By noon the New York Timesman was tipsy on bootleg champagne. His necktie was long gone, and he found himself stumbling up an endless flight of stairs. The whole scene was too much. Since stepping off the train in Miami two days ago, January 14, 1926, he’d been pulled and…
Pity mild-mannered Michael Wolok. Since late August the 38-year-old free-lance futures trader hasn’t dared venture forth in his rust-color Ford LTD. All his life, Wolok says, he’s eschewed such vices as caffeine, alcohol, red meat, and marriage. Now, thanks to a “bashful kidney” and a run-in with a by-the-book state…
In the week leading up to Sunday, April 21 last year, a tiny notice appeared in the Miami Herald’s classified pages: “ESTATE SALE!” the ad read, “Furniture, Bric-a-brac, Clothing. 7701 Biscayne Blvd.” The address was instantly recognizable to any old-time Miamian, particularly if he were male, heterosexual, and past 50…
During the 1980s, American corporate chieftains spent four times more money on fine art than did the United States government. Inspired by sudden wealth and juicy tax breaks, arbitrageurs gobbled up Old Masters, and Wall Street CEOs decked their halls with Expressionists. But today, with the New York art market…
They were weird and wicked times, no doubt about it. Years after his death, when strangers in suit coats kicked and grappled for the crumbs of his estate, they would say the old man lived his last days in a gross gush of profligacy. Ordering the servants about. Getting snockered…
In Homestead – the last piece of American terra firma before the floating realm of the Florida Keys, a place of blurred borders and naturally occurring surrealism – the summer heat has been known to drive the worst townsfolk to baroque conspiracies, and the best to strange odysseys of self-discovery…
Danny Faries, a winsome con man with a snaggletooth grin, ran one of the biggest telephone credit card scams in American history from a cramped cell in the Dade County Jail. During four years of incarceration in Miami, the 42-year-old convicted murderer used pilfered credit card numbers to illegally buy…
Maria Hernandez never missed a day of work in ten years until the hot summer morning she was autopsied and released for burial in section eleven, lot 93-A, of Southern Memorial Park cemetery in North Miami Beach. The drowning of the 35-year-old Metro-Dade police dispatcher three months ago in the…
Irma Stone knows bounced checks better than anyone in South Florida. The phlegmatic 37-year-old has reigned for more than thirteen years as queen of the Worthless Check Division, a little-known bureau in the Dade State Attorney’s Office that tries to catch and prosecute habitual check cheats. But the Worthless Check…
Shopping mall managers and owners have a phrase for the totality of what happens in their climate-controlled Edens: The Retail Drama. At some malls The Retail Drama is low comedy or pantomime or a degraded television sitcom. At Dadeland, twelve miles south of downtown Miami, it is high art. From…
In the early years of the 21st Century, Miami’s flourishing arts scene begins to implode. A string of once-lively neighborhood dance companies and playhouses shuts down for want of funding. The city’s giant downtown performance center, open for only a few seasons, strangles in debt. Middle-class aesthetes retreat to televisionland,…
Tom Marko, part monk, part Tasmanian devil, has been cloistered for weeks in his office on Flagler Street. Subordinates say the director of Metro’s Passenger Transportation Regulatory Division looks pale and sickly, yet mysteriously triumphant. At times, they report, he is heard cackling into the telephone late at night, or…
He was one of these guys you see on Friday afternoon at the 7-Eleven, stocking up on beer for the weekend, maybe buying some Lotto tickets, then piling into a battered van with his buddies and cranking up Zeta-4 on the radio. It would be nice to say his skills…
“In a story in the March 18 editions of The Herald, Homestead City Manager Alex Muxo’s fainting in 1981 was improperly described as a nervous breakdown. It was in fact a physical collapse brought about by exhaustion and stress.” — Miami Herald, March 22, 1989 Three years ago, observing an…
In recent weeks Miami’s financially floundering Jackson Memorial Hospital has become the principal battle zone in a union war for the hearts and minds of Dade County’s 14,000 nurses. Since 1975 a local chapter of the Florida Nurses Association (FNA) – one of only ten unions in Dade – has…
FITZCARRALDO: I’m doing all this because I have one dream. The opera. The great opera in the jungle. MOLLY: Fitzcarraldo will build it, and Caruso’ll sing the premiere. It’s only the dreamers who ever move mountains. Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog THE MOUTH OF A GIFT HORSE Perhaps you haven’t heard, but…
If you drive from Miami up to Surfside and park in the shade of a certain palm tree near the fashionable Bal Harbour Shops, you can watch Leon Weinstein coming home to his bungalow at midday. He appears in a heat shimmer at one end of Carlyle Street with Peppi,…
From the moment I stepped into the canoe, I felt good about the trip. The boat, a seventeen-foot aluminum Grumman, capsized instantly and left me standing up to my shoulders in Biscayne Bay, flapping against the chop. My knapsack bobbed among the swells, along with a life vest and two…
Long before 1901 – the year Miami’s first canal was dug from the Miami River to present-day Allapattah – social progressives and capitalist greedheads alike had fantasized about a bigger, drier Miami. Not only were the vast western swamplands unprofitable in their natural state, they were an affront to the…
Unless the three-week-old Gulf war becomes bloody beyond precedent, one segment of Greater Miami’s population may be safer manning the front lines of battle than at home on the streets of its own neighborhoods. Throughout the county, a young black man now stands a better chance of being killed between…
“They dragged them out of a little house there and chained ’em to a light pole on the dock. There was two of them. Everyone was running around grabbing tires, kids and women rolling tires up the dock and dumping ’em around the pole. Me and Monkey Betts was coming…
“You can’t put this in your story,” says Ed Davidson, hunched over a tiny sewing machine in his shop at Biscayne National Park, repairing a piece of diving gear. “Wouldn’t fit the image.” The image that presents itself, in odd counterpoint to the sewing session, is this: a diminutive Hemingway…
