In late June of last year, a deranged bounty hunter smashed Daniel Walker in the mouth with a gun barrel, shattering eight teeth. But Walker wasn’t even the intended target of 34-year-old Albert Scaletti, Jr. The vicious bail bondsman was seeking a passenger in Walker’s car. Regardless, since that time…

Ed Wasserman arrived in Miami nineteen years ago with a young wife and family in tow to take a job as an editor at the Miami Herald. For the previous two years, Wasserman had been an editor at the daily Star-Tribune in Casper, Wyoming, a city of about 50,000 on…

For the past two years, a drug gang has rampaged through Opa-locka, clashing with a network of local dealers. The resulting violence has left at least seven people dead, though law enforcement and street sources say the actual number of fatalities may be more than that. Another half-dozen people have…

Standing in a courtroom late last week, prominent businessman Manuel Diaz handed over to his lawyer his tie, gold watch, and belt. A bailiff then quietly cinched tight the handcuffs and escorted his charge to the county jail for booking. Only then were investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department’s public-corruption…

The owner of the hip-hop label Lil’ Joe Records pulls up to his Northwest Miami-Dade offices most mornings in a true player’s ride, an aquamarine Jaguar S-2000. He wears the right accessories for his role. A diamond-crusted Rolex jangles from his right wrist. Fat gold rings glisten on both hands…

As Rolando Bolaños, Sr., nervously awaits the September trial date of his two sons, Rolando Jr. and Daniel, the Hialeah police chief’s own behavior is under quiet scrutiny in Tallahassee. The Bolaños brothers, both Hialeah cops, are charged with brutalizing a prisoner and lying about it afterward. Prompted by two…

William Oertwig, Jr., is a born-again Christian, a 25-year veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department, and every speeding motorist’s dream come true. For the past two years, the 47-year-old road patrol officer has refused, on principle, to write traffic citations. Although he pulls over drivers for violating the law, he…

By the time Dondre Johnson was a teenager, his mother had begun to suspect something. Johnson was a tall, thin boy with a timid smile. In most ways he seemed like an average child, trooping around the neighborhood with his stepbrother and stepsister, and playing trumpet in the Norland High…

In the five years since he left the City of Miami Police Department, Danny Felton has prospered. He has married, studied for his mortgage broker’s license, started a company, and become an upstanding member of the business community. He attends Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce meetings and takes out full-page…

The struggle to keep little Elian Gonzalez from the clutches of his communist father has galvanized Miami’s Cuban-American community like no other issue. Spanish-language radio buzzes with us-versus-them propaganda, political figures on both sides of the ethnic divide pander, and street-corner conversation focuses on exacting revenge from those who would…

It’s late afternoon and Jerry Babij is sitting in the lounge of Image Model and Talent Agency on Lincoln Road discussing the past year’s success. Babij (pronounced bah-bee) is a trim man who wears his brown hair brushed straight back from his wide, round face. Both his ears are pierced,…

As Joe Carollo stiffly marches down the stairs from his city hall office on the evening of April 27, an adoring crowd presses in around him. “Ca-ro-llo! Ca-ro-llo!” they chant as Miami’s mayor struts into the commission chambers with the rigid indignation of a temperance leader in a distillery. His…

The bottom floor of Liquid nightclub on South Beach is empty. The brick walls are bare. Velvet couches and chairs are gone; so are rows of liquor bottles. The only things visible through the front window last week were eight buckets of paint and plaster. Although the club rocks on…

The recent arrest of a juvenile-court employee displays the scope of problems in Miami-Dade’s system of selecting court-appointed lawyers. On December 9 the State Attorney’s Office charged Thomas Grande, a 31-year-old judicial support specialist, with official misconduct. Authorities say he illegally assigned two cases to a lawyer. One of the…

Unlike Miami’s austere courthouses, such as the Flagler Street tower or the fortresslike behemoth on NW Twelfth Street, the sprawling Juvenile Justice Center on NW 27th Avenue has all the dignity of an elementary school. And form speaks to function. In the adult courts, both civil and criminal, grownups suffer…

Back in 1989, when Rolando Bolaños, Jr., was seventeen years old, he was arrested and convicted of trying to break into a Fort Lauderdale Cadillac dealership. To reduce his sentence, Rollie, as he is known, cooperated with a police task force investigating a ring of car thieves. He met with…

On a clear hot afternoon this past July, Chris Paciello, né Ludwigsen, loaded his 50-foot yacht with friends and aimed the bow north up the Intracoastal. Then he gunned the engine and sped off into a day filled with promise as bright as the subtropical sun overhead. The 28-year-old had…

In 1997 the Hialeah Police Department hired as officers a convicted car thief and a man rejected by the City of Miami Police Department as a result of admitted steroid use. Somehow the background checks Hialeah conducted did not uncover this information. In a sworn statement, Hialeah Police Chief Rolando…

After four days of looping around the Caribbean, the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Fascination eased into its berth at Port Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of July 23, 1998. Legions of flushed, sunburned tourists descended the gangplank, luxuriating, no doubt, in the last few hours of their tropical escape before…

Michael Quinn never saw the blow coming. The five-foot eight-inch, 270-pound former Mr. Universe was sitting in the nightclub Liquid with a young couple the night of June 25, 1996. After the woman, who was white, borrowed a hat from a black man, Quinn told her to “give the nigger…

When the Historical Museum of Southern Florida offered limousine broker Jesus Prieto the job of rounding up more than 30 luxury vehicles for the museum’s annual road rally last month, he was ecstatic. This was the grand prix of local limousine-rental jobs. The museum fundraiser is a swank affair, and…

Nestled among the warehouses and auto body shops on a desolate stretch in Miami’s inner city is a steel-plated door behind an iron gate. If you want to pass through that portal, don’t even think of making contact with five knuckles. “No, no,” says Red, a ghetto philosopher. “Don’t knock…