With all the high-rise condos going up downtown, from NW 36th Street to the southern end of Brickell Avenue, one has to wonder: What stunt is Miami trying to pull? This one: Entice at least 40,000 people to move downtown over the next two to four years and then rely…
Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo stunned his fellow Cuban exiles three weeks ago with an audacious maneuver in the quest for democracy on the island. He traveled from Miami to Havana for a vacation, then announced he was staying permanently and demanded permission from the Cuban government to open an office for his…
What if a bagman from a billboard company met with certain City of Miami officials and offered them $350,000 to make a big problem go away? That would be bad, right? Well, two weeks ago city manager Joe Arriola and city attorney Alex Vilarello asked Miami’s five commissioners to do…
Miami-Dade Community College’s recent efforts to purchase the landmark Freedom Tower may have violated several state and federal laws, according to former prosecutors familiar with the planned transaction. The former state and federal prosecutors, who did not wish to be identified by name, believe the intricate deal, advanced by MDCC…
“Call Us Essential” is Miami-Dade Community College’s catchy advertising slogan. And essential to that essential-ness, MDCC president Eduardo Padrón quietly resolved in January to use a lot of public money to buy a very symbolic sixteen-story building in downtown Miami. Specifically Padrón decided it was essential to give Jorge Mas…
As residents and automobile drivers in downtown Miami brace for an ominous high-rise condo boom, a romantic (yet lucrative) episode of urban pioneering is coming to a close. Over the past year Andrew Tobias, one of Miami’s leading financial geniuses and the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, quietly sold…
Long before he came to clean up a few small messes in Miami, this city’s new police chief John Timoney was a young cop in New York City in the early Seventies, when millions of dollars of heroin disappeared from one of NYPD’s warehouses. The case went on to inspire…
Just like President Castro said, you’re either with us or you’re against us. In his latest big move in the 44-year-long chess match that is U.S.-Cuban relations, the comandante en jefe ordered the arrests of about 80 dissidents for, among other things, meeting with the top enemy’s chief diplomat: the…
From the sound of it, a roller hockey revolution is about to roll over Coconut Grove’s bayside Peacock Park, a block east of CocoWalk. The City of Miami Parks Department is forging ahead with a plan to replace a makeshift rink on two netless tennis courts with a 240-foot-by-130-foot roller…
In his February 19 “state of the port” speech, Port of Miami director Chuck Towsley ignored the ravenous billion-ton Gorilla 100 miles away, namely the Cuban economy. A few years ago, that omission would have been unremarkable in a county where the craving to starve out Fidel Castro has been…
The friendly guy at the coffee table in South Miami’s Trattoria Solé bar could have been any 39-year-old, educated, self-assured millionaire from Pinecrest talking politics. But it was Jorge Mas Santos, chairman of MasTec and of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), basking in the amber evening light of this…
Pop morality quiz: An organization with offices in the United States has assassinated a foreign spy in that agent’s homeland, or tried to do so. This is: A) right, B) wrong, C) legal, D) illegal, E) the kind of activity U.S. and Cuban authorities should be investigating. If you live…
Will-Bob was cursing himself as he rustled through the flotsam of photo albums and manila files in his floating studio apartment, also known as Tigua, a 35-foot sailboat anchored a few hundred yards offshore in one of Marathon Key’s harbors. He was trying to find pictures of his and Donna’s…
What would happen at this stage of our war on terrorism if a group of clerics, claiming to represent all members of their ethnic community, publicly appealed for the freedom of suspects jailed for attempting to blow up the head of an evil empire? They would be blasted to the…
It used to be that challenging the Cuba embargo establishment in this town could get you spit on, fired, ostracized, bombed, or even shot. Now, in these more civilized times, it only gets you accused of being a one-issue candidate, at least in the race for Florida’s new U.S. House…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami’s Brain Matter A small misunderstanding about Medicaid and Medicare coverage touched off a crisis in Ofelia Garcia’s world. The money involved (less than $100 per month) would have elicited no more than a shrug from some people. But it was…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami’s Brain Matter Surely by now someone somewhere in Miami’s bureaucracy must have drafted a war plan to attack the city’s outrageous poverty, right? In fact the Community Development Department (CDD) did just that several years before the 2000 U.S. Census…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Are You Poor? Do the Math Miami Portrait Top-Ten Poorest Cities Poverty Quiz Good Surveys Make Good Neighbors Compare & Contrast American Cities There have been many days over the past two years when nary a customer has shown up at Freddie Southall’s coin laundry in…
They’re angry, tough, resentful, good Christians, flush with family values, and full of loathing for Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas. They are zealous and perhaps, according to detractors, a little paranoid. They also may soon be running this town. Their public presence is Take Back Miami-Dade, a political coalition dedicated to…
Take Back Miami-Dade’s crusade to take back Miami-Dade from “homosexualist extremists” is officially doing a number on harmonious community relations. Rev. Willie Sims, for one, is in a pinch again. As a member of the county’s Community Relations Board, his mission is to preach tolerance and understanding. But as president…
With all due respect, Miami City Commissioner Arthur Teele was so mad at a July 9 meeting that he just barely caught himself from swearing into the public record. “Something has gone dreadfully wrong in this city,” he declared from the dais. “And you know old habits are hard to…
Johnny Winton hasn’t solved many of the mysteries inside Miami government in his two and a half years as city commissioner, but the little man with a quick tongue and a big vision has at least started to unravel a few. Like that of the city’s grimy, tattered old downtown,…
