She is an ordinary three-pound monkey, a brown Java macaque (also known as a crab-eating macaque), languishing in a cage at a veterinary clinic just over the Dade County line in Pembroke Park. She arrived in mid-July after Pedro Diaz, who had stopped with his wife and daughter in Homestead…

Five years ago, just before a grand jury indicted Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez on eight federal corruption charges, the charismatic politician infuriated U.S. prosecutors by claiming to a local television station that the government had offered to drop all charges if he would resign. (It was Martinez who made the…

Fernando Lamigueiro, Jr., and another kid were strolling through bird Drive Park looking for trouble. A gangly sixteen-year-old with coal-black hair that curled past his shoulders, Fernando had run away from home a few weeks earlier. It was March of 1985, Youth Fair time, a Friday evening, and he and…

Lawrence Wigdor’s beef with his Enchanted Lake neighbors puts a new spin on “Not in My Back Yard” — a literal one. The retired real estate broker has met with officials from the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, alleging vote fraud in the approval process for two resident-financed guardhouses in the…

During the past five years, Miami animal dealer Matthew Block has been hailed as a hero and excoriated as a villain; he has played the role of outlaw and law enforcer. Now Block may be closer than ever to assuming another identity: that of a federal prisoner. Barring, of course,…

Franklin Jacobs’s Southern-accented voice grows pained when he discusses Lucious C. Conway. “We love Lucious and pray for him, and we can all say with all our hearts we did everything we could to help the man,” laments Jacobs, an ordained Baptist minister and professional gospel singer with a ruddy…

Omar Corzo admits the allegations in his federal civil rights lawsuit are incredible, even by Hialeah standards. He and his wife Carmen, residents of Dade County’s second-largest municipality, accuse a Hialeah city councilwoman and the town’s police chief of using their political might to orchestrate a five-year campaign of harassment…

B.B. was fourteen and Tito nineteen when they were shot on the road west of the Bargain Town flea market just outside Homestead. The youths were part of a group that confronted two young men, their wives, and their children leaving the bazaar on a sunny December afternoon in 1993…

Surfside police officers who say they were told to downplay criminal activity in the seaside town appear to be backed up by at least two incidents. The allegations, which were made anonymously by the patrolmen, were outlined in last week’s New Times in a story entitled “Wipeout!” Among them were…

A group of Surfside police officers say they have been ordered to alter police reports, destroy evidence, downplay violent incidents, and, in some cases, to overlook criminal activity — all in an effort to maintain the town’s image as a peaceful hamlet by the sea. “They don’t want a police…

When the City of Miami’s Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) advisory board designated the recipients of millions of dollars in federal AIDS funding earlier this past month, it should have prompted a sigh of relief among AIDS activists countywide. After all, internecine bickering had delayed this crucial step…

The League Against AIDS is in such financial disrepair that last weekend most of its eighteen employees were dispatched to the streets of Little Havana, donation cans in hand, to solicit change from passersby. The Dade-based nonprofit, known to its clients (the majority of whom are Hispanic) as La Liga…

Life has been more complicated than usual lately for Miami Police Department Confidential Informant Number Eleven, ever since her identity became known to just about all of Biscayne Boulevard. She doesn’t own a gun or any other deadly weapon, so when she goes out she stashes the next best thing…

Biscayne Boulevard motel owners operate under conflicting pressures A from the police and community to refuse to rent to criminals, and from the economy to rent to anyone who can come up with the roughly $25-per-night charge. Motel managers, unless they are members of the owner’s family, almost always are…

Touted as a national model, Dade County’s ambitious $15-million-per-year plan to combat homelessness has come under the hardest public scrutiny since its inception in 1993. During hearings last month before U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins, old antagonists argued the effectiveness of the plan and its implementation. The debate arose…

A City of Miami police officer is under investigation following a complaint filed by an assistant city attorney. The charge against the officer: lobbying on behalf of a Miami businessman. No one would have thought twice about it except that the businessman, Orlando Mesa, also happens to be the officer’s…

In some segments of Dade County society, Roxanne Falco is a famous person. Stories are told about her, news of her whereabouts exchanged. But the talk is not complimentary, unless you consider sheer notoriety flattering. Roxanne Falco is a prostitute, and she is generally unwelcome in the part of town…

The day before Johnny Torres won the Florida state junior-welterweight boxing championship, he went to work as usual in a lime grove outside Homestead. Bumping down the narrow roads in his ten-wheel Ford truck, Torres was frustrated that he’d have just a few hours after work to get to the…

It was a hot Friday night on Biscayne Boulevard, and they were out under a full moon: the hunters and the game. Here at 73rd Street, across from the Vagabond Motel and in front of a gutted office building, was the game. A young black woman in a low-back jumpsuit,…

This past July, during a special Miami City Commission meeting to consider construction of Dade County’s largest homeless shelter, city leaders heard dozens of variations on one theme: Miami — specifically the northeastern Overtown and Edgewater neighborhoods — is host to a disproportionate share of homeless facilities in the county…

Donna MacDonald’s first day as executive director of the Miami Coalition for the Homeless was a harbinger of events to come. She assumed the post on Monday, August 24, 1992 — the day Hurricane Andrew propelled homelessness to new proportions in Dade County — and promptly faced her first crisis…