Everything is dirty, or at least feels dirty. Metro-Dade buses, once bright white with blue and lime-green stripes, are now various shades of gray. With the reduced water pressure, it’s hard to get clean under the dribble that falls from shower nozzles. Better to take a sponge bath (and there’s…

It wasn’t exactly the stuff of a John le Carre novel, but it was espionage nonetheless. Cloak and dagger, public utility-style, you might say. On August 18, several Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) workers armed with cameras boarded five county trucks and headed for Hialeah. Their mission was clear:…

Nobody is having more fun at the Commissioner James Burke Labor Day Family Picnic than Commissioner James Burke himself. “Welcome!” he says to guests filing through the gates of Arcola Lakes Community Park, just north of Liberty City. “And oh boy, are you gonna have a good time today!” As…

In the pantheon of great American empire-builders Nelson Long’s name may not immediately spring to mind. Rockefeller had oil. Vanderbilt was master of the railroads. J.P. Morgan ruled steel and financing. The Hearst name became synonymous with the publishing industry. Long, in his own obscure field, was equally unsurpassed. His…

On Monday, August 1, a man broke into the Coral Gables home of an 80-year-old woman — the wife of a federal judge — and raped and robbed her. Joan Fleischman, a veteran Miami Herald reporter and columnist, learned of the attack late the following day and quickly wrote a…

These are not the kinds of days James Burke probably dreamed of when he won election to the Dade County Commission in 1992. Since late last month he’s been defending himself against a torrent of criticism that he slipped behind the backs of county attorneys to request $9000 of taxpayers’…

Wanna see how nasty this business is?” asks chef Cindy Rothman, riffling through her Filofax and a stack of documents. “Take a look at this.” She holds up a sheet of paper on which is photocopied in block letters: “Don’t be fooled! There’s only one Cilantro and we lost our…

I am so convincing I scare myself. I’m standing in a small dingy room, staring into the lens of a video camera and demonstrating why I should be hawking Snickers on national television. A casting director is working the camera and lobbing pro forma questions about my vital statistics. Each…

The news filtered through South Florida’s environmental community like polluted runoff into the Biscayne Aquifer. Mary Williams, the top state-level environmental official in the region, was being transferred to the home office in Tallahassee. After nearly two years as director of the southeast district of the Florida Department of Environmental…

To the untrained eye, cricket looks like a lot of standing around. Which it is. But it’s more. It’s a lot of standing around with a purpose, the purpose that links all competition: to pummel the opposition. Cricketers just happen to do this for the most part with their hands…

On February 12, 1968, hometown fans at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica, upset with an umpire’s call in a sporting match between the West Indies national team and a visiting squad from England, express their outrage by launching beer and rum bottles onto the playing field. Ignoring appeals by both…

Even in this age of ultrahigh finance, it’s churchgoers’ blind faith that their contributions to the collection plate will be well spent by others. No receipts requested, no quarterly spreadsheets provided. Among a group of parishioners at Mount Hermon African Methodist Episcopal Church in Opa-locka, however, that trust has eroded…

South Floridians who are even vaguely familiar with the brief life and eventful times of the City of Sweetwater probably weren’t surprised to see this image played across their television screens last month: Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators leading Sweetwater City Councilman Ronald Mitro, unshaven, sporting a Flintstones T-shirt,…

Like the rest of the industrial world, Dade County is smothering itself with trash: three million tons of solid waste per year. In the late 1980s, after the Florida legislature passed a statewide waste-reduction act, county officials set about developing one of the nation’s most comprehensive recycling programs. Today an…

Twice each year the Dade County Grand Jury releases its report in much the same way as a sailor would cast overboard a message in a bottle, albeit with a little more fanfare. While the jury’s primary function is to review prosecutable offenses (in particular first-degree murder cases) and decide…

Does South Beach have a parking problem? Dade County Court Judge Raphael Steinhardt would probably say so. According to an incident report filed by two Miami Beach bicycle cops, the judge became irate after his green Corvette acquired a twenty-dollar handwritten hood ornament for parking in a no-parking zone across…

Every year Dade County is required by law to publish the names of all business-and land-owners who haven’t paid their county property taxes on time. Dade publishes two lists: one for local businesses’ unpaid personal property taxes (i.e., those that relate to an enterprise’s equipment and furniture) and one for…

Two weeks ago today, County Commission Chairman Art Teele and Commissioner Pedro Reboredo convoyed north to the West Palm Beach headquarters of the South Florida Water Management District, along with Aviation Department Director Gary Dellapa and Department of Environmental Resources Management Director John Renfrow. When the future of your county’s…

Key Biscayners failed this past week in their effort to snare a parcel of Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Recreation Area, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, at the ripe old age of three, Dade’s youngest municipality is behaving less like a toddler than like an uppity adolescent…

I knew it was going to be a good day when I arrived at 7:30 in the morning to find several hundred people already waiting in line, and the doors weren’t scheduled to open until 10:00,” says Russell Galbut, managing director of South Florida’s most prolific condo company. “It was…

Bob Knight is apologizing for getting all worked up, which for him means talking even faster than usual and raising his voice a little, but not in a way that would suggest he was mad. “Sorry for getting carried away,” says the botanist, leaning earnestly over the steering wheel of…

A quick quiz: Of the following prospective tenants, which might a landlord be most likely to select? 1. A gang of unemployed teenage crack addicts 2. A cadre of Maoist rebels 3. A team of alert environmental regulators If you’re William I. Donner, the answer might not be at all…