A dispatcher’s call crackles over the radio: Shop owner threatened, suspect is armed, location is one-seven and six-nine. Miami police officer RRonni Harris steps on the gas and zooms through the darkness toward the scene, which translates from police argot as NW Seventeenth Avenue and 69th Street. Harris knows that…
No question about it: Manty Sabates Morse’s office isn’t what you’d call palatial. Her austerely appointed quarters, on the seventh floor of the Dade County Public School Board’s administration building at 1450 NE Second St. in downtown Miami, measure twelve by seventeen feet. That’s enough space for a desk, a…
Architect Jorge Espinel has a number of visions for Miami’s downtown waterfront. Or at least for what’s left of it. As with all idealized visions, Espinel’s pay little heed to obstacles — political, financial, or otherwise. If they seem fanciful in that regard, they nonetheless strive to accomplish a very…
Twenty students hunched over their computer keyboards or slumped at their desks on a recent Saturday afternoon in Brenda Feldman’s newspaper class. They were preparing articles for February’s edition of Highlights, the monthly Coral Gables Senior High School newspaper, which would be published February 27. Staff writer Kurt Panton labored…
Nina Betancourt strolls toward the skeleton of an unfinished house in an unfinished development called Jordan Commons, located in a community north of Homestead named Princeton. Once the site of the largest and most ambitious low-income housing project ever undertaken by any chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Jordan Commons now…
Kenny Merker exits through a wrought-iron gate in front of his grand, two-story house and heads north along NE First Avenue to a dilapidated building on the corner of 47th Street. On its east face, the street number, 4620, has been unevenly handwritten. The door hangs open as if someone…
In a quiet, wood-paneled West Palm Beach courtroom last week, far from clattering plates and customers’ chatter, South Florida’s best-known female restaurateur tried to explain why Joe’s Stone Crab has hired so few women for high-paying server jobs. Jo Ann Bass, Joe’s president from 1984 to 1995, testified for three…
Over the past 200 years, members of what is now called the Miccosukee Tribe have searched, fought, and finally negotiated for a permanent home. Part of a southern band of Creek Indians who spoke Hitchiti, the tribe had migrated from Alabama and Georgia to North Florida by the Eighteenth Century…
Roughly 40 miles west of Miami, the Tamiami Trail breaks its straight-line monotony and angles northwest into the shadowy forests of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Right at that bend, a narrow, two-lane road intersects the Trail and heads south, across a drainage canal and past a dense weave of…
The sweat on Bob McAllister’s bald pate glistens even in the fluorescent light of the Coconut Grove Convention Center on this first day of November. He pirouettes across a blue-skirted stage as he relates anecdotes and quips conspiratorially to the front row. This is a tough crowd — 2300 Dade…
Though Sam Thompson is running late on this hectic afternoon in early October, the indefatigable dean of the University of Miami School of Law refuses to forgo his sprints around the track — four laps, 440 yards each. When he finishes, he heads to the law school’s courtyard. As a…
Identification cards, wallets, clothing fragments — the flotsam of the downed ValuJet Flight 592 — are continuing to float up from below a mat of muck and seared sawgrass at the crash site in a northeastern corner of the Everglades. Recent repeated rains have caused the water level to rise…
This past week, while Congress was wheeling out its latest weapon in the ever-escalating fight to curb illegal immigration, an equally potent — if far more obscure — piece of ammunition was quietly making its debut in the red- tape-festooned halls of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)…
The day begins early and ends late for Pat Tornillo. He rises at 5:30 a.m. to take his vigorous morning walk along Brickell Avenue — his mind already alive with plans, for he has many jobs to do. Most mornings, he arranges a breakfast meeting, either at his office near…
It was about 2:00 p.m on a recent Sunday — low tide — when a couple on a water scooter cut the motor and floated to the south side of a City of Miami boat ramp. They studied their prospects for pulling the craft out of Biscayne Bay. The ramp,…
Nobody could get the indomitable Jean Rich to slow down until cancer finally grounded her. One of the first women in the United States to own and operate her own airline, she was relentless in her pursuit of success. At the headquarters of Rich International Airways, located in the northeast…
The Loading Zone in Miami Beach — with its interior walls lined with wire display cases containing leather jackets and chains for sale — hardly seemed the right setting for a clinical discussion of safe sex and HIV. The fifteen people gathered on a Monday night in the dingy light…
Waste Management garbage truck number 258 makes its way to the gate of the company’s Miami depot on NW Tenth Avenue, then heads loudly north toward Liberty City, hinged metal clanking, diesel engine groaning through the silent streets. Pulling into a parking lot at the Sugar Hill Apartments on NW…
Squat and hefty, at first glance Miami lawyer and civic activist Dan Paul doesn’t look like a man who would take on the combined forces of the Miami Heat, the Dade County Commission, and the chairman of Knight-Ridder. But think bull terrier. When Dan Paul sinks his teeth into the…
A six-foot-high cyclone fence surrounds the New Horizons apartments in Liberty City. At the entrance to the seven-story building, a security door is always locked. After dark many of the building’s residents, most of whom are elderly and black, stay behind their locked apartment doors. They are not afraid to…
