“When I come over from Cuba, people see my bags, sure, but they don’t see what I keep up here,” whispers Jose Galvez, tapping a pate dusted with brown hair and speckled by age. “What I keep here is the secret formula. It is in my brain the whole time…

When Peter Jaile announced he was gay two years ago, his father greeted the news with a week-long silence, then delivered a chilling reply. “Change your ways,” he calmly proposed to his only child, “and I’ll pretend this never came up.” Stunned, Jaile returned to Florida International University to finish…

If Barbara North Burton could keep time in a bottle, the evening of March 11, 1989, would rank right up there with Dom Perignon. On that gorgeous Saturday night it seemed the whole Village of Miami Shores turned out to rally behind her dream – a plan to erect permanent…

More than two years after the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) removed Lisette and Andres Nogues’s seven youngest children from their Kendall home, citing alleged physical and sexual abuse, department officials are seeking a stunning reversal. According to motions filed this past Friday at an emergency hearing…

When Derrod Bush was called before a judge last Tuesday, just before noon, chuckles rippled through the courtroom. That might seem odd, given that Bush has been charged with aggravated assault, a third-degree felony that carries a maximum punishment of five years under the state’s supervision. But consider Derrod Bush…

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, it seems, are all the rage at the Dade Public Defender’s Office this year. In the past dozen months, four have been filed by miffed ex-employees, two of whom are black, the other two Cuban. Long-time staffers attribute the claims to the office’s pressure-cooker atmosphere…

If Armando Valdez had shelled out ten bucks to have his fortune told this summer, he might have planned a vacation for the fall. A long vacation. As it is, Valdez, a mild-mannered senior planner for the City of Miami Beach, has been the unwitting referee in a bizarre cat…

At an age when most of the girls in her Liberty City housing project were treading the slippery path toward teen pregnancy, Carrie Jones was burning rubber down a less-traveled road. It wasn’t that the slim tomboy disliked girls. She just didn’t share their interests: “They was into boys. I…

Vehicle traffic facing a steady red signal shall stop…and remain standing until a green indication is given. — Florida state statute 316.075, subsection III They say childhood does not prepare us for adulthood. And as usual, they are wrong. Who, after all, can forget our earliest lesson in vehicular etiquette,…

Assuming virtually everyone in Dade County runs red lights virtually all the time — as a recent in-depth study indicates — a good number of people are going to get caught, if only by happenstance. These offenders, as well as other traffic violators, face a grave choice: They can plead…

From where Patrick Snay sits, deep within Killian Senior High School’s administration building, he can’t see any of the surrounding campus. Then again Snay, Killian’s assistant principal in charge of administration, doesn’t need to. The black rotary phone on his desk, specially designated for “Rumor Control,” supplies him with enough…

Oh, how we Floridians love exclusivity: the waterfront mansions, the crystal chandeliers, the caviar-stained revelry of Palm Beach estates and Fisher Island yacht fetes. Most of the time, of course, sniffing this rarefied air means paying through the schnozz. And here in the land of bonehead public policy, even breathing…

On September 23, 1989, Lisette Nogues, a consulting neurologist, and Andres Nogues, an aspiring physician and her husband of thirteen years, were accused by their fifteen-year-old daughter Aimee of child abuse. That same night, caseworkers from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) removed the Nogueses’ seven minor…

Listed below are the names of Nogues family members, followed by other principal characters mentioned in this article, in alphabetical order. Dr. Lisette Nogues, 41, neurologist. Since November 1989 has been forbidden by the court to see her six youngest children, stemming from allegations against her and her husband, made…

It sounds, at first, like a faint siren, the shrill announcement of far-off disaster. Only after the fourth or fifth tone do you locate the source, a beeper concealed beneath the clutter on Dr. Lisette Nogues’s nightstand. Two years ago, when Nogues (pronounced no-guess) was earning $300,000 annually as a…

In seven years as a detective in the Metro-Dade Police Department’s sexual battery unit, Ellen Christopher has exposed dozens of criminals to the light of justice. But by the time she completed her troubling, seven-month investigation of Andres Nogues, accused by his daughter of sexual abuse, Christopher had no interest…

Under what circumstances does the state have the right to take children away from their parents? To what lengths should the state go to reunify a divided family? In Dade County these questions recently prompted juvenile court officials to form a Family Preservation Committee, with the goal of avoiding “out-of-home”…

In the end, Cesar Bocachica couldn’t bear the silence. The six-foot-five-inch sharp-shooting forward left Florida International University last year, after just one stellar season, returning to Puerto Rico’s Superior Basketball League (SBL). “It was tough for me to get up for games in Miami,” recalls Bocachica, who, despite his stature,…

Roberto Torres is rocking, ankles to unsure toes, on a concrete step high in the sweaty reaches of Guaynabo’s municipal stadium. He is a small, round man squeezed into a mesh tank top and Day-Glo shorts. On his face is a look of sheer contempt, which he rivets on a…

Three days ago, it might have answered to “Spot.” Or “Checkers.” Or – God forbid – “Pumpkin.” But for now, the mutt heaped like soggy coal on the asphalt fringe of Miami Gardens Drive is fetching slippers for a higher authority. Its muzzle, framed by a Rorschach of dried blood,…

How lean are the bean counters at Dade County’s auditing central? Let’s put it this way: junk mail of the future may arrive with address labels spit out by a county printer. That’s just one option under Dade’s bold, new campaign to hawk access to computerized public records. The plan,…