The morning of Tuesday, January 20, began routinely enough at Health Crisis Network, South Florida’s largest AIDS service agency. If anything, the 100 staffers at the main office on Biscayne Boulevard might have been a bit more relaxed than usual, having had Monday off in celebration of Martin Luther King’s…

A ruddy-faced man in jeans, polo shirt, baseball cap, and padded ear protectors carries a thick-barrel assault rifle to a field bordered by trees, swamp brush, and a twenty-foot-high dirt berm. Under bright sunlight, he lifts the gun to his shoulder and gets a fix through the scope. He leans…

It’s the barricade from hell: a berm of earth stretching across NE Seventh Avenue at 80th Street, framed by freshly poured concrete curbs and landscaped with languishing bougainvillea and miniature palms. Who could have imagined that this innocuous street closure would ignite an ugly war in Miami’s Upper Eastside neighborhood…

Sonia Gonzalez leads her three-year-old daughter down an unlighted flight of wooden stairs and out the front door of their apartment building into the dazzling sun over Havana, fiery even in January. Her face set in grim concentration, she unfolds a borrowed stroller and tells the child, Sonia Maria Elizondo,…

Back when he was a boxing promoter in the early Eighties, Hank Kaplan used to drive to trainer Caron Gonzalez’s cramped garage gym in Allapattah to note the progress of several fighters Gonzalez was bringing along. Kaplan, a tall, lanky middle-aged man, would lope in and stand on the concrete…

Life wasn’t too bad for King the gorilla back in the summer of 1996. Despite his solitary and obviously inadequate living quarters — a small concrete enclosure at Monkey Jungle in South Dade — King benefited from the devoted attention of his keepers and fans. He routinely worked through a…

Eight-year-old Benlee Bruneau began having problems last year in his class for gifted students at the North Dade Center for Modern Languages, a magnet school in Opa-locka. According to reports filed by teachers, Benlee, who is Haitian American, was bothering other students, and his once sterling grades began dropping. The…

Melanie Morningstar arrived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, one Saturday afternoon this past September toting a backpack full of books and speaking the fractured Spanish one might expect from a blond gringa tourist. Little did the clerk checking her into the Honduras Maya Hotel imagine that the slightly ditsy visitor from Miami…

As laundromats go, My Dream Coin Laundry is spectacular. Row after row of shiny front-loading washing machines hum along to reggae tunes on the sound system. The white tile floor is spotless; dryers along the walls work for free. Men and women fold clothes in air-conditioned comfort while kids skip…

Last month the City of Miami’s Nuisance Abatement Board declared the dingy pink Stardust Motel at 6730 Biscayne Blvd. a public nuisance and shut it down until February 1998. The fraying, funky motel, like many others on the boulevard, has been closed by the NAB in the past, always because…

The 1997 Hialeah mayoral race is already moving along at a brisk clip by this Saturday morning in mid-October, but everyone knows the ride’s going to get a lot rougher very soon. This is a landmark election in Hialeah, and in Dade County too, although right now the scene at…

Back on April 11, the long nightmare on the Miami River appeared to be over. Under mounting pressure from state and federal authorities, the owners of the decrepit freighter Rex Bear had finally found a terminal willing to rent them space to dock their 40-year-old German-made hulk, which for a…

The aged rotary telephone in the third-floor hallway of this dilapidated Havana mansion — long ago partitioned into apartments — rings at short intervals throughout the day and night. Someone in an apartment near the phone usually answers the call and then yells, “AOctavio!” And Octavio, tall and skinny, wearing…

It’s just a 40-foot stretch of land on the north bank of the Little River Canal, but for more than four years that piece of Miami real estate south of 79th Street near Biscayne Boulevard has been a battlefield. Someone was always interested in sticking cable TV poles or sewer…

He could be almost anyone, the clean-shaven black-haired man in his thirties wending his way through the strolling, posing, gossiping, blading masses along Ocean Drive on a Saturday afternoon. He’s wearing a faded paisley shirt, brown pants, and rubber-soled brown leather lace-up shoes. In a black folder he carries several…

The name of the place — Stratogen Health — sounds like a high-tech diagnostic center, or maybe a medical consulting firm. Definitely streamlined and corporate. In reality, for the past five years the name was a front of sorts for something quite different: a pioneering HIV/AIDS treatment center, and the…

Little Debbie Cosmic Snacks: two boxes. Won ton wrappers: a couple of packages. Herbed Italian deli turkey breasts, jumbo bags of potato chips, marshmallows, cartons of nonfat half-and-half, lactose-reduced cottage cheese, gourmet white chocolate chips, refrigerated buttermilk biscuits, sugar cookie dough. All of it stacked in Sharon Diener’s blue plastic…

Shortwave radios all over Cuba may soon be picking up some unusual transmissions: direct from Radio Marti studios in Miami, Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas and County Commissioner Miriam Alonso, together on their very own show, discussing the democratic process as practiced in the United States. One of the more…

This past May the Dade County Commission unanimously voted to honor the late Cuban expatriate Pedro Fico Rojas by naming a stretch of NW 58th Street (between 97th and 117th avenues) after him. Commissioner Pedro Reboredo, himself a well-known anti-Castro activist, sponsored the resolution; Commissioner Miriam Alonso, in whose district…

The first calls came in mid-1992. Students at high schools in southwest Dade were talking about little white pills that had begun to pop up at parties along with the usual cocaine and marijuana. Some of the callers were seeking more information about the pills, downers they called “roofies” or…

At Trail Glades Gun Range, you can’t buy food, there’s only a limited selection of ammunition, and not all the lights work. The few wooden buildings that inhabit the flat, grassy fields could use some sprucing up. To save money, Dade officials have cut back on the county-owned facility’s days…

Having pulled on his black elastic knee guards, Nick Berger leaps up into the ring where William Gonzalez, his practice opponent and sometime tag-team partner, stands waiting. In one corner, Berger climbs to the middle of the three ropes, facing outward. Then he springs backward, flips and turns in midair,…