It is Sunday evening in the Happy Room, the bar at the Miami Outboard Club on Watson Island. Clemente Gonzalez, a talkative 38-year-old with a goatee, is recapping the aquatic equivalent of war, which broke out on the MOC grounds a few hours earlier. Armed with bilge pumps, dozens of…
These are perplexing times for the hip, at least in Coral Gables. New is old, old is chic, and, to paraphrase that hepcat Bob Dylan, when you think you’re at top of the heap, you just might be on the bottom. Then again Dylan is over 50 now. In a…
It’s almost midday and Miami-Dade County Commissioner Javier Souto zig-zags his shiny new purple mountain bike down a sidewalk past a telephone pole, a trash can, a bus bench, and a street sign. Clad in dark-green slacks, a crisp, navy-blue shirt with red and white pinstripes, and a light-green baseball…
The last of 35 suburban-style houses flashed by as we cruised west through the Everglades. The two lanes of pavement plastered over swamp were still pretty smooth, though miles of gravel lay ahead. On my left I glimpsed a dozen very big, white birds perched in a stand of cypress…
On a Tuesday in May 1945 several Miami residents decided to go for a swim in the ocean. Two women and five men, including a lawyer, two grocery store owners, a union leader, and two U.S. Navy sailors, were among them. They left work downtown, climbed into their cars, and…
It’s not long after lunchtime when Justin Styer and Bob Glazer climb into a longbed, white GMC pickup truck. They drive half a mile to a boat launch and back their twenty-foot fishing vessel into the water. After some blue smoke plumes from the 150-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, they head…
The victim was female, in serious condition, sprawled bellydown in her tattered, brown, velvety coat near the Sears store on the edge of Coral Gables. When Luzandra Diaz arrived on the scene early in the evening of February 10, people were poking at the incapacitated little body with car keys,…
It was Saturday night at a new club in uptown Miami and a hot young dance band was booked for the evening. An excited group of people waited outside. Inside the concrete building, liquor and beer flowed freely. But this wasn’t the scenario that owners of Timba, located at Biscayne…
Harvey and Alice are out for a late-evening walk in front of their three-bedroom house in a quiet, fenced-in, botanical-garden-of-a-neighborhood in Coconut Grove. Each has a four-foot, blue nylon strip attached to its neck. Both are off-white American Eskimo hounds. At the other end of Harvey’s leash is Luis Font,…
“Come around eleven o’clock. It starts gettin’ thick ‘n’ chunky around then,” Bo the Lover growls into his cell phone. Bo, a.k.a. Brindley Marshall, has promptly returned a page. It’s Friday night and the caller is inquiring about a hip-hop dance party that Marshall’s Pure Funk DJs are throwing at…
The little green wooden cottage near Biscayne Bay survived thrashings from the mighty hurricanes of 1926, 1935, and 1992. But starting in fall 1997, human forces accomplished what the storms could not: A construction crew up and moved the one-story, pitch-roofed bungalow a few hundred feet to a new resting…
Robert Dowd is talking about legalizing drugs again. He’s sitting in an old easy chair — vanilla with copper crisscrosses — that clashes intensely with the sea of yellow and gold shag carpet flowing across his living room. Dowd is a mellow dude and a vegetarian who wants world peace…
As the waning moon rose over Dinner Key on December 8, Mary Barr Munroe, the wife of Coconut Grove pioneer and author Kirk Munroe, returned from the grave. Pink-cheeked and clad in Victorian dress, she begged Miami commissioners to stop two Boca Raton men from building 41 four-story townhouses amid…
Miami-Dade County lays claim not only to an endless stream of Fidel Castro-related paranoia, but also to a rich history of actual espionage. Havana’s agents have infiltrated a half-dozen exile groups. Some highlights: Bay of Pigs veteran Carlos Rivero-Collado formed a paramilitary group called the Pragmatistas in the early Seventies,…
On one of those brilliant aqua-hued Miami Beach afternoons, 28-year-old Joel Reist is 25 feet high, wrapped around a thin but sturdy royal palm. The tree towers over a large open-air patio area surrounded by the Plymouth and Ansonia hotels. Reist is hanging a string of tiny Christmas bulbs as…
In the golden glow of an October evening, several dozen opera aficionados chat politely as they queue for a much-heralded engagement. These connoisseurs of Gesamtkunstwerk, “the total art form,” as Richard Wagner called opera, have traveled great distances to see a radical new staging of Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), the…
On a cloudy, gusty July afternoon the trawler Calanus is plowing eastward through a light chop in the Gulf Stream about five miles east of Key Biscayne. In shorts, white T-shirt, orange life jacket, and blue helmet, Jim Post stands astern, bare feet against the wooden planks of the deck…
When the U.S. government’s war on illegal radio hit the Pure Funk Playhouse in Liberty City on July 28, Diamond Perkins was lounging on a black leather couch next to a row of huge speakers. After greeting a pack of law enforcement officers in the entrance of the one-story concrete…
You probably don’t have the $65 million that Evergreen Media spent in 1996 to buy WEDR-FM (99.1), one of the most popular radio stations in the Miami area. And even if you have money, why waste it? For less than $1000, you can bypass the humdrum commercial mainstream and broadcast…
These are confusing times for affairs of the heart. Men are sleazy jerks; women are fickle teases. For years now, the lonely and lovelorn have resorted to dating services and romance sections of weekly newspapers. Romantics, however, hold out for miraculous chance meetings in laundromats, discount stores, airports, and gas…
At Wet Willie’s bar on Ocean Drive, a cheery Mike Goodwin, age 28, holds a big strawberry daiquiri in one hand and snakes the other through the air to imitate a drunk driver weaving through traffic. “If a guy’s doing this down the road, take him to jail!” he exclaims…
Hustling down a dirt road surrounded by miles of farmland, Leslie Fernandez struggles to keep a rifle balanced on her shoulder. Dressed in bell-bottom jeans and a white T-shirt, she catches up with her fellow commandos — five men dressed in military fatigues and also toting weapons. “What kind of…
