The moment of truth had arrived, and attorney Karen Gievers was losing her grip. Her voice was cracking. Her eyes kept misting over. Much to the astonishment of lawyers and laymen alike, her questions were barely coherent. And those that did make sense were being summarily overruled by the judge…
When last we left the genteel citizens of Indian Creek Village, the hue and cry over the burg’s twelve-man police department had nearly subsided. In February an independent audit commissioned by city officials had labeled the force “out of control” and recommended that Chief Rudy Piedra and his right-hand man,…
They say the big house ages a man. Something about the empty hours, the bare cells, the crush of conscience, gnaws at the very fabric of youth. In Stanley K. Shapiro’s case, that fabric was pretty frayed going in. Lightly liver-spotted, bulging around the belly, the 63-year-old emerged from Turner…
Horses did not eat one another. Pigeons’ heads did not spin around and fall off. In all, the world’s framework did not disjoint. But as of 1:59 p.m. on Saturday, May 29, 1993, it was a world without The Jim and Steve Show. Nobody thought it would last. The radio…
Finally, a singles club that has found the fast lane to romance in South Florida. Similar interests? Nah. Intellectual compatibility? Ha! The potential for long-term commitment? Not a chance. Try this: a hot set of wheels. As any swinging single will tell you, the key to becoming a love magnet…
Ricardo Samitier, Sr., has a knack for winning attention. The wrong kind of attention. In 1986 Samitier, the former president of Commuter Airlines, was found guilty of defrauding Eastern Airlines and sent to prison. While incarcerated, he claims former business associates forged his signature to strip him of two airplanes…
Hack critics and weathered promoters will all tell you the same thing about Bob Seger. Seger, they’ll say, never had it easy. Abandoned by his daddy at age ten, he shared a one-room dive with his mom and brother during junior high school and cooked off a hot plate. By…
The package arrived with no return address. George and Helen Clarke found inside it a catalogue from Sotheby’s, the fancy New York auction house. Attached was an unsigned note that read, simply, “We suspect the items catalogued #229 will be of interest to you.” The Clarkes thumbed through the glossy…
Guillermo Vargas Martinez, a reporter for the WSCV-TV news program Ocurri cents Asi, met with prisoner Alicia De Jesus L centspez in the library of the Dade County Jail on April 7. As Vargas listened in rapt silence, L centspez, a 38-year-old Honduran immigrant awaiting trial for first-degree murder, described…
In Clint Clark’s neighborhood, they call it “jacking a tourist.” The J-T for short. The media have branded the crime a “smash-and-grab.” It boils down to the same thing: detaining a car full of tourists and then robbing them. To fourteen-year-old Clark the J-T is an everyday occurrence, something friends…
In late 1991, when Metro-Dade Police Sgt. David Simmons was assigned to investigate the latest child abuse allegations lodged against physicians Lisette and Andres Nogues, his colleague Det. Ellen Christopher issued an ambivalent sigh. On the one hand, she was thrilled an officer as competent as Simmons had inherited the…
Inside the minuscule Indian Creek Village Hall, some 30 tense bodies were crammed, and more spilled onto the outdoor walkway. Elderly residents dressed in the fashion of twenty years ago. Lawyers in staid suits. Scruffy reporters and even a television news crew, much to the horror of a community that…
Adam Von Furstenberg remembers seeing the hypodermic needle taped to his right arm pop upright like a jack-in-the-box and knowing he was in big trouble. The machine that was supposed to be converting his blood from HIV-positive to HIV-negative had malfunctioned. Rather than returning ozone-treated blood to his body, the…
The airwaves beckon. Yet we are captives on the Venetian Causeway. Locked in traffic and reduced to soothing our frayed nerves straight from a bottle. Our larger half, Jim, is not one to obey gridlock protocol. His faded red Mazda lurches left, then right. Soon we are slaloming through the…
In the few maps that record South Florida before the era of dredge-and-plat, Indian Creek Village survives as an obscure speck of land off the northern tip of Miami Beach. Originally earmarked to become part of a much larger manmade island, the islet was instead remodeled into a free-floating country…
At nine o’clock sharp on Wednesday, February 24, Norman Braman strolled into Indian Creek Village’s teensy town hall to address his esteemed council. In an unprompted, five-minute soliloquy, the millionaire auto salesman paid homage to the ultra-exclusive isle on which he had settled eighteen months ago. The crown jewel of…
Later they would play Candyland. Later, too, they would eat homemade muffins and frolic with the anatomically correct dolls. But first, four-year-old Donna had to practice. That was what her therapist, Miss Suzanne, told her. Over and over again. Because this wasn’t just any rehearsal. Tomorrow Donna (which is not…
Laura Coburn, 23 years old and thoroughly freaked out, sat staring at six grim mugshots. She was being asked by two jumpy cops if any of the photos resembled the man who two months earlier had raped and viciously beaten her A the man who would come to be called…
So maybe you’re sick of the snowbound Canadian winters. Maybe it’s time to swoop south, like the geese. And maybe, just maybe, that Cuban Ministry of Tourism brochure A the one with blue sea lapping at unspoiled beaches and the lights of Old Havana twinkling A is beginning to look…
When Genesi Mallay and her husband opened the Lazy Lizard restaurant on Lincoln Road two years ago, the plan was to offer customers the tropical cocktails best suited to Mexican food: margaritas, daiquiris, even the occasional pi*a colada. That was before Mallay collided with Florida’s alcoholic bureaucracy. Because her eatery…
Burnie had it right. Five minutes before the Heat embarked upon its embarrassingly ugly loss to Milwaukee this past Thursday, Miami’s mascot clamped himself onto the stiltlike leg of Alan Ogg and refused to let go. Refused as the congenitally good-natured Ogg chatted with old Heat teammates. Refused as Ogg…
If Thomas Kramer has flaunted anything in his tenure as South Beach’s latest eccentric rich boy, it is a talent for well-publicized charity. While he extinguished his Ocean Drive nightclub, Hell, two weeks ago, and his grandiose plans to convert South Pointe into a faux Italian village remain drawing-board fantasies,…
