In public, Mayor Philip Levine strives to come across as the affable politician, a grinning multimillionaire populist who transitioned from media mogul and major Clinton donor to top dog in Miami Beach. But as heat has mounted around Levine’s role in raising more than a million dollars for a political…
For months, lame-duck Commissioner Jonah Wolfson’s new Political Action Committee has been the talk of Miami Beach. The PAC has raised more than $1 million in just three months amid accusations of high-pressure tactics aimed at city vendors by Wolfson and Mayor Philip Levine. Miami-Dade’s ethics commission has even opened…
It’s now been a whole decade since Hurricane Wilma tore through Miami as a Cat 2, and without a single landfall since then, all has been quiet on the hurricane front. Too quiet. This summer, with a historic El Nino building and widespread Saharan dust spreading over the Atlantic, we’ve…
Earlier this month, Gov. Rick Scott agreed to pay upwards of $1.3 million in legal fees for repeatedly breaking Florida’s open records laws. Of course, he’s paying for those mistakes with taxpayer money, so voters get to pay for his crimes. Even for Scott, that’s a tough act to…
The 47-second video opens with a group of Miami police officers calmly placing a young man in a black T-shirt into handcuffs. One of the officers then leads the man toward a squad car and sits him in the back seat. Then, suddenly, the officer leaps toward the suspect, seemingly…
A new push for higher minimum wages is sweeping across America, with New York City on the path toward joining Seattle and San Francisco with a $15 per hour standard. Last month, dozens of workers in Miami marched to demand that South Florida do the same. But even among…
Anyone who’s ever lived on South Beach knows the moment. Thunder booms, rain pounds down in solid sheets of water, and then it happens: The streets suddenly turn into rivers, sending cars and pedestrians bobbing in the massive buildup of precipitation. Floods are part of the contract that comes with…
Real estate is a game of bravado, especially in Miami Beach where multi-million dollar penthouse suites fly off the market every week to a dizzying swarm of overseas investors. Kevin Tomlinson, a 48-year-old with One Sotheby’s International Realty, knew how to play that game as well as anyone, bragging on…
Relations may well be warming at last between Washington and Havana, but that doesn’t mean the Castro regime is suddenly upping its human rights game just to please Obama. In fact, just yesterday the Cuban government threw an estimated 90 protestors — many clad in black-and-white Barack Obama masks —…
The body bobbed to the surface of Biscayne Bay right along a seawall behind Mount Sinai Medical Center February 6. Judging by her blond hair and small frame, passersby at first told the media that a teenager had been pulled from the cool water. But five days later, police announced…
In the wrestling ring of South Florida pro sports, Jeffrey Loria is the always-hated heel, a villainous mix of Vince McMahon and Rowdy Roddy Piper. This year was supposed to be different, with his Fish poised to contend in the East. Instead, Loria stayed true to character: firing his manager…
By most expert accounts, Gov. Rick Scott’s tenure in Tallahassee has been a flat-out catastrophe for the Sunshine State’s already fragile environment. He slashed water management budgets and stacked regulatory board with developers. He battled tooth-and-nail against new clean water mandates. Even muttering the words “climate change” was banned in…
It’s been seven years since President Obama ordered the detention center at Guantanamo Bay closed and yet more than a hundred prisoners of war remain. That could finally change. A top Obama official revealed this weekend that the president will soon ask Congress to let him transfer dozens of inmates…
Just over one year ago, Miami voters approved a ballot measure giving developer Jeffrey Berkowitz the go-ahead to build an oddly shaped, 1,000-foot bay-front tower called Skyrise Miami. The tower would lure hundreds of thousands of tourists, Berkowitz pledged, and even better, taxpayers wouldn’t foot a cent. City Mayor Tomas…
David Beckham made it official today: He wants to build a soccer stadium next to Marlins Park near the site of the old Orange Bowl. In a letter sent to Mayor Tomas Regalado, Beckham and his partners pledge a “world-class stadium” on the site — while offering scant few specifics…
In a few hours, a delegation from Havana will raise a red-white-and-blue flag that hasn’t officially flown in Washington for more than five decades. The Cuban standard will rise above the nation’s embassy on NW 16th Street in D.C., symbolically marking a change that became official at the stroke of…
A passerby spotted the body just after dawn March 29. It didn’t take long for Miami Police detectives to identify the man lying in a pool of blood near Biscayne Boulevard and NE 80th Street. But that only deepened the mystery. Shaun Cole, they soon learned, was a 22-year-old Scottish…
As commerce and tourism to Cuba open up amidst President Obama’s big thaw of relations between the neighboring nations, Miami’s biggest cruise line is ready to get in on the action. Carnival announced this morning that — barring a red-tape holdup on the Cuban end of the deal — you’ll…
Post-Trayvon and Ferguson, the nation has turned its attention to gaping racial disparities in local police forces, which are often overwhelmingly white even though they patrol mostly black neighborhoods. It’s a serious problem. But there’s another group with far more power to influence criminal cases and the delivery of justice…
It’s not really a holiday weekend in Miami until a professional athlete gets arrested in South Beach. So get those Fourth of July firecrackers ready because last night, Green Bay Packers tight end Andrew Quarless got the party started. Quarless ended up in police custody early this morning after firing…
Marlins fans know they’re in for a certain amount of pain at the ballpark. The team’s atrocious baseball on the field and brain-punishingly dumb decisions off it have been brutalizing spectators for years. But Beth Fedornak got more hurt than she bargained for on a trip to Marlins Park. The…
Yesterday, Jeb Bush dropped more than a thousand pages worth of his personal tax returns on the web — 33 years worth of financial info in all. The document dump represents the most tax documents ever released by a presidential candidate. Reporters are still dredging through all that paper, but…
