Hank Goldberg has been called many names throughout his 26-year career hosting talk radio in South Florida: heel, sorehead, jerk, cretin, to cite just a few of the epithets his listeners, rivals, and even some admirers use to describe the 64-year-old radio personality. But since his early days at WIOD-AM…
A tenth-grader at G. Holmes Braddock High School has been keeping a secret from her fellow students: She is HIV-positive. It is her private burden, one she has been shouldering since she was a little girl. But Brandy (not her real name) had a moment of panic a couple of…
Neith Nevelson looks like a refugee from some war-torn Balkan village. A black cloth wrapped around her body serves as a dress, a scarf adorns her head; her paint-stained hands and perpetually bare feet are browned by the sun and gnarled as tree roots. She sits on her porch in…
David Collins is not an imposing man. He’s a baby-faced 37 years old, about five feet, five inches tall, heavyset, with thinning hair. He has a habit of talking fast and crass, which makes him seem nervous or gives him a hustler’s air — depending on the subject. But lack…
Roberto Behar and Rosario Marquardt keep having a kind of recurring hallucination. They’re in a jet plane heading toward Miami Beach, on approach to Miami International Airport. They look out the window as the jet heads west over the rooftops of South Beach and then the brilliant blue water of…
A highly contagious and antibiotic-resistant strain of staph infection has contaminated a Miami-Dade County jail, causing open, seeping sores in some inmates that could potentially spread to anyone they come into contact with including corrections officers, visitors, lawyers, and judges. Corrections medical officials have misdiagnosed the ailment, been slow to…
The pedal steel guitar is a thing of strange beauty. Call it a musical contraption: a guitar neck flattened on a board of wood and resting on spindly metal legs, with sometimes a second neck, or even a third. The strings number eight, ten, or twelve, too many for a…
There have been events in Juan Carlos Elso’s life that led U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz to describe it as “beyond tragic” last week. Before his world unraveled, Johnny, as his family calls him, was a kid from a classic middle-class Cuban-American family, a former wrestling champion at Coral Park…
This past April, when Rene Rodriguez retired as director of the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, his surprise announcement was accompanied by a florid memo to County Manager George Burgess in which the housing agency’s achievements were extolled, while the media’s criticism of his stumbling efforts to provide housing for poor families…
Life could hardly get any worse for Mario Barcia. He’s unemployed and broke. He and his wife have crammed themselves into the home of a relative. A court order prevents him from physically setting foot outside that home. His wife is expecting a baby within weeks. And he is facing…
Hooligan’s Pub owner Jay Love touts himself as a common-sense alternative to the career politicians and slick elites populating the pack in the upcoming Miami-Dade mayoral election. He’s self-made, an entrepreneur, he loves children! And as Love is the only Anglo in the race, his influence cannot be easily dismissed…
R.J. Lockwood was found dead on his apartment floor days after he and his new belle made plans to start a life together in the new year.
So we got Rudy Crew. The new superintendent of the Miami-Dade school system is a savvy man. Masterfully coquettish in handling many suitors from different cities vying for his acceptance, he had us chasing and panting right up until the last second. We won his hand, and Crew gained not…
This past February the rebellion in Haiti gripped the world. Journalists from Spain, England, and Japan, not to mention a battalion of American media might — the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, NPR, and more — camped out at swank Port-au-Prince hotels like the Montana, El Rancho, and…
In the front yard of his salmon-colored, single-story house across the street from Brownsville Middle School, mechanic Lorenzo Jones, 49, slouches on a white lawn chair, holding a cup in his right hand filled with Coca-Cola and Jim Beam. Jones’s bloodshot gaze is focused on the apartment buildings next door…
Last week Denise Caligiuri Calvo, dressed in a handsome black suit, light-brown hair coifed in a long shag, entered a cramped courtroom at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building and stood before a judge. She raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, her long, manicured fingernails glistening…
The Miami-Dade Police Department’s Animal Services unit is getting a lot of attention lately, none of it good. On March 18, New Times published a story about a woman who was taken to the hospital with heart trouble. After the ambulance carted her away, someone called Animal Services, which confiscated…
Gadflies don’t make a lot of friends. Paulo Adario knows. A bustling man with a wiry build, intense emerald eyes, and flecks of gray in his beard, Adario has spent most of the past three years wearing a bulletproof vest and fending off death threats with the help of bodyguards…
Capt. Edwin Milian-Zabala is a hard-working member of the Miami-Dade Park and Recreation Department’s security unit. Didn’t know such a thing existed? You’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean the unit’s employees don’t work hard. In fact Milian-Zabala appears to toil endlessly on behalf of county taxpayers. He put in…
A giddy chaos swirls through downtown Tallahassee as the legislative session approaches its midpoint, April Fool’s Day. Gusts of energy and appetite move people through the cool marble rotunda of the old capitol. At lunchtime in the plaza outside, a stiff breeze blows tiny bits of leaves into a giant…
In the sweltering hilltop town of Petionville, about ten miles above the congestion and cacophony of Port-au-Prince, people gathered on the morning of March 7. Under the watchful eyes of U.S. Marines and French troops in armored vehicles, men and women wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the Haitian flag and carrying…
The white-haired, soft-spoken man seated comfortably in a plush chair inside the Biltmore Hotel’s elegant lounge thinks the U.S. Treasury Department could be after him. Why? Because during his most recent visit to Cuba he played his harmonica without a license. It’s a joke. But this is not: He has…
