Every day fifteen wells in Northwest Miami-Dade pump more than 150 million gallons of water from the Biscayne Aquifer, South Florida’s sole source of drinking water. The aquifer is a freshwater reservoir made of limestone-bearing materials — shells, coral, and sand — that extends 100 feet deep beneath most of…
It’s the big day. Jon Jacobs is rushing around his office in his Spanish-style house in the Design District. A 39-year-old with dirty-blond hair and a British accent, he’s checking the settings on four computers in the front room of his home. They are all connected to the online virtual-reality…
A denim baseball cap tames Walter “Priest” Waters’s wiry salt-and-pepper hair. Snowy white sneakers adorn his feet, and crisp khaki shorts skim his knees. A baggy, brightly patterned shirt masks a middle-age paunch. Shortly before dusk on a recent Saturday outside Take One Lounge on NE 79th Street, silver cane…
Let’s face it. Fidel Castro is either dead or headed that way. So, you wacky exiles, let’s head for la isla, filch el comandante’s body, and bring it home. Here are Miami New Times’s suggestions for the cadaver: 1. Use him in a campaign ad for the strong-mayor initiative. The…
As midnight approached this past Monday, Radio Mambí host Ninoska Pérez Castellón cautioned against speculation of Fidel Castro’s death. But on Calle Ocho, no one seemed to be listening. Block after block teemed with revelers waving Cuban flags, leaning on car horns, dancing on SUV roofs. From the sidewalks, onlookers…
There was something fishy about the skinny, long-limb, shaved-head stranger who appeared in the parking lot of Macy’s at Aventura Mall one steamy Sunday last summer. It wasn’t simply that he was younger than the other weekend warriors who bike to Key Biscayne and back every week. Most of the…
Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts. Read the first in our online archives. It’s 1:30 p.m. Monday, July 17, and Pinkie Braddy waits nervously on a bench in Judge Leonard E. Glick’s courtroom at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building. In a few minutes, the 84-year-old mother…
He’s sitting on a mod red couch in the hotel’s lobby, wearing a Phat Farm T-shirt and texting himself reminders on his Treo. Def Jam Records founder and rap megaimpresario Russell Simmons blends in seamlessly with the 305-chic atmosphere of The Standard, South Beach, where the minibars come stocked with…
This past January 26, inside the Miami-Dade County Commission chamber in downtown Miami, Dorrin Rolle played MC for an early-morning ceremony honoring several government employees celebrating 30 years or more of county service. As usual, the “Ghetto Governor” — as the county commissioner is affectionately known by his family, friends,…
Harrel Braddy is menacing. He stands six feet tall and weighs 220 pounds. He shaves his scalp and walks like a lumbering heavyweight fighter. When he enters Courtroom 4-5 of the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building on July 10, the room falls silent. Dressed in a red prison uniform, shackled…
If you are a black female officer on the Miami police force, standing by your man can get you fired. Take Ofcr. April Hardemon. The 42-year-old has known Gregory Barnes since the two were teenagers attending Miami Northwestern Senior High. They became reacquainted in October 2003 after running into each…
Marshall Robert Bellin can’t win. On a recent balmy Saturday evening, the 63-year-old architect stepped from his 2001 silver Porsche Carrera at a Coral Gables home. On his wrist shimmered a $20,000 diamond-encrusted gold Rolex Daytona. Suddenly 24-year-old Moses Max Sejour emerged from a side street, pistol in hand, face…
Steve Clark has about an hour before his class begins. He’s one of the newest professors at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens. And he’s an expert on his subject: criminal law. “I’m a felon,” Clark admits. A white-haired, gregarious man with a pressed gray suit and…
Zipping around his Aventura office on a recent afternoon, Jeffrey Herman doesn’t look much like someone who regularly hears real-life horror stories. The young-looking 44-year-old lawyer wears a white Kiss T-shirt with yellow sleeves and answers his cell phone every few seconds. He is simultaneously participating in a conference call…
On the first page of her recently released HarperCollins book Miami Psychic, self-proclaimed clairvoyant Regina Milbourne writes: “Because I believe I got the gift directly from God, I felt I had to do something with it. For more than fifteen years, I dedicated my life to helping anyone who needed…
The splinters were so big that Robbie could see them from the top of the ten-foot-high ramp. Despite his kneepads, he knew the wrong fall on the half-pipe would shred his legs. Still, he had to practice for a couple of hours every day before a competition. And anyway, skating…
Old Blue Eyes was there. He was chatting with boxing promoter Nuno Cam as legendary Cuban slugger Kid Gavilan stood by on a recent Tuesday night. Luis “El Feo” Rodriguez, Benny “Kid” Paret, and Kid Chocolate, fighters from Miami’s halcyon ring days, were all there, too, in black-and-white photos pasted…
At 11:00 p.m. on the Abbey Brewing Co.’s eleventh anniversary, Brad Berkman, a middle-age man with bulging biceps and a shaved head, wobbled slightly at the bar and muttered, “I wanna smack someone in the face.” “No you don’t,” laughed Ray Rigazio, the Abbey’s owner and operator, hugging the man…
The story of the Liberty City 7 ignited last Thursday as most of South Florida headed home from work. At 5:57 p.m., NBC affiliate WTVJ-TV (Channel 6) disrupted regular programming. Patricia Andreu, a pretty brunet of Cuban descent, broke in breathlessly. “We have some video that is just arriving from…
6:15 a.m. Creeping silently through the bedroom window, dawn shatters with a mechanical bleating. The alarm clock will not be ignored. It is Saturday, May 6, just another morning in Menes Daniel’s ten-hour-a-day, six-day work week, or so Daniel thinks. He can look forward to the rest Sunday will bring…
Not long after noon on June 11 at the Playwright Irish Pub in South Beach, the predominantly pro-American crowd was silent. It had nothing to root for in this opening round of World Cup action. A flat-footed Team USA was unraveling against the Czech Republic, down two-zip entering the second…
Shannon Levy-Rowley is 21 years old and five feet seven inches tall. She weighs 108 pounds. During the past five and a half years, she has endured three major surgeries and diets ranging from fourteen weeks of consuming only liquids to sipping blended meals through a straw. But the brunet’s…
