Forget Edison, Franklin, even Steve Jobs. If there’s one innovator we truly love and respect here in South Florida and the Caribbean, it’s Charles Ponzi.The guy, let’s face it, invented pretty much the best scheme ever. Why do complicated stuff like “invest money” when you can just take it and…
Just before midnight last February, the top nuclear operator at Turkey Point quit on the spot and stormed out of the plant, convinced that profit-hungry FPL executives were pushing the nuclear reactor to restart too soon after a shutdown. A little mishap you might have heard of in a Ukranian…
So much for protests. Taxpayers are on the hook for a $634 million new playground for the Marlins, and the biggest grassroots organizer against the project says he wishes he hadn’t wasted his time fighting it.”The fix is in. It was a dog-and-pony show,” says Michael Burnstine, an insurance salesman who…
With the Miami Dade Commission set to vote this afternoon on whether to blow hundreds of millions of your tax dollars during the worst recession in a generation on a new Marlins Stadium (not that we’ve got a stance on this thing or anything), downtown developer Glenn Straub sent a…
‘Madness’ is a pretty outdated term — offensive really — so at Riptide we prefer to classify what’s going down at American Airlines Arena this afternoon a little more precisely. Our psychologists are rolling out a diagnosis of paranoid basketball schizophrenia with a touch of hoops paranoia and a major…
By now you’ve seen the brackets so many times you know North Dakota State’s mascot by heart and you’ll break down in tears if another person mentions President Obama’s picks. But are you really ready for Miami’s first-round matchups tomorrow at the AA Arena? More important, do you know whom to mercilessly…
A Cutler Bay man funneled money to the Irish terrorists who murdered two British soldiers in Belfast earlier this month, federal prosecutors say in a complaint unsealed in Miami-Dade court and obtained by New Times. For at least three years, Roman Vidal, age 57, allegedly smuggled millions of dollars’ worth…
A federal jury this week convicted two doctors and two assistants of bilking Medicare for millions of dollars by setting up a bogus HIV clinic in Miami, the State Attorney’s office tells Riptide, the latest conviction in a racket that’s quickly become the Magic City’s seamiest new claim to crooked…
Marlene Jaggernauth had been a legal U.S. resident for 27 years when the ICE agents came knocking on her door in 2003. They arrested the Trinidad native on a shoplifting charge from six years earlier, took her from her four young children, and moved her from county jail to county…
They didn’t win 20 games. They finished .500 in a mediocre conference. Their best player is a goofy looking white guy. They lost five of their last six games of the season. Yet somehow the geniuses running the NCAA selection committee added up these facts and decided that the Arizona Wildcats…
Capt. Agustin Dominguez understands the ebb-and-flow of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as only a battle-hardened soldier who’s been there truly can.Dominguez, a Miami native and ’98 grad of Palmetto Senior High, followed a stint in northern Iraq from ’03-’04 with a tour of duty in Afghanistan from ’05…
Here’s something you don’t know: In the Netherlands, professional baseball is called Honkbal Hoofdklasse. Something else you don’t know? A single player on the Netherland’s World Baseball Classic team, which shocked the honkbal world by somehow taking down a powerhouse, all-star Domincan Republic club in the 11th inning last night…
A Cutler Bay man funneled money to the Irish terrorists who murdered two British soldiers in Belfast on Saturday, federal prosecutors say in a complaint unsealed in Miami-Dade court today and obtained by Riptide.For at least three years, Roman Vidal, 57, allegedly smuggled millions of dollars in black market cigarettes…
If you happen to wander by the Capitol on your daily stroll around Tallahassee today, yes, that is in fact a truck full of farm workers being beaten into unpaid slave labor right on the steps of the Florida Legislature.A few months after the latest slavery bust in Immokalee –…
In hindsight, it’s tough to argue that Larry Coker didn’t get a little bit screwed. He got canned as University of Miami head coach in 2006 after piling up a 60-15 record and bringing a national championship to Coral Gables — a record pretty much any other program in the…
Tendrils of earthy smoke snake through a room on the edge of Little Havana, past old men in guayaberas slapping dominoes on a folding table and a long counter where a wrinkled 80-year-old brews espresso. Near the front window facing NW Seventh Street, Dionisio Gonzalez gently peels a cured deep-brown…
Tendrils of earthy smoke snake through a room on the edge of Little Havana, past old men in guayaberas slapping dominoes on a folding table and a long counter where a wrinkled 80-year-old brews espresso. Near the front window facing NW Seventh Street, Dionisio Gonzalez gently peels a cured deep-brown…
One of the strangest rampages in South Beach history — which is saying something — ended last Wednesday with police shooting and killing the suspect in North Miami-Dade.Miami Beach Police ID’d the suspect as Oswain Brentall Walcott, a 22-year-old wanted in Georgia for breaking into a restaurant. When officers approached him…
As President Obama tries to keep his pledge to close Gitmo by next January, his biggest challenge — as told in-depth in your New Times this very week — is figuring out what to do with guys like Omar Khadr. Khadr, the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay and the only…
There are quite a few South Florida connections to the ongoing “mini-Madoff” scandal surrounding Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford, who faces civil charges from the SEC that he orchestrated a “massive, ongoing fraud” to the tune of $8 billion through his Stanford International Bank. Stanford operated a large office in…
The soldiers move through the wheat field, scanning the windswept plain for signs of trouble. There are six of them, dressed in fatigues and body armor, wearing the sunglasses and bushy beards popular among the Special Forces. The only thing they can hear is the rustling of wheat stalks. They…
Maj. Tom Fleener was enjoying a quiet life as an assistant public defender in Wyoming when he was thrust into the greatest legal conundrum of our times.Fleener, an Army Reservist, became more and more outraged as he read about the military commissions set up in Guantanamo Bay for the “enemy…
