The eighth item on the agenda at this past month’s meeting of the Metro-Dade Community Relations Board regarded the touchy subject of business cards. Seated around a long, narrow table in a cramped Government Center conference room, the 26 board members learned that it is against county policy to distribute…
Lazaro Albo provides a pointed new meaning to the old term “rugged individualist.” For more than a year now the 62-year-old businessman and close friend of countless politicians has absolutely refused to follow the crowd — the crowd of neighbors, city officials, and even some of those influential close friends,…
Two U.S. Customs agents hidden in a trailer office at the Opa-locka Airport captured the scene on blurry black-and-white videotape. The old DC-3 transport plane, its belly underlit and a cargo hold open, waiting on a runway in the dimness of night while five men drift distantly in and out…
Chris Drennan was getting some bad energy from back home in the Sunshine State. Having temporarily relocated to Chicago to care for her dying father, she was concerned about her little red house in Coconut Grove. When she placed a long-distance call to her next-door neighbor, Drennan says, he refused…
Rosaries dangling from their hands, a clutch of women stands on the sidewalk that circles Ermita de la Caridad church. Daylight is fading on a southerly wind from Cuba, breathing wisps of clouds over the tepee-shaped church, which overlooks Biscayne Bay just south of downtown Miami. The women, the majority…
On January 24, when Martha Ayerdis filed a discrimination grievance with the Dade County Affirmative Action office, she officially entered the murky waters through which sexual harassment allegations run their bureaucratic course. But not even the 39-year-old Ayerdis, who worked as a defense lawyer in her native Nicaragua before escaping…
Michael H. Metzger, the controversial California defense lawyer who mounted a nationwide campaign to discredit the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, shot himself in the head with his .357 Magnum at his home in rural Napa County on March 1. His death was the most recent bizarre twist to the…
Two months ago the Northeast Task Force, a 35-member advisory board whose mission is to revitalize Miami’s northeast neighborhoods, was wracked with dissent. A few weeks ago nearly half the city-appointed task force’s membership had resigned. A week from today, the organization more than likely will cease to exist. The…
On this Monday evening at Buena Vista Elementary School, the only public school in Wynwood, the wind outside the open auditorium doors is whistling and banging. It is an apt accompaniment for the restive audience of 200 inside, where Carmen Lunetta, director of the Port of Miami and one of…
At lunchtime most weekdays, Alan Greer walks the few blocks from his law office near the downtown courthouses to the Miami Club or the Bankers Club and, like every other professional who ventures onto the noonday streets, he encounters a good number of panhandlers eager to share his lunch money…
Tracy’s pink plastic mirror is one of those trinkets you buy at Woolworth’s; one swiveling face reflects normally, the other magnifies. Mounted atop a Deco-ish base of swirly, translucent plastic, the mirror is utterly flimsy and fragile, an extreme of femininity. Late afternoons, when Tracy takes it out to get…
The Dade State Attorney’s Office confirmed late last week it will join the City of Miami in investigating allegations against Assistant City Manager Herbert J. Bailey. “We have been asked to look into matters of conflict of interest and nondisclosure,” says the prosecutor assigned to the case, David Maer, who…
In October 1991, the Miami City Commission handed out a half-million dollars and started a small war. The fight erupted over how to improve a few blocks of deteriorated property on the northeast side. As happens with many of the city’s best intentions, political combat quickly replaced constructive action. Today…
It was all in honor of Dan Quayle, back in February 1991, when he was still vice president. Drivers down Biscayne Boulevard slowed to an irritated halt while a few dozen people crossed the street, back and forth from the I-395 overpass to Bicentennial Park, like a disoriented trail of…
A mean little piece of land along the Miami River gained brief notoriety last month as the site of the so-called pizza murder. A thirteen-year-old boy, who had brought some pizzas to share with others who frequented the spot, shot and killed a homeless man for taking two slices instead…
More than ever in these waning days of Fidel Castro, the air between Miami and Cuba is electric with intrigue, upheaval, and the schemes of all types of would-be revolutionaries. There are the militarists, who would wage war against Communism. There are the politicians, who would bring democracy to the…
Punching out an arrhythmic battery of beeps on his horn, Lu Castillo swings the well-worn white van off Biscayne Boulevard and into a paved parking area at Bicentennial Park. He stops the truck a short grassy stretch from the street, along the deep-water slip that leads to Biscayne Bay. A…
A letter arrives in the mail, addressed to you, from something called the American AIDS Alert Association (AAAA). “Ref: Possible HIV Infection,” it says at the top, which makes you feel a bit short of breath. “We regret to inform you that someone who claims to have been intimate with…
Georgina Otero Lee drives a big green van for a living. She transports handicapped people around Dade County. Lately Lee has been driving with a suspended drivers license and is due to appear in court this Thursday on a careless-driving charge. Just one more nut on Miami’s chock-full roads? That…
About a dozen Metro-Dade Department of Corrections officers, most in their uniforms of forest green pants and light green shirts, were bunched together in the small waiting area outside the courtroom on the eighth floor of the Dade County Courthouse. Sitting, standing, leaning, talking, chortling. All at that very moment…
Several months ago, the architectural highlight of the homeless encampment on Watson Island was a room with a porch, constructed four feet off the ground among the limbs of a tree on the shore of Biscayne Bay. The dwelling was a clever little house wrought from an assortment of salvaged…
The six little wood-framed paintings, modestly Impressionist in style, depict a street scene, a shady lakeside park, historical monuments. They are glimpses of Odessa, a port city of two million on the Black Sea. They hang in Alvaro and Ludmilla Alba’s sparsely furnished living room in Little Havana. Alvaro Alba,…
