The script would have sent the folks from Cops into spasms of voyeuristic glee. On September 21, 1989, a lone gunman invaded a quiet patch of Miami Beach suburbia, broke into a physician’s home, savagely beat his maid, then engaged two police officers in a life-or-death shootout. Although it was…

In five months as a criminal court judge in Dade County, Henry Ferro has come to expect days filled with mayhem. His overcrowded docket reads like a True Crime index: assaults, drug deals, sex battery, and all varieties of theft. But nothing could prepare the jurist for the sight that…

To those milling in front of the Miami Arena an hour before game time on March 18, Steven Friedman’s pitch sounded too good to be true. The attorney was offering to sell thirteen $29 tickets to that night’s Heat match-up against the Indiana Pacers at face value or below -…

With two fox terriers already yapping away at home, Gisela McClelland wasn’t looking to adopt a third when she visited Dade County Animal Services Division headquarters two weeks ago. On the contrary, the South Miami dog lover was there to drop off a stray German shepherd found roaming her neighborhood…

Basil Earle Wainwright slumps forward, stubby fingers pressed at the temples, head drooped to reveal strands of hair combed across bare scalp. A bottomless sigh whooshes through his lips, completing the pose he has carefully crafted to suggest a withering martyr: Jesus, perhaps, spared the cross and sent into the…

The conversion from kick-boxer to one-man buffing crew probably won’t qualify among the world’s more common career moves. But then, Peter Vincent Ignatious Chin-Tai doesn’t boast one of the world’s more common resumes. The son of a Cantonese herbalist who fled China before World War II, Chin-Tai grew up in…

A miracle cure was about the last thing Dr. Robert Mayer expected to find when the U.S. Army stationed him on Ellis Island in 1942. Fresh from setting up a new medical practice in Miami Beach, the young pediatrician had volunteered to treat ill Coast Guardsmen. But one day Mayer…

Martin Van Wyngen had his doubts about Lucas Boeve from the start. A mild-mannered translator from Ottawa, Van Wyngen was lured down to Boeve’s Hollywood clinic in late 1990 with promises that intravenous injections of ozone would cure the HIV virus he contracted five years ago. Boeve requested $2000 in…

With all the disinformation swirling about his good name, Basil Wainwright often found it helpful to provide acquaintances, and potential backers, with a more objective account of his achievements. Below are excerpts from “The True Story of Basil Wainwright: Humanist, Physicist and Award Winning Inventor,” by “historian” Richard Johnson. “Basil…

Edward Margolis was raised on the AM radio wars of the 1960s. Back when Margolis was knee-high to a soundboard, his father Allan bought WMBM-AM (1490), a nearly bankrupt radio station on Miami Beach. The senior Margolis, a Wall Street dropout with a passion for rhythm and blues, leaped into…

On the day before her husband was anointed, once and for all, as the democratic frontrunner for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton was at a synagogue in North Miami Beach, knocking 300 old Jews on their collective tush. Rapping at a podium conspicuously free of cue cards, the comely Clinton invoked…

Like the village that surrounds it, the Coconut Grove Playhouse has lived to middle age in more-or-less constant tension, its stage the locus of a long tug of war between art and commerce, spiritual ideals, and materialistic forces. For entire decades, as in the Thirties and Forties, the Spanish rococo…

The fight began just after dusk and within minutes the scabbed asphalt in front of Bootsy’s Grocery was standing room only, the aimless human electricity of a Saturday night in Opa-locka conducted from the housing project across 22nd Avenue into a schoolyard knot around the spectacle. Monica Dawe, a 25-year-old…

Aside from a predilection for anchovies, Denise Cruz’s pizza fetish never sparked much controversy. In fact the self-employed bookkeeper was such a loyal crust hound when she lived in north Coconut Grove that employees of the Domino’s Pizza franchise at 3740 Bird Rd. knew her by her first name. But…

On the morning of February 5, moments before her umpteenth press conference, Cheryl Little received an unsettling phone call. For Little, the crusading supervising attorney at Miami’s Haitian Refugee Center, unsettling phone calls have been part of the daily grind since a September 30 military coup toppled Haiti’s fledgling democracy…

By the time accounts of Paula Redo’s arrest hit the evening news, acquaintances, even friends, had trouble recognizing the 29-year-old Lauderhill woman. Her cheeks bruised and purple, one eye puffed into a grim wink, Redo’s face reflected the fate of a boxer with too strong a chin. As did her…

Si Ayiti pa fore, ou jwenn tout bet ladan-l If Haiti isn’t a jungle, why then all these beasts? – from “Ayiti pa fore” (“Haiti Is Not a Forest”) by Manno Charlemagne Under the pinkish lights, Manno Charlemagne’s features looked exaggerated. Somehow too real, fans would later say, his stubborn…

Lulu Hormilla didn’t even have time to panic. One instant the postal worker was dropping letters into the mailbox at a Sweetwater duplex, the next she was on the ground, fending off a Doberman pinscher that had just left permanent fang imprints on her thigh. Later doctors would tell Hormilla,…

Evelyn Streiff is muttering something about her father, about the suicide he planned as a starving young lad on the Lower East Side and abandoned for a hitch with the cavalry in Kansas, back when Miami Beach was a soggy tongue of land full of critters and mangroves and, in…

For months officials at Biscayne National Park have been fretting over the proposed expansion of the South Dade Landfill, a squeezed-to-capacity dump that seeps untold gallons of toxic run-off into the park’s fragile underwater ecosystem. But chief ranger Wayne Landrum says the throwaway mentality that built Mount Trashmore has done…

Erny Fannotto’s resume is, by his own account, a testament to small-fry fame. For 39 years Fannotto was one of New Jersey’s premier golf pros. During the Sixties, after moving to Miami, he served for several years on the city’s zoning board and did half a dozen hitches as a…

It would be a ruse, though a convenient one, to claim that the mojitos served in various Miami restaurants vary in earth-shattering degrees. They do not. There are, after all, only so many ways you can mix rum, sugar, lime, yerbabuena, ice, and soda water. Then again, for the budding…