Sometime after 3:00 p.m. this past October 27, Miami City Manager Joe Arriola ministered to Hurricane Wilma-weary residents at the Orange Bowl. He also relayed a message to citizens in District Five, which includes much of Overtown and Liberty City. A vote for Richard Dunn II will get nothing done…
Guillermo Gonzalez was a science whiz, the kind of kid classmates eye with awe — or scorn — as they fumble with their beakers in chemistry class. While a senior at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High, he interned at Cordis Laboratories, where he helped build a device that measures temperature in pacemakers…
On a recent blistering, sticky afternoon, the corner of NW Seventh Street and First Avenue is teeming with vagabond men and women looking for a free meal or an empty cot inside the Camillus House shelter in downtown Miami. The sidewalk smells like a pungent cauldron of salt-crusted dry urine…
She came from the West, a demure Category One, letting us think she was steady, docile, and relatively harmless. But when Hurricane Wilma blew ashore and crossed Florida in a flash, she was a bitch. She toppled a multistory dry dock in Sunny Isles Beach, launched a 30-foot sailboat and…
The call came in the middle of the day. They normally did. And once I heard his voice, I knew it would be far more interesting than sorting through my notes about Miami’s latest bureaucratic squabble. His voice was husky and animated: “It was Memorial Day weekend in 2001 and…
News Bulletin: “A rarely seen nine-foot-long American crocodile cornered itself [sic] in the same North Miami Beach carport visited by an even larger alligator fifteen years before.” October 6, 2005, Miami Herald A male American crocodile continues to recover in a South Dade swamp, two weeks after he was lassoed,…
Those Miami-Dade cops are a testy bunch. The Dade County Police Benevolent Association recently told officers to stop talking to Channel 10 reporters for the next year, Channel 10 reporters say. The edict came after a report by the station’s “problem solver” Jeff Weinsier, who cornered a few cops who…
The summer of 1977 I was seventeen years old and working a pay-by-day gig on a construction site in the Grove, jackhammering concrete slabs at a shoddily laid duplex. The pay was crap ($40 a day), the work murderous, and my girlfriend Maritza, who was several years older and had…
Maestro is a Miami drug dealer who plies his trade at night, but you won’t find him standing on a street corner, shifting his weight from foot to foot and making furtive hand signals. Like many in the coke-selling sector of the economy, Maestro has found a more discreet and…
At age 57, Jon Roberts is a wiry fellow whose rugged mug has been whittled by time and prison into a caricature of the two-bit New York hood he once was. Over the years, his features — shaggy brows over deep-set brown eyes and a large nose — have strengthened…
Click here for the map. 1. Harold Ackerman Cali cartel’s man in Miami. Busted in 1992 along with seven subordinates and 6000 keys of cocaine. Seized ledgers indicated Ackerman’s outfit did $56 million in business in Miami in the ten months before his arrest. He kept a low profile at…
Last week, in Part One of “Kilo,” we took readers on a journey through the cocaine world underlying all that Miami has become in the past 25 years: the thriving banks, the overblown real estate, the drug culture, and an international identity created by a television show. They all must…
When one envisions a night at the opera, images of lavish performing arts centers and high-society hobnobbing usually come to mind. But this Sunday’s show at the historic Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church offers an alternative for those averse to stuffy venues and high ticket prices. Samuel Eudovique — a…
As father-and-son moments go, this one was downright surreal. Forget about Sunday-afternoon baseball games, weekend camping trips, or even a shared whoop of applause at a stadium rock concert. Instead, one grinning dad, sitting with his young son in the auditorium of downtown Miami’s Hyatt Regency hotel, leaned over and…
Listen to the pugnacious Ecuadorian fellow with the New York accent, whom shady Miami bankers tolerate with a nervous smile. “Miami has a well-deserved reputation for money laundering,” says Charles Intriago, a former federal prosecutor who has built a lucrative business on that experience. “There are four major categories of…
It was four guys — bound, gagged, and shot to death. It was drugs. There were empty grocery bags with coke residue in them, and somebody got sloppy and accidentally left a kilo under the bed. They were all Colombians.” A few heads turn when the man with the neatly…
This is a year in which Miami has been compelled to look back at two decisive events that shaped its destiny, both of which were widely acknowledged on their 25th anniversaries: the Mariel boatlift and the Liberty City riots. But a third fateful event hasn’t received the recognition it deserves…
At its peak in 1979, the Mutiny Club claimed to have 11,000 card-carrying members and to consistently sell more Dom Perignon than any other venue in America.
Three-year-old Jorge Armenteros giggles and shrieks as he patters around barefoot on the tile floor of a Burger King in Little Havana. His brother Eric, a lanky six-year-old, happily wolfs down Chicken Tenders. French fries are scattered on the table in front of him, and ketchup is smeared on his…
Though still in his twenties, Peruvian pianist Kiki Sanchez has played for President Clinton and studied under jazz greats such as Jim Gasior, Mike Gerber, and Mike Orta. Sanchez has mastered styles as seemingly disparate as jazz, classical, Andean, gospel, Brazilian, R&B, blues, pop, Afro-Peruvian, and Afro-Cuban. Now you can…
Brand-new superclub Metropolis takes a night off from bumping and grinding to play host to the Katrina/Rita fundraising event, Superstars Give Hope. The proceedings begin at 7:00 p.m., with a charity basketball game featuring Antoine Walker, Gary Payton, Matt Walsh, Shavlik Randolph, NFL Hall of Famer Richard Dent, and NFL…
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Real Estate 101. My name is Carl Fisher. Just so you know, I’ve been dead for the past 66 years. Yes, I am an apparition, a figment of your morose imagination. I was one of the legendary hucksters who bamboozled hundreds of hopeful snowbirds out…
