It is about midnight on the Intracoastal Waterway and Moises Baez’s baggy blue jeans are flopping as he and a woman in platform tennis shoes gyrate in a merengue on the crowded upper deck of La Rumba. Were it not for the blinding clusters of red, blue, green, and yellow…
Info:Correction Date: 07/30/1998 Info: Ebony and Larceny How did a stolen Steinway concert grand end up in North Miami? It’s a long and sordid tale. By Kirk Nielsen Jonathan Rosen, a 34-year-old entrepreneur of the well-coifed, Italian-loafers-with-no-socks variety, has a very hot commodity: a Steinway & Sons concert grand piano…
“Everything is nice,” says Giacomo Coschignano, smiling through a screened-in window next to the front door of his sprawling one-story house in suburban west Miami-Dade. Things are nice for Coschignano. Extremely nice. After all, the genial, hard-working 59-year-old earned $91,259 last year, more than enough to buy that shiny black…
The silver Honda Civic careens past a no-entry sign into the parking lot of Little Havana’s police substation. After it stops in a space marked “Lieutenant,” a man and woman get out of the car and hustle toward the building’s glass-doored entrance. But a frowning police officer flings open the…
Petunia was eating cherries off the sidewalk about 3:00 a.m. when the first police car pulled up. Then another cruiser arrived. Then another. “There had to be twelve to fifteen cop cars, unmarked and marked. They were everywhere!” recalls Mark Digulimio, who awoke to red and blue flashing lights. He…
You step from a Metrorail car at the Vizcaya station, descend the escalator, and enter a gleaming 60-foot-high glass cone teeming with kids. You follow them into a huge room where others are climbing all over a virtual cruise ship. Walk farther; more tykes are building a house, while teenagers…
The phones were ringing furiously during last month’s pledge drive at WLRN-FM (91.3). Volunteers took pledges for $30, $65, $100, and more. In return, supporters of the public radio station would soon receive their thank-you gifts — coffee mugs, T-shirts, CDs, subscriptions to Newsweek, even dinners at some of South…
Glen Wilsey is knee-deep in a slough three miles south of the Tamiami Trail. Dressed in khaki shorts and shirt, sunlight glinting off his sunglasses, the airboat guide is inviting the six tourists he has just transported into the heart of the Everglades to join him. He wants them to…
When Lisa Cox staged her weekly “Girls in the Night” event earlier this month, everything ran smoothly. Women boogied with women to a thumping disco beat. Above the bar, silent videos featuring topless females cycled endlessly. A few girls made out in a dark corner. There was only one problem:…
After a good four years of terrorizing dance club denizens, the macarena finally appears to be dead. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of its legacy. Hoping to cash in on the line-dance craze, rum baron Bacardi, with the help of salsa singer Willy Chirino and a squad of Miami…
When Dave Fisher proudly held up a gold-painted coconut, a group of twenty men and one woman broke into applause, whooped, and swilled beer. He and the rest of the Fort Lauderdale Area Brewers (FLAB) had just won the first annual Coconut Cup and would soon be taking the gilded…
Amnau Karam will never forget the day she learned that her picture was on Metrorail fare cards all over the county. It was a sweltering July morning in 1997 and her husband Clifton Mallery had left their South Beach apartment to pick up some groceries at the nearby Art Deco…
The big Bud Light clock, ringed in orange neon, was marking 10:00 p.m. at the Rinconcito de Noche cafeteria in Little Havana one night last month when the jukebox stopped. Owner Linda Huerta, who was on her way out of the kitchen with two plates of food, knew right away…
When David White was a boy back in the 1930s, he and his family used to walk the three blocks from their one-story house in the Bahamian section of Coconut Grove to Plymouth Congregational Church in the white neighborhood, just through the trees to the south. The Whites’ house was…
If you are one of the dozens of people in South Florida who were terrorized by alligators in your back yard during the past year, you might have called Pesky Critters or some other wildlife-catching service. These folks are happy to come out and remove the animal in question. Manny…
You can’t go around slashing dogs,” Rosie Heffernan warns a roomful of chattering high school students at Our Lady of Lourdes, an all-girl Catholic academy in South Miami. Not that any of the girls has converted to a religious cult with a penchant for cutting up canines. Rather, Heffernan, their…
The intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road in Coconut Grove is a well-traveled crossing for Miami commuters, but even in the sunlit roar of the morning rush hour it can appear ominous. One or two police cars are parked around the clock on a barren lot at one corner,…
Humberto Hernandez is A) a former attorney for the City of Miami fired in 1994 by his boss for allegedly conducting outside legal work on city time. B) an attorney who the Florida Bar determined should have his license suspended following charges that he violated Bar regulations by soliciting family…
