officials and community leaders, would participate in a…
The modern hospice movement was born in England as an idea that you should have someone close by as you near death A a helping friend, a caregiver to sit with you in those final days to ease your fears and tend to your needs. The idea has been expanded…
In the coming weeks, as the push for health-care reform collides with efforts to reduce the national deficit, one federal program is virtually guaranteed to get caught in the crunch: Medicare. Lawmakers in Washington are targeting that sprawling program A primarily for those over the age of 65 A for…
Horses did not eat one another. Pigeons’ heads did not spin around and fall off. In all, the world’s framework did not disjoint. But as of 1:59 p.m. on Saturday, May 29, 1993, it was a world without The Jim and Steve Show. Nobody thought it would last. The radio…
So you’re one of those pessimists who say the triumphant era of American business has faded. That the great Yankee entrepreneurial spirit, which once burned so brightly, is now barely flickering. Well, take heart. And take a seat at the bar. And buy a round for Steven Kaplan and Steven…
What a marvelous spectacle it must have been. A concourse filled with several hundred county bureaucrats, tipsy airline executives, and scotch-swilling local politicians, all rubbing elbows with a select group of well-scrubbed, strapping young men. The date: December 28, 1988. The place: Miami International Airport. The occasion: A party for…
By all accounts, Joaquin Avi*o and Rick Elder never worked well together. The county manager had always resented the way Elder, as Dade County aviation director, insisted on working outside the normal chain of command. Avi*o didn’t mind a certain degree of independence among his key employees, but he was…
In Clint Clark’s neighborhood, they call it “jacking a tourist.” The J-T for short. The media have branded the crime a “smash-and-grab.” It boils down to the same thing: detaining a car full of tourists and then robbing them. To fourteen-year-old Clark the J-T is an everyday occurrence, something friends…
The airwaves beckon. Yet we are captives on the Venetian Causeway. Locked in traffic and reduced to soothing our frayed nerves straight from a bottle. Our larger half, Jim, is not one to obey gridlock protocol. His faded red Mazda lurches left, then right. Soon we are slaloming through the…
A minister, a rabbi, and an attorney are swimming in the ocean. A shark comes along and swallows up the rabbi. A second shark moves in and gobbles the minister. A third shark approaches, sniffs the attorney, and swims off. Why? Professional courtesy. It’s really not so difficult to hate…
Winston Churchill said it best: “Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous.” Miami’s most venerable political consultant, Phil Hamersmith, has a new appreciation for the British statesman’s pithy observation. And he gained it just in time to carry his battlefield injury into this week’s elections. The…
