Dade State Attorney Janet Reno, acknowledging that her office made mistakes in the way it handled the investigation of a North Miami teen-ager’s death, says she will present to the courts any information withheld from last month’s inquest. Andrew Morello was shot to death February 1 by off-duty Metro-Dade police…

Laura Russell is a nine-year-veteran of the Metro-Dade Police Department, a decorated officer with dozens of commendations in her personnel file. In nearly every evaluation, the 28-year-old Miami native has received her highest marks in the category that rates initiative. “Officer Russell is always looking for suspicious or unusual activity,…

Defense attorneys say they wouldn’t be surprised if the Morello inquest was incomplete and one-sided. The proceedings are inherently flawed, they say, because prosecutors are allowed to present carefully selected evidence and testimony without the scrutiny of an opposing attorney’s cross-examination. “What a joke they are,” says Miami attorney Jeffrey…

In the split second it took Laura Russell to squeeze the trigger on her 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol, Andrew Morello’s fate was sealed. Russell, an off-duty Metro-Dade police officer, says lethal force was necessary to keep Morello from killing her and her husband outside their home. Morello, she claims,…

The months leading up to the shooting were difficult for Andrew Morello and his three companions in the van. Morello had been cutting classes at North Miami High School and had fallen so far behind in his schoolwork that his parents withdrew him from school before the end of the…

Three weeks shy of his 50th birthday, Jim Chambers could still move pretty quickly. As he set out across the field, the knees that had forced him to stop playing football two decades earlier were holding up well. He was charging hard, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping. He didn’t seem to…

When Dexter Lehtinen resigned suddenly this past January 13 from his post as South Florida’s U.S. Attorney, prosecutors past and present joined together to celebrate. Gathering the night of the announcement, the group hoisted beers and breathed a collective sigh of relief amid strains of James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”…

Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta didn’t climb to the highest echelons of the drug world by sitting on their duffs and letting life pass them by. They were go-getters who turned adversity into opportunity. And in the process, federal prosecutors say, the partners built an empire. So it should come…

It was a day for redemption, a chance to win back a little respect after years of embarrassment. Everyone wanted to be in on the arrest of Willy and Sal, to be able to say they’d been there when the legend died. So on a rainy afternoon last…

Smuggling cocaine into the United States wasn’t Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta’s only business venture. According to federal agents, the pair was also heavily into the South Florida real estate market. During the past eight months, the U.S. Marshals Service has seized more than $16 million in property they say…

When Miami Herald sportswriter Gary Long picked the University of Washington over the hometown Hurricanes as the number one football team in the land, he catapulted himself to public enemy number one in Miami. Long, who contributes South Florida’s only opinion to the highly respected Associated Press rankings, had the…

For 26 years the hits kept coming: Requiem For a Heavyweight, The Odd Couple, A View from the Bridge, Steel Magnolias, Driving Miss Daisy, Oklahoma!, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, and many other Broadway successes headed directly to South Florida from their sold-out runs on New York’s Great White Way…

With the success of his first two novels, To Speak for the Dead and Night Vision, mystery writer Paul Levine’s future as an author seems bright. He has abandoned the practice of law, a career that not long ago earned him an annual salary of nearly $180,000, and for the…

Teresa Hoover has a quick temper, a harsh mouth, no husband, and four kids. She lives on a rough street in a bad section of Miami Beach. She’s used and abused drugs, though she says that’s behind her. And at age 29, she looks much older than her years would…

In Roy T. Devaney’s third-floor room at the Plaza Hotel, at the foot of the unmade bed, is a four-inch-thick book of poetry whose binding has been completely covered with aluminum foil. The sum total of Devaney’s published work appears in small print on a crowded page of the vanity-press…