Amidst the pre-Super Bowl parties, fireworks, and crooning by plastic- surgery goddess Cher this past week, Tony Martin sat down at a table in the Miami Airport Hilton and Towers. A throng of reporters from ESPN, CBS, and NBC, as well as a profusion of daily drones jostled for a…
Despite the trophies mounted on the wall nearby, Juana Moraes is bemoaning the one that got away. “This man came in and he grabbed one of the double dildos, the big ones, and he ran out like he saw the devil,” recalls Moraes, assistant manager of South Beach’s Pleasure Emporium…
In some Miami neighborhoods, Pop Warner football is a community rallying point. Weekend games for kids age eight to fifteen draw thousands of spectators. Families gather to barbecue chicken and watch with passionate interest as tiny players wobble down the field in oversize helmets. The events are “therapy,” says one…
On April 7 Ralph Devito finished a nighttime game of racquetball at a University of Miami gym. On the way to his car he clutched his chest, made a gurgling noise, and fell to the ground. Someone frantically called 911. An emergency dispatcher called Coral Gables medics, the city’s police…
The dull blue light from the neon sign above the entrance to Reef Bait and Tackle barely cuts through the dusk and rain on NE 79th Street. The John F. Kennedy Causeway can be seen dimly rising over the bay just ahead. Inside the shop Jack Reeves taps on a…
The day after Hurricane Georges bodyslams the Keys, September 25th, Miami is a ghost town. Though the winds barely reach gale force, businesses close and workers shutter storefronts in a post-traumatic-stress flashback to Hurricane Andrew. Windblown detritus clogs empty roads: palm leaves, newspapers, scraps of wood. By late afternoon a…
If Walter Reynoso was apprehensive, he didn’t show it. Reynoso was about to give his closing statement last week in the federal drug-conspiracy trial of six men, including his client, Fritz LaFontante. The handsome lawyer, in a dark suit and white shirt with cuff links, launched into an aggressive speech…
You’re driving down South Dixie Highway. It’s a blissfully cool fall day in Miami. Traffic is crawling, but you’re taking advantage of the slow pace to look around. The Metrorail snakes overhead, and palm leaves rustle above a Burger King. You approach Le Jeune Road, and what’s this? A parking…
Michael Band is packing. The stacked boxes of files make his sparsely decorated office look even more austere. For twenty years Band has operated in rooms like this one on the second floor of the E.R. Graham Building in Miami, stripped of adornment in service of the people. Band, one…
In a sterile white conference room on the second floor of the Department of Justice building in downtown Miami, about 80 Opa-locka residents are gathered: old ladies in floral-print dresses, pastors in suits, and police officers in short-sleeve, midnight-blue uniforms. A serious-looking black man in a dark suit, white shirt,…
By the time Black Cherry has persuaded the manager of Coco’s strip club to give her a two-hour break, hopped in a limo, and zoomed the few miles to the WEDR studios, she is nearly twenty minutes late. “Black Cherry, where you been?” growls radio talk show host Luther Campbell,…
In early spring a stranger showed up at “Touchdown” Tony Martin’s home in Escondido, California. No doubt the wide receiver, a Pro Bowl veteran and Miami native who started his career with the Dolphins, is accustomed to occasional visits from strangers. That’s the price of fame. But Michael Medrano was…
County jailers sometimes deal with strange cases. Take the matter of 38-year-old Jeffrey Allen, convicted of burglary in 1991 and sentenced to seven years of confinement. He has an interesting background. His 80-year-old wife Margaret (they’ve been married eleven years — her hairdresser introduced them) says Allen sold her television,…
Richard Bronson hasn’t had much time for soirees lately. He’s been too busy launching a glossy fashion magazine called Channel.
State Sen. Bill Turner sat on the stage in Liberty City’s Caleb Center for two hours last month holding a sign that called for unity among Democrats. He hoped to say a few words to the crowd. After all, he was — and is — the incumbent in the September…
Some members of Miami’s literati were sorry to hear about Fashion Spectrum magazine’s recent demise. Not because there will be a void left by the monthly’s disappearance from newsstands — a start-up publication called Channel promises the same menu of models, bikinis, and party shots. In fact, Channel will absorb…
When the bronze-color Lincoln Continental nosed into the intersection of NW Sixth Avenue and 75th Street on May 19, 1994, Danny Felton was one of the Miami Police Department’s most promising young cops — officer of the month, repeatedly praised by supervisors. But soon after the 23-year-old Felton swung his…
As Raymond Johnson stood on a curb near his Liberty City home last month chatting with his brother-in-law, he didn’t think he was breaking the law. But a Miami patrolman arrested Johnson for standing in a “well-known drug area,” according to a June 17 police report. The official charge was…
Info:Correction Date: 07/30/1998 Info: The Don Adrift in Miami’s fierce political maelstrom, Donald Warshaw is one cool customer Tristram Korten Donald Warshaw enters a back room in Miami City Hall filled with political types and lawyers. He tells a joke, then settles into a cushy swivel chair. No one says…
John Rivera, his hulking frame trussed up in a sharply creased tuxedo, smiles broadly as the starched and sequined crowd streams into the ballroom at the swank Westin Resort in Miami Beach. A three-foot-high ice sculpture of a police badge glimmers on a table. Hundreds of people nibble on shrimp…
It was supposed to be a debate about increasing police presence in black neighborhoods. But when Adora Obi Nweze stood up in a flowing orange dashiki at the Joseph Caleb Center May 28, it was as if a divining rod suddenly jerked the meeting toward a reservoir of discontent. “We…
In the rear of a nondescript South Miami office building, a hidden door is set in a tiled floor. Grant Miller, who uses the place to publish a chain of weekly newspapers, pries it open for a visitor. “Let me show you something,” he says. A dank odor issues from…
