In June 1998 John Drew purchased Lambda Passages, secure in the knowledge he had made a good business investment. After all, the gay and lesbian bookstore at 7545 Biscayne Blvd. had been operating successfully for fifteen years. In transient Miami that qualified Lambda Passages as a venerable institution, an excellent…

There are paperback books, LP records, baskets, computer keyboards, and even a vintage Polaroid camera for sale at the People With AIDS Coalition thrift shop at 270 NE 39th St. The charity donates some of its used wares — furniture, kitchen utensils, and clothes — to indigent people who usually…

At Level nightclub in South Beach on a Thursday night in late June, models pranced down the blood-red runway wearing sheer, hip-hugging sarongs below and body paint on top, outfits courtesy of Anastasia Monster of Art. On a stage the self-proclaimed “last of the Great Masters” splashed colors onto a…

Darrin McGillis doesn’t believe his sister committed suicide. On a warm afternoon in January, his eyes beginning to tear, he expresses his skepticism. “No one saw her hanging,” he says, having just ordered a turkey and cheese sandwich for lunch at the Oasis Café in Miami Beach, an item not…

From a distance Flagler Memorial Monument appears pristine against the backdrop of a cerulean sky. Looking northward from the MacArthur Causeway during daylight hours, one sees a 96-foot obelisk that resembles a smooth ivory sword pointing toward the heavens. It stands on a two-acre island surrounded by shimmering Biscayne Bay…

It’s 3:00 p.m. on a weekday, peak passenger time, and Elucien Cheridor is driving Miami Mini Bus number 29 with about $60 in singles stuffed inside the jitney’s ashtray and four people onboard. On the fourth round of a not so profitable day, Cheridor departs downtown Miami indignant. “This is…

In 1997 Maria Yopp-Mathias whacked a man named Luther Clark in the head with a wooden stick. Clark, she claimed, had stolen from her. She later was convicted in Miami-Dade Circuit Court of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. Authorities sent Yopp-Mathias…

The way Lisa Willoughby tells it, her boss Jack Garofano crossed the line on a February morning in 1998. After the two discussed some personnel matters in Garofano’s office, he stepped out for a cup of coffee. She stretched. When he returned, he allegedly stood beside her and stared at…

If fate had been kinder, or if people in state agencies had done their jobs, perhaps nineteen-year-old Kyle would not have done time in a state correctional facility. Nor would he now be stuck in Krome detention center. When social workers from the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in…

Thanks to the Elian Gonzalez saga, things in las dos Havanas are becoming surreal. In Little Havana reporters spend hours waiting for a six-year-old kid to wheel by on a bicycle, and tourists pose for photos in front of the home where he is staying. Across the Florida Straits, Fidel…

The scene outside Elian Gonzalez’s Little Havana home was rather subdued this past Saturday afternoon. A few network news crews and photographers staked out the house from a neighbor’s yard, huddled around a television set atop a milk crate, watching the NFL playoff game between the Washington Redskins and the…

On a warm Friday morning in mid-December, the local Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) coalition held its monthly meeting at Miami-Dade Community College’s downtown Wolfson Campus. The troubled agency’s mission is to ease program participants off welfare and into the work force, a transition that has been rocky at…

In late August, after Miami businessman Teo Babun and three anonymous partners founded a company to help Cuban exiles reclaim their former belongings on the island, 75-year-old Vicente Lago Grassot shuffled into the corporation’s sixth-floor Biscayne Boulevard headquarters with the help of a cane. He carried a red-plastic folder bursting…

One Sunday night in October, Porsche Williams met with old friends from the Opa-locka neighborhood where she grew up. About twenty teens were partying together that evening at Platinum nightclub, toasting a friend’s graduation. But it was also Porsche’s first outing since she split with her boyfriend, Jonas Baptiste, and…

A lot has changed since the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) embarked on a legal jihad against the City of Miami on behalf of 5000 vagrants in 1988. Senior U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins, whose ruling in Pottinger v. Miami created a national stir, has died. So have…

Keith Moss emerges from the garden of his north Coconut Grove home carrying a hose. “Not many people water their car,” he says, while drenching more than twenty species of herbs, flowers, vines, and weeds that completely cover his 1980 Toyota Corolla station wagon. Plants such as mallow, Moses in…

United Way is in the business of breathing life into communities. It provides child care, keeps families together, and rescues the homeless. But recently United Way of Miami-Dade, the charity’s local branch, committed a murder. Well, kind of. It all began in April when the organization purchased the six-story Ansin…

In a crowded Stock Island trailer park about 90 miles from her homeland, Juana Maria Chambrot lays on a narrow cot lamenting her losses. “I have no life here,” she says staring blankly at the ceiling. “I don’t even go outside. In Cuba I could at least walk over to…

Key Biscayne is perhaps the most bike-friendly town in South Florida. It’s a place where pros show off their carbon fiber Colnagos and 28-mile-per-hour pace. Congestion isn’t a problem on the key; intersections can be counted on one hand. In fact until recently high-speed renegades on two wheels flew through…

William Vallenilla uses words like funky and artsy to describe his shop on the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and NW 69th Street. The eclectic 1600 square-foot space is filled with Gothic candelabras, 1920s Art Nouveau furniture and other used merchandise arranged according to theme. From the occult section to the…

History doesn’t mean much in Miami. Barely 100 years old, the city has allowed the bulldozing of decades-old buildings, re-routing of rivers, and ravaging of sacred Native American grounds. The few who are sensitive to the past look to the city’s preservation officer, Sarah Eaton, to safeguard its patrimony. But…

On a recent sweltering June afternoon, Rigoberto Betancourt sits outside his uncle’s Hialeah home and repeatedly pushes the redial button of a black cordless phone. The stifling air in the cement yard adds to his frustration; for the past few hours he’s been trying unsuccessfully to call his wife in…