Joan Andre is an emotional woman. She is given to generous, even extravagant, impulses, which she can often indulge because life has left her financially well off. She is 53 years old and a successful real estate agent with a lovely home in Coconut Grove. After four marriages followed by…
Nine months ago the Homestead City Council agreed to let a business group take over the moribund Homestead Sports Complex, a 6500-seat baseball stadium with adjacent athletic fields. More precisely, the complex is a financial sinkhole that cost about $18 million in hotel bed-tax revenues to build, costs Homestead an…
Miami-Dade County officials have pulled the plug on politically connected electrician Hector Pio Ortiz, whose company, Horsepower Electric, has won $24 million in county contracts over the past five years. As reported here January 13 (“Kicked Back and in the Green”), Horsepower was close to securing a nine-million-dollar, no-bid deal…
A blithe middle-age white man on a red bicycle zooms across the intersection of NE 78th Street and Biscayne Boulevard. He is dressed in a pair of denim shorts, a black polo shirt, white Converse sneakers, and a black baseball cap. Tinted glasses conceal his wide, piercing blue eyes. The…
Most of the outdoor seating permits for Lincoln Road restaurants were first issued in 1997, a time when the City of Miami Beach was attempting to promote the pedestrian mall’s revival. The city’s plan worked much like George W’s Iraq war — it was “too successful,” with no contingency plans…
For the past five years, Forrest Gordon and other Redland residents have peppered county Commissioner Dennis Moss with requests to allow them to vote on incorporating to form Miami-Dade’s 32nd municipality. Some Redland dwellers want independence from county rule in order to protect the 64-square-mile rural area in the unincorporated…
Periodic temperamental outbursts seem to be part of the job description for the City of Miami’s District 5 representative. Commissioner Jeffery Allen, appointed to replace the indicted and possibly cop-threatening, possibly bribe-taking Art Teele, has shown that he is qualified for this public-serving position, as least in the nonpassive aggression…
New Times obtained this e-mail sent from the Miami Herald Publishing Company to its employees: “For this year’s Annual Meeting video, all MHPC employees are invited to participate in a group shot scheduled for Tuesday, January 18 from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m. We will be closing off NE 14th Street…
For more than a year bail-bond agents throughout Miami-Dade County have watched their business plummet. Some bondsmen estimate that their client volume has dropped as much as 70 percent. “This has paralyzed many people’s business,” says Nathaniel Sala-Suarez of Coconut Grove Bail Bonds. Adds Jack Benveniste, President of All Dade…
Juan Carlos Cardenas idly twirls a spoon, then holds it still over his plate of rice. He sits in silence at Puerto Sagua restaurant on South Beach, as if inspecting the funhouse reflection of his goateed face in the spoon. He sits still for so long you’d never know he’d…
Early in the evening on December 29, several residents of the Greens apartment complex in Doral came upon what appeared to be a Muscovy duck massacre on the banks of the property’s manmade lake. There they found five of the waterfowl in the throes of agonizing deaths. “There was another…
Carlos Suarez de Jesus was thrilled his article about Miami’s money-inflamed art world was appearing on the cover of Street Weekly’s January 7 issue. It was the freelance writer’s first feature-length story, on a subject the paper prided itself in covering. But any hopes the assignment would lead to more…
The last burnt-orange light of day dissipates over the dusty buildings as I drive along North Miami Avenue looking for prostitutes. Really, just one in particular. This takes place during the fevered buildup to the holidays and I’m thinking it’s an appropriate way to mark the season. I’m not alone…
Religion, as a subject of public discourse, has been hijacked by political analysts who talk about faith mostly in the context of political battles or culture wars. Christianity, according to the commentariat, is a set of values usually aligning with a political platform which ¨the people¨ can vote for or…
Hector Pio Ortiz is a made man. The electrician owns a Hialeah company that routinely wins multimillion-dollar contracts from Miami-Dade County to install and maintain traffic and street lights. Over the past five years county commissioners have awarded Ortiz’s Horsepower Electric eleven contracts worth about $24 million. Now Horsepower Electric…
The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder executives have closed Street Weekly, the free youth-oriented tabloid that was meant to engage young readers and compete directly with Miami New Times. Late Wednesday staff members were informally told that the issue appearing on Friday, January 7, would be the last. Human resources…
The mob guys were leery of taking Laurie in on the big job, even though, at 28, she was one of the best cat burglars on Miami Beach. “They didn’t want to bring me because I was a girl,” Laurie Lichtman remembers. “Phil told them, öShe’s better than any one…
Turf wars over drug territory have sent the homicide rate in Overtown up 120 percent from last year, according to Miami Police Department figures. Between January and November, eleven murders had been reported in the beleaguered neighborhood, as opposed to five homicides during the same period in 2003. “Drug dealers…
Extracting a straightforward answer from the City of Miami was like pulling teeth, but at last came a confession: The new billboards plastering the walls of the city’s high-rise buildings are illegal. At press time 21 of the signs, which contain gargantuan images of beer and vodka bottles, gyrating iPod…
His feet sloshing in blood, Petty Officer Nathan Allen moved frantically through the scene trying to decide which of his friends to save. They were calling to him, screaming from every direction about missing legs and torn-up arms. Seconds earlier, an Iraqi insurgent had lobbed a mortar over the wall…
“Britney got married. Ashlee was caught lip-synching. ODB died,” writes Dallas Observer music editor Sarah Hepola in “Trend Spotting,” one of eight essays the New Times has compiled to assess the year in music. Sarah’s statement is deceptively facile. While she picks three superficial, screaming headlines from the previous twelve…
It’s difficult to survey the hip-hop of 2004, more bloated and self-referential than ever, and not imagine the mythical AOR wasteland of the mid-’70s. Like rock before it, hip-hop has easily won a cultural acceptance once unthinkable, and our reward is a parade of Jadakisses and G-Unit solo projects, preaching…
