They all want to ride a wild horse,” says Taras Lyssenko, explaining why women love him. “But if you ride a wild horse, is it wild any more? I basically don’t stay with a woman longer than one night. If they want to cook breakfast, okay, but that’s it. I’m…
Captain Midnight, an irascible hermit, lives from time to time on a crumbling trawler with six yelping mutts. The captain is universally hated by his neighbors. He likes to pop up on deck wearing yellowed Fruit of the Looms and curse at novice sailors. If the sailors tack too close,…
A news photographer captured the image: Harry S Truman hoisting a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune dated November 4, 1948. The headline proclaims Thomas Dewey the winner in a close presidential dogfight, but the press guessed wrong — late returns squeaked Truman into a second term. In the photo,…
In 1989 a hearty, hand-shaking Californian named Sherman Whitmore motored into Miami on a 68-foot Bertram. He stepped off the yacht into a cream-colored Rolls-Royce, drove to the Grand Bay Hotel for brunch, and began dropping hints about his $13 million West Coast real estate holdings. It wasn’t palm trees…
Every so often another unsuspecting motorist comes zooming down SW Thirteenth Street into Coral Gables. All at once, a few blocks past Le Jeune Road, the pleasant residential route becomes a nightmare of a country road, complete with monster potholes, pint-size boulders, and a gloomy absence of streetlights. “The next…
Whenever Timothy Ivory reads a newspaper, he starts to laugh. Hurricanes? Hah! Home invasion robbers? Tee-hee! Noise pollution? Heat waves? Third World tyrants with nuclear weapons? Wahoo! The things that worry normal people don’t apply to Ivory. He’s the latest lucky local to discover Miami’s best-kept real estate secret –…
“Grab a beer. We’ll go sit on the porch where we can smoke, and I’ll tell you the whole story. It’s the first time I been interviewed, so I feel almost famous. You got me remembering a lot of things I haven’t thought of in a while. Here, knock the…
It’s unlikely that you will ever meet Alan L. Stein, even though you indirectly pay part of his salary and, a little more directly, you work for him. Stein lives in Houston, Texas, and holds the title of vice president of Browning-Ferris Industries’ Materials Marketing Group, a small but important…
Not long after the invention of carjacking, alert South Floridians noticed another hit-and-run phenomenon: the advent of the drive-by novel and the home-invasion travelogue. As practiced by such notable out-of-towners as Joan Didion (Miami), T.D. Allman (Miami: City of the Future), and David Rieff (Going to Miami), the nonfiction version…
When Mike Morris woke up on a park bench the night of Tuesday, July 9, this is what he saw: Uniformed police and a contingent of firefighters boarding the Tango, a 1934 custom motoryacht parked in Slip 23 on the south side of Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove. When…
If you turned on the boob tube the night of June 17 and switched to WTVJ-TV (Channel 6), you might have heard this while rooting around in the fridge for a cold one: “Now to Miami, Florida: It’s become world-famous for its beautiful people and carefree lifestyle, but it’s also…
After growing up in a series of chilly, drab-sounding places like Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Sioux City, Iowa, and Manchester, Massachusetts, a drab-sounding woman named Joann Kozlin settled in exciting South Florida. In 1994 she got into the swing of things by declaring bankruptcy in Broward County. She took up singing…
Hundreds of off-road bicycling enthusiasts got a shock not long ago when they showed up at their favorite woodsy riding trail in South Dade. Someone had built a chainlink fence through the heart of the winding track, bisecting enough of the hairpin curves to render the rest useless. “The track…
Last year so many Dade residents forgot or refused or otherwise failed to pay their property taxes that the sum total of delinquency — $73 million — outweighed the entire property tax revenue of most North Florida counties. This year looks like a repeat. Instead of twiddling their thumbs and…
Tuesday, April 25, 1995, was a good day for long-boarders and a bad one for Portuguese man-o’-war. Throughout the morning the surf near the Government Cut jetty came thundering in from the east, mean and green. Surfers in wet suits showed up on Miami Beach at sunrise to pick their…
Month in and month out for thirteen years, Dade County’s 1.2 million telephone customers have shelled out eleven cents to support a conundrum called Manhole Ordinance #83-3. The mysterious charge shows up on every bill for every residential and commercial phone line, lumped on the same page with federal, state,…
A mile from Miami City Hall stands Mercy Hospital, a private, not-for-profit institution owned by the Catholic church and positioned on a first-rate chunk of bayfront real estate. The hospital has never paid any city taxes on the bulk of its land or buildings, but every time a fire alarm…
Beverly Causey is quite the connoisseur. In August of last year she telephoned Rochambeau Wines and Liquors in Dobbs Ferry, New York, proffered her American Express card number, and ordered a bottle of ’91 Chateau Montelena zinfandel for $14.99 plus $11.50 shipping and handling. In September she followed up with…
The Hound of the Baskervilles would love the Old South Dade Dump. The overgrown landscape, hidden from the view of motorists traveling SW 248th Street, its northern boundary, resembles a lumpy, fogbound moor. It’s actually a smoldering, snake-infested bog stuffed with 900,000 tons of buried tires, household garbage, and chemical…
Seconds after the anchor chain tumbles into Biscayne Bay, two women on the sun deck strip down to thong bikinis and start lubing their bare breasts with coconut oil. A surfer dude in laser-green swim trunks cuts the air with a rebel yell and somersaults from the top of the…
On March 6, the peripatetic Micky Arison, chairman and CEO of Miami-based Carnival Corp., took time off from running a pro basketball team and the world’s largest cruise line to fly to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of his fellow maritime tycoons. Their goal: To persuade key U.S. Congressmen to…
The call came in at 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. A man in a phone booth in Seattle had a question. He needed an answer fast. The question: Do chickens wear contact lenses? If so, why? Three thousand miles away, Bob Sherman booted up his computer in North Miami Beach and…
