After reading the article, Donna Weaver only thought, maybe. Maybe her missing husband had been caught up in Operation Airlift, an FBI drug-smuggling investigation gone haywire. Maybe Airlift would supply clues about Gary, who had disappeared in the Bahamas the day before their first anniversary in 1983. Maybe this was…
The staff at Jackson Memorial Hospital routinely performs miracles. Real, true, bringing-people-back-from-the-precipice-of-death miracles. At Jackson, through the 400 or so organ-transplant surgeries performed every year, the surgeons and nurses revive the hopes and bodies of people who would have been unsalvageable a couple of decades ago. One of those people…
The graphic renderings of some new condominium developments around downtown Miami look like the covers of pulp-fantasy novels. Architects, it seems, are taking “Magic City” a little too literally these days as they reimagine a skyline of gleaming towers and crystal pinnacles. A prancing unicorn wouldn’t seem out of place…
Ah, football season. You can almost smell the torn-up sod, feel the thud of crashing helmets and pads, and hear the police scanner crackling. Soon college teams all over the state will gear up for practice, including the latest entrant into the collegiate circuit, Florida International University, which will brave…
He was a quiet man, taciturn and difficult to read beyond what any language barriers would account for. He worked two jobs, washing dishes and mowing lawns; sometimes he drank, sometimes he fought with his wife. But mostly the Cuban immigrant struggled to support his family — wife Caridad and…
Common is hip-hop’s prodigal son. A succession of mid-Nineties classics — 1994’s Resurrection and 1997’s One Day It’ll All Make Sense — established him as the king of true skool hip-hop. But on 2002’s Electric Circus, the Chi-town rapper seemed to have lost his footing, adrift in a messy mixture…
Donna Weaver didn’t look at the leaden Atlantic Ocean below. Fighting a three-headed monster of fear, mourning, and nausea, she didn’t dare. Donna hated flying in even the largest jets, and this tin can hurtling above the Bahamas — a claustrophobia-inducing cylinder stuffed to capacity with nineteen passengers and a…
Art Teele is a man of very big appetites, and because of them he is now in very big trouble. As the investigative report below indicates, the once-powerful politician is possessed of a seemingly insatiable craving for all things illicit — adulterous sex, illegal drugs, bribery and extortion. Three weeks…
It began with a single stray strand of sun-streaked brown hair. At the age of nine, Veronica Milchorena — who would become a curvaceous, beautiful multimedia star as an adult — was a confused Salvadoran expatriate living with her aunt in tiny Oneida, Tennessee. “I remember this girl telling me,…
When Robert Parker woke up on June 16, cooling rain clouds were rolling in. But the day ended up being a hot one for Parker, Miami-Dade County’s relatively new top cop. Demonstrators in Liberty City were out protesting the death of a black man one of his police officers had…
The condominium boom may make parts of Miami even more fabulous one day, but it is already butchering the black Grove. Just ask a butcher. “This destroy my life,” says Angel Arias, a 66-year-old who is just tall enough to peer over the aluminum top of the long glass meat…
After a six-year layoff, Peter Thomas’s “How Can I Be Down?” conference returns to South Beach. “How Can I Be Down?” is the largest urban music seminar in the world and (for a $300 registration fee) will purportedly teach industry novices how to navigate hip-hop’s shark-infested waters. There’s a ton…
We had been bouncing and lurching our way from Holguín to Boniato for about an hour when Carlitos stopped his cavernous covered flatbed truck at a crossroads. No other vehicles were in sight around what appeared to be three divergent highways. An almost full moon and clusters of stars lit…
A funny thing happened on José Marti’s way to the Key Biscayne Police Department, even though it is only steps from the island’s fire-rescue department. Somewhere along the way a black plastic trash bag containing $9881.20, which he was supposed to deliver, became lost. The money was part of the…
Alex Carter, it is safe to say, is happy to have his job back. In 2003 the Transportation Security Administration fired Carter, a screening manager at Miami International Airport. His dismissal came five months after Carter filed a sexual harassment complaint against his supervisor. Carter promptly filed a lawsuit. Indeed…
This week I’m writing about the governor’s press minions again. You may be wondering why, given that I just wrote about them — specifically Jacob DiPietre (who as the press secretary for Gov. Jeb Bush is number two in the office under communications director Alia Faraj, not number one as…
Sixteen years ago Miami closed out its most turbulent decade with one final spasm of violence. The last major race riot erupted in Overtown in January 1989, after Miami police officer William Lozano put a bullet in the brain of Clement Lloyd, who was fleeing another officer on his motorcycle…
A gang of gas can-wielding, ATV-riding arsonists has been terrorizing a simple farming community, and the authorities have done little to curb the bandits. In what he describes as “the Old West,” retired contractor George A. Burns, age 62, who together with his wife Ruth Roth, age 62, manages a…
Anwar Zayden must have felt a cold shudder run down his spine when he read about the woman suing political comedian Bill Maher for palimony (not to be confused with a paternity suit; palimony is support from a former lover). Nancy “Coco” Johnsen sued Maher in Los Angeles, claiming the…
After a lengthy and publicly rancorous battle with his employers, Kevin “Ital-K” Smith was officially informed that his services as traffic director at WLRN-FM (91.3) would no longer be required. This occurred Tuesday, June 21, when Friends of WLRN executive director Rick Lewis and CFO Karen Echols personally lowered the…
The federal government has thrust itself into the middle of a court battle between Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel (CIP) and the city’s police department in an effort to keep bureaucrats from breaking the law. This past Thursday the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a motion to prevent city officials from following…
In the 1979 science-fiction film Alien, the crew of the freighter Nostromo lands on a harsh and barren planetoid to investigate a distress signal. The group discovers the remains of a starship that had crashed, perhaps eons ago, its crew mysteriously wiped out. Quivering in the vessel’s cavernous underbelly are…
