Sean was one of those people who never drank in public but who was always drunk. Without too much trouble, she was managing to put down a case of beer every day and still work. Totally dependable. She’d stay up emptying the case until midnight or 1:00 a.m. and then…
It was one of those little things that mean a lot. A postcard from a distant country. “Thinking of you!” it read. “See you soon!” When Shirley McGreal found the Kenya-postmarked card in her mail about a month ago, she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, but she did know…
As the United States trade embargo against Cuba has dragged on over the past 30 years, a simple phone call to the island has become a frustrating ordeal. New or upgraded phone service from the U.S. to Cuba was forbidden when the Kennedy administration imposed the embargo, essentially freezing telecommunications…
The kid is a giant heavyweight: 6′ 8″, 270 pounds. He just moved down from North Carolina. Can he fight? Well, sure he knows how to fight, he can box, and with the right opponent, he can win. Even better, he’s white. It’s just a fact in the boxing trade…
On April 15 and 16, Matthew Block sat almost invisible at the burnished mahogany defense table in U.S. District Judge James W. Kehoe’s dim courtroom in Miami. A slight man in wire-rimmed glasses and a dark suit, surrounded by the dark suits of his lawyers, Block sounded younger than his…
You see him on South Beach, svelte and silent, loping past the News Cafe, Mango’s, the Clevelander. Turning heads. Drawing hungry hands that want to touch, to pet, to hold. On another night you catch a glimpse of those sapphire eyes through the crowd at CocoWalk. He’s never alone. Someone…
People still ask me about my car, the little red Sentra that was totaled as it sat parked outside my apartment in the rain one early morning in November. An off-duty Miami Beach police officer plowed into it. I wrote about the whole experience in the January 20 issue of…
The big jet from Frankfurt, Germany, dropped gently through vaporous clouds to the runway at Miami International Airport, and Kurt Schafer’s heart raced for a few seconds as he wondered, again, if the threats had been serious. Somebody was going to pocket $10,000 for shooting him as he disembarked; at…
It’s your mother, her careworn Iberian face framed in graying hair, smiling delightedly and holding a telephone receiver to her ear. The past few weeks, the posters and ads have been cropping up all over town: “No se olvide de su madre, ella esta esperando su llamada,” they urge. “Don’t…
Don Francisco had promised his television audience a once-in-a-lifetime story of love and adventure during this July 1991 taping of his show, Noche de gigantes. Two years earlier, a pair of Miami sailors, Bill and Simonne Butler, had been rescued off the coast of Costa Rica, having survived 66 days…
Morning on Watson Island. Commuters cruise along the MacArthur Causeway, just across the Intracoastal from downtown Miami. The turquoise water of Biscayne Bay ripples up on a narrow, rocky strip of sand on the north side of the island. Cleared of clouds by a brisk wind, the sky is still…
The bang of the crash didn’t wake me, but the piercing, high-pitched whir of a revving engine roused me to semiconsciousness. Three o’clock in the morning, Friday, November 20. As the revving stopped, I began to drift back under, victim to the migraine headache that had plagued me for the…
Betty Wright is talking about being born again when she’s interrupted by the beeping of her phone, a high-heeled pink pump with pushbuttons. On the other end is a girlfriend, crying and nearly hysterical. “He just did that?” Wright asks in a low voice. “Well, you got to live for…
John Popejoy stood in a Plantation Key courtroom on November 10 and pleaded guilty to two counts of lewd and lascivious assault on a child. Sixteenth Circuit Court Judge J. Jefferson Overby sentenced Popejoy to seven years in state prison, to be followed by five years probation with mental health…
Monday, November 9 was the first day of an unprecedented practice in the 50-year history of Voice of America (VOA), the government agency born of the Cold War to broadcast U.S. news and culture to countries with limited freedom of expression. Between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. on that Monday last…
The street can be a risky place; movement is the only constant. So Marcia Gelbart Walkenstein took it in stride when, two weeks ago, a work crew finally scraped off the mosaic of hundreds of photographs she’d pasted on the side of a building at Washington Avenue and Fifth Street…
August 20 was a typically steamy Thursday in Miami, before anyone was paying much attention to a tropical storm called Andrew gathering in the Caribbean. Right on time, at 6:03 p.m., Lufthansa Airlines Flight 462 from Frankfurt, Germany, carrying 282 passengers, taxied up to gate E-23 at Miami International Airport…
There he is — the guy with the strawberry-blond mustache who tried to electrocute his own mother in the bathtub. And the nurse, now dead, who always wore a flower in her hair. The cowboy with a twisted smirk who invited preteens to his room. The sweet-faced woman whose husband…
The shadows, those skewed flat forms that first began to appear on Miami sidewalks and walls about a year ago, have begun to catch up with Vincent Luca. He’s the earnest artist in horn-rim glasses and holey cut-offs who has loosed the shadows on South Beach and downtown Miami: images…
