Long before they lead the charge to annex more than half of Bicentennial Park, the good folks who run the Miami Art Museum should consider offering a master class on the art of political subterfuge. They are masters at it. Not only did the museum’s director and trustees persuade one…

Computer programmer Byron Jones knew big trouble was looming before he arrived at work on Wednesday, August 25. Earlier that morning he’d received a call from a co-worker at the Miami-Dade satellite courthouse in Coral Gables: Jones’s computer and several others had just been removed from their workstations and locked…

You open your mailbox one afternoon after a hard day at the office this past August and pull out your junk mail and maybe a copy of a magazine that you subscribe to but never read. Amid the refuse is a large envelope that turns out to be campaign literature…

The arrest last week of Miami Commissioner Art Teele on assault charges following a wild car chase brought to a climactic close one more scene in the drama that has become his life. The saga began more than a year ago with state and federal agents launching corruption probes into…

After flying into MIA on June 29, an extra-hot Tuesday even by Miami standards, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart strolled out of the terminal and headed for his car in the VIP parking lot. An airline passenger spotted him and soon he was swarmed by an angry mob, some of whom weeks…

When U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft visited Miami two weeks ago as part of a nationwide blitz to promote the Bush administration’s war on terror, he issued a scary warning. “Multiple available streams of intelligence indicate to us that al Qaeda plans to attack the United States this year and…

Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt keep having a kind of recurring hallucination. They’re in a jet plane heading toward Miami Beach, on approach to Miami International Airport. They look out the window as the jet heads west over the rooftops of South Beach and then the brilliant blue water of…

There have been events in Juan Carlos Elso’s life that led U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz to describe it as “beyond tragic” last week. Before his world unraveled, Johnny, as his family calls him, was a kid from a classic middle-class Cuban-American family, a former wrestling champion at Coral Park…

Last week Denise Caligiuri Calvo, dressed in a handsome black suit, light-brown hair coifed in a long shag, entered a cramped courtroom at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building and stood before a judge. She raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, her long, manicured fingernails glistening…

The white-haired, soft-spoken man seated comfortably in a plush chair inside the Biltmore Hotel’s elegant lounge thinks the U.S. Treasury Department could be after him. Why? Because during his most recent visit to Cuba he played his harmonica without a license. It’s a joke. But this is not: He has…

Lazara Betancourt was hospitalized with heart trouble and a broken leg when the county’s dog-enforcement agency, a.k.a. the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Animal Services Unit, moved in on her mixed-breed pet Ambrosio. On January 3 Ofcr. Kathy Labrada entered Betancourt’s second-floor apartment on Normandy Drive in Miami Beach, snatched the year-old…

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz may be relieved to learn that Jamie Loughner hitchhiked out of Miami two weeks ago and headed home to Washington, D.C. Loughner was one of the more than 230 people arrested this past November during protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). According…

The terrifying inferno of the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and left hundreds of his supporters dead has returned to haunt Little Haiti. The drab storefront on NW 54th Street that serves as headquarters of Veye Yo, where refugees of that coup now gather to watch videotapes of…

On September 18 of last year, prominent businessman José Calvo was shot to death as he, his wife, and one-year-old son sat in a Mercedes-Benz in the driveway of their Coconut Grove home. A suspect has been arrested, but the murder case is far from resolved. Initially the crime appeared…

On a stormy Tuesday this past November, voters in Miami approved a measure that raised the annual salary of their five city commissioners to a reasonable $58,200. Since 1949 the salary had been set at a paltry $5000 per year. Although a pathetic nine percent of the city’s electorate cast…

Miami’s hip new Wynwood Art District (WAD) has entered an exciting stage of evolution, marked not just by sleek pink-and-black street banners but also a heightened sense of perception regarding the area’s most colorful con artist, Martin Siskind. Marty, as he is known in the WAD community, is currently under…

On a recent afternoon on the busy central Havana street known as La Rampa, Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo ducks into the back seat of a taxi, one of the plethora of boxy old Russian-made Ladas that careen through the Cuban capital. The pudgy driver, who barely fits into the tiny vehicle, turns…

It’s now official: Fidel Castro had nothing to do with a decision to gut the University of Miami’s Dante B. Fascell North-South Center, a federally funded research institute that has specialized in hemispheric affairs since 1984. For months inquiring minds on and off campus have wondered if the shutdown, announced…

Jamie Loughner was arrested near the Inter-Continental Hotel on the afternoon of November 20 and hers is a twisted tale indeed. Police nabbed her at a spot along the fence erected to keep protesters of the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks away from the hotel, where trade ministers…

Miami police Chief John Timoney is old school, but by now he must be aware of several Websites that young techno-geeks who were among FTAA protesters in the city last month have launched into cyberspace. The sites contain videos showing riot police wielding nightsticks and firing rubber bullets and beanbag…

Leo Casino and David Cohn believe that Martin Siskind and a minister’s daughter stole a church in the heart of Overtown and sold it for a quarter of a million dollars. They think Miami Commissioner Art Teele was in on the scheme. The church in question, though, is actually a…

For some people who know Denise Calvo well, the shock, anger, and sorrow caused by the September 18 murder of her husband, José Calvo, must have been informed by a very specific sense of remorse. Their regret would be even more acute because they’ve known all along that undercover cops…