Like many compelling ideas, Love Your Neighbor revealed itself in a vision. In January 1994, Jim Ward and six long-time friends made a pilgrimage to the Super Bowl, as they had done each of the previous thirteen years. In his Atlanta hotel room sometime during the wee hours after the…

On a six-foot-square piece of aluminum that leans against a wall behind Mario Del Castillo’s house in West Hialeah, the words Calle Ocho 96 are spelled out in foot-high letters of lavender, red, yellow, green, and blue, all fashioned from Styrofoam. Along with several other signs stored in the yard,…

Someone called the City of Miami police just after midnight March 5 reporting that a man was crawling toward NW 79th Street from the unlit, trash- and bush-clogged alleyway behind the Edison-Little River Neighborhood Center. An officer who arrived soon afterward found Darryl Butts lying face-down in broken glass and…

We’ve been training for this moment not just the past few hours or days, but for the past few years,” Monica Russo declares emphatically, her voice tinged with a southern drawl. “And now the moment has arrived.” She paces, lips pursed, pausing for a Haitian man to translate her words…

More than 50 people, many dressed for church, packed State Rep. James Bush’s Biscayne Boulevard office this past Sunday with one thing on their minds: hair. Bad hair. Nearly everyone in attendance is a cosmetologist or barber, and they’re worried their profession is about to get blown away by lacquer-headed…

Victor Van Gilst appeared in Dade County Court this past November 30 to answer charges of disorderly conduct and obstructing an emergency vehicle. But he never actually had to answer; the arresting officer got the case thrown out for him. Last October, Van Gilst, a native of the Netherlands who…

Just another audition: On a Sunday afternoon Omar Caraballo shows up at a windowless North Miami warehouse to read for a part in a potential TV series called 2-100 Ocean Drive. Like a few other actors who have arrived before him, he finds a place to wait and reads through…

It’s official: Miami’s own Gabriel Castillo is the one and only Gaby Gabriel. With an assist from entertainment lawyer Richard Wolfe, the 43-year-old percussionist/vocalist induced Sony Discos to back down and change the name of their Gaby Gabriel, a 25-year-old Dominican merenguero named Humberto Gabriel Lantigua. The Cuban-born Castillo, orchestra…

The employees of the posh Bal Harbour Shops are used to treating their well-heeled customers like royalty, as indeed some of them are. But many staffers say the mall management treats them like peons, especially when it comes to the common yet ticklish question of parking. Each year, during five…

Herman Echevarria wasn’t running for anything, but he was campaigning as he never had before. Seated at a long table that took up most of a sound booth at WQBA-AM (1140), starched white shirt sleeves rolled up, Echevarria, president of the Hialeah City Council, held a finger above a blinking…

Next month, the January 1996 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal hits the supermarket checkout displays, and Miami’s own Isabel Cabell has never looked better. The wide-eyed, raven-haired 37-year-old is one of five winners of the seventh annual Oil of Olay/Ladies’ Home Journal “Why I’ve Never Looked Better” contest. This year…

Every weekday evening just before six o’clock, Emilio Milian, Jr., slowly sits down in front of a microphone in the studio of WWFE-AM (670). His neat mustache and wavy gray hair combed back from a deep V hairline are streaked with white. Invariably he is dressed in a conservative suit,…

This past summer, Dade County Court Judge Victoria Sigler won the Singing Judges Contest at the South Miami-Kendall Bar Association’s annual banquet at the Biltmore Hotel. Every year the association invites Dade’s judges to sing for their dinners; besides dining free, the winner parades around the banquet room to the…

Victor Van Gilst isn’t a tourist in this town, but he knows a lot about what it’s like to be one: As a free-lance tour guide, he makes his living leading visitors on excursions around South Florida. And late last month, Van Gilst says, he got a different sort of…

The Heftel Broadcasting Corporation’s acquisition last year of four of Miami’s most popular Spanish-language radio stations — including two of the three most politically influential AM outlets in the Cuban exile community — raised the ire of moderate exile groups opposed to those stations’ strident anti-Castro bias and their methods…

Going south on U.S. 1 near SW 220th Street, off to the right in a grassy clearing down a scarcely paved road from the Disco South Inn and a ramshackle grocery braced by metal bars that stretch over every gap in its faded wood faaade, you can see Pastor Bonny…

The press conference at Victor’s Cafe had been convened to introduce Jorge Luis Gonzalez to Miami. The heavyweight amateur boxing champ from Cuba defected a few months earlier while at a meet in Finland, and now, on this June afternoon in 1991, he was a hot property. Dozens of representatives…

A menacing presence stalks the streets of Hialeah. Though you may never notice (that’s part of the insidious plan), the threat is real. Someone somewhere is seeking to masquerade as a member of the Hialeah City Council. That’s called “falsely personating an elected official,” and it’s a crime. Last month…

During the past three years, homelessness in Dade County has become a high-profile issue, with some of South Florida’s most powerful business and political leaders addressing the problem that once was left solely to hard-pressed social service and advocacy groups. The turmoil has not bypassed one of the county’s oldest…

For more than a year now, the proprietors of Coconut Grove’s Cafe Europa have been receiving pleading, cajoling, and downright threatening letters from City of Miami officials and attorneys. Chef-owner Bernard Lapo’s restaurant, a Commodore Plaza mainstay for the past eighteen years, owes the city thousands of dollars in parking…

As Hurricane Erin was moving slowly toward Miami on Tuesday, August 1, two buses and a van were making the rounds of Dade County’s hurricane shelters. It was late afternoon, and 75 anxious people were running out of time to find a refuge from the storm. But despite having been…

They call this block the Slab. Along the eroded sidewalks of North Miami Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth streets, people are sitting on crates and boxes, a rare lawn chair or lounger, or reclining on makeshift mattresses and ragged bedding. Subdued by drugs, depression, or just the heavy heat, they…