Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel, established by voters in 2001 to monitor the city’s police department, is in a fight for its life. The agency’s very authority has been challenged, and consequently its reason to exist. For more than a year now, the CIP has been engaged in a lawsuit against…
The Miami Herald, like most large dailies, relies heavily on market research when considering changes in content or format. Several months ago, after studying some of that research, Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen and executive editor Tom Fiedler decided to resurrect a time-honored tradition in the newspaper business — book serialization…
The story I wanted to write this week was about judicial appointments. I wondered whether President George W. Bush, whose controversial judicial nominees have disrupted the U.S. Senate, has looked with envy at what his little brother has been doing down here in Florida. I was going to point out…
It’s an annual rite of passage in these here parts: Ozzfest returns to South Florida for a tenth anniversary edition! Leading the pack of course is Ozzy Osbourne, who is reassembling his old compatriots from Black Sabbath for another go-round. Don’t these guys ever retire? More promising are performances by…
Roy Thomas McDade, a 60-year-old mortgage broker, lives in the Village of Biscayne Park, a suburban oasis of some 3500 residents tucked between Miami Shores and North Miami. He and his wife Jane, who is also 60 and an insurance company executive, moved into the village back in 1975 and…
Ronald Gotlin has been a law-enforcement officer with the Village of Biscayne Park for 21 years. He began as a part-time patrolman and worked his way through the ranks to captain. In 1998 the Biscayne Park Village Commission, which hires the village’s department heads, rewarded Gotlin by naming him police…
Friday: It is already well into happy hour, you’re still at work, and the only free liquor event you’ve heard about is at some place called Design Within Reach, way the hell over in Coral Gables, an arduous cross-town trek on a Friday evening, even now, at 8:30 p.m. As…
When J. Arthur Heise took over the journalism program at Florida International University in 1983, there were instructors who wouldn’t talk to each other, hopelessly scrambled student files, and a faculty that was often in open revolt. “The FIU provost told me that the department was ‘my single biggest academic…
A couple of hours before they are to play the Colorado Rockies on a mild Thursday evening at Dolphins Stadium, Florida Marlins outfielder Juan Pierre stretches his hammy beside catcher Matt Treanor, himself mere minutes removed from watching TV in the clubhouse while pensively raking his goatee with a fork…
By our count, only a few sequels are waiting to have oil rubbed on their backs this summer — one featuring an evil lord named Vader, another featuring an evil lord named Schneider — so the season has that going for it, which is nice. But in lieu of sequels…
Titus Berry, a 34-year-old former math and physics teacher at Miami Beach Senior High School, is so fearful of that city’s police department he fled town two weeks ago and has gone into hiding. He took this extraordinary step on the advice of his attorney. Before leaving, however, Berry related…
Well, it just so happened I was gearing up for a vacation when Luis Posada Carriles decided to announce he had sneaked into the United States, putting the Bush administration on the spot and setting the stage for a huge public-relations triumph for his nemesis Fidel Castro. That was in…
With all the Memorial Day madness, there aren’t many new concert announcements — but this one is a doozy. The ladies of Destiny’s Child, the high priestesses of Top 40 R&B, are bringing their “Bills, Bills, Bills” to South Florida and plan to make you “Lose Your Breath” at the…
Doumic Romain sneered when he read a recent op-ed piece in the Miami Herald by Miami Police Chief John Timoney touting the department’s recent role helping Haiti’s interim government assess security in Port-au-Prince. “He talks about providing a safe environment for Haitian citizens,” the 42-year-old amateur filmmaker said. “Yet he…
This past February we took a stroll down Lincoln Road and noted numerous violations of sidewalk café permit rules governed by the Public Works Department of Miami Beach. We allowed some time to pass and then decided to contact code enforcement, which writes tickets for these offenses. After leaving many…
The studio is crammed in the back corner of Tootsie’s Cabaret, a sprawling strip club near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line. The walls are painted pitch-black. Leopard-print pillows cover two couches. Computers, microphones, Web cameras, and cables are strewn throughout the small room. Glass windows allow club visitors to watch the…
Juan Carlos Zapata, the dashing Colombian state representative from Miami-Dade County, insists during a recent interview he has no need to carry a pistol on his person. “I own some firearms, but I generally don’t have them on me,” Zapata says. Yet the 39-year-old Miami Sunset Senior High School graduate…
In one of the photos that charter-fishing captain Mark Quartiano distributed two weeks ago publicizing his latest catch, he is sprawled across a heap of very large dead sharks. He grins lasciviously at the camera and splays his legs while one hand caresses a fin and the other holds a…
The sun, the rain, the exhaust fumes from two-stroke diesel engine-powered scooters — those who sell flowers and distribute flyers on the street experience all of that and more. But this absolute ground-level capitalism has its allure too, from freedom from corporate overlords to a chance at eternal salvation. New…
Linda O’Brien, Aimee Artiles, Tom Guilfoyle, and Ken Drucker are all pleasant, generally helpful and professional county bureaucrats. Their jobs, respectively, are police spokeswoman, county spokeswoman, police attorney, and assistant county attorney. This past week these poor folks endured incessant badgering from this newspaper because their bosses tried to ignore…
Jim Morrison is dead. But that didn’t stop the remaining Doors — Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger (minus John Densmore, who suffers from tinnitus) — from re-forming with Ian Astbury, former lead singer of Edie worshippers the Cult, and one-time Police legend Stewart Copeland in 2002. That lineup didn’t work…
When art dealer Ramon Cernuda talks, people listen. Some may not like his message, but he says it anyway. In the Eighties he drew angry protests by declaring he had a constitutional right to buy and exhibit art from Cuba, even if the island was under communist rule and subject…
