No one passes through Biscayne Park on their way to another destination. Shaped like an isosceles triangle, the placid village just north of Miami Shores is hemmed in by the Biscayne Canal on the west and FEC railroad tracks on the east. It can be hard to find even if…
On a Tuesday night in a townhome behind the Dadeland Mall, comic book history is being made. Maybe. “Some might consider it a comic book mistake,” says Eric Da Silva, the co-creator of Outcross, a maverick magazine that hopes to be to comic books what Blender is to music: a…
The vodou appears to have worked. In Gonaives, a port town in northern Haiti where the armed insurrection began that ultimately forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power, an ash mound in front of the grave of Amiot Metayer is a charred reminder of an angry people. It is the remnants…
If you don’t live in a West Miami-Dade community like Miami Lakes, Hialeah, or Doral, and if you don’t stalk the political hunting grounds of Tallahassee or the Miami school board, you’ve probably never heard of Ralph Arza — unless maybe you were a fan of Miami High School football…
The Miami Herald set off fireworks with its March 9 article headlined “Police secretly watching hip-hop artists,” in which the paper alleged Miami Beach and Miami police were “secretly watching and keeping dossiers on hip-hop celebrities” and have “photographed rappers as they arrived at Miami International Airport.” Written by Nicole…
A ceramic ape bares his teeth from his perch on a bookshelf in the Kendall townhouse where Cher Durham is preparing to deliver her first child. A quizzical little monkey in a framed print stares at midwife Corina Fitch from the dining room wall as she settles herself under a…
Lazara Betancourt was hospitalized with heart trouble and a broken leg when the county’s dog-enforcement agency, a.k.a. the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Animal Services Unit, moved in on her mixed-breed pet Ambrosio. On January 3 Ofcr. Kathy Labrada entered Betancourt’s second-floor apartment on Normandy Drive in Miami Beach, snatched the year-old…
Depending on your point of view, Fane Lozman, during the scant thirteen months he’s lived in North Bay Village, has either wreaked havoc on the town or single-handedly saved it from its worst demons. First was Lozman’s confrontation with Adolph “Al” Coletta, one of the city’s most prominent and influential…
Dr. Luisa Utset-Ward is used to making people scream. As a dentist who specializes in serving children on Medicaid, she regularly pulls rotten teeth out of scared little mouths. But Utset-Ward, 42, wouldn’t trade her job for anything because she believes early intervention in the mouths of babes sets them…
Taimira Perez eases herself onto the navy sofa in the living room of her townhouse in Miramar Gardens, a private residential community of predominantly low-income property owners in the city of Miami Gardens, near the border of Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Leaning back wearily, the 41-year-old rubs the back of…
For the past couple of years developers, contractors, engineers, concrete companies, and road builders have been flooding into South Miami-Dade. The hundreds of homes they’ve built have sold quickly. Thousands of new residents have moved in, and their arrival has provided incentive for yet more development. It’s boom time down…
Miami Mayor Manny Diaz may be relieved to learn that Jamie Loughner hitchhiked out of Miami two weeks ago and headed home to Washington, D.C. Loughner was one of the more than 230 people arrested this past November during protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). According…
Last week, at the University of Miami’s Gusman Auditorium, Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas gave his final State of the County address. In this optimistic political libretto he hit all the high notes, mentioning the county’s fiscal health and burgeoning cultural scene, evidenced by the Latin Grammy Awards here last year…
The terrifying inferno of the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and left hundreds of his supporters dead has returned to haunt Little Haiti. The drab storefront on NW 54th Street that serves as headquarters of Veye Yo, where refugees of that coup now gather to watch videotapes of…
Going out on South Beach can be intimidating for the average citizen whose wealth, beauty, or hipness quotients aren’t quite stratosphere-scraping. Most of Greater Miami, in fact, generally avoids the place, except when carting around visitors from out of town, impressing business contacts, or trying to seduce nubile young somethings-or-other…
Lewis Moncrief beams from behind his secondhand desk like a CEO in a Brickell high-rise. His apartment, which doubles as his office and the headquarters for his nonprofit organization Mother Nature’s Kitchen, is furnished with items scrounged from sidewalks and thrift stores. To his left a battered filing system with…
Several attorneys working for the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office have filed formal complaints alleging their supervisors pressured them to support the candidacy of long-time incumbent Bennett Brummer over that of a young challenger who until recently worked in the defender’s office. One of the attorneys who lodged a complaint believes…
In 1818 the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley published “Ozymandias of Egypt,” which describes how a traveler in the desert stumbles upon the enormous, broken statue of a great king. “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” stand next to a “shatter’d visage,” Shelley writes. “And on the pedestal these…
When the dancers walk to class on Sunday afternoons, they are careful to follow the bright blue lines painted on the ground. In prison, walking outside boundaries can net a warning, a writeup, or even land an inmate in lock — close confinement for as many as 30 days. Maggie…
She doesn’t look like a Spanish knight beset by noble delusions, yet ever since Rosa Kasse decided to go jousting with political giants, even her friends have warned her to watch out for windmills. But Kasse, a 56-year-old Democrat originally from the Dominican Republic, believes she has a shot at…
On September 18 of last year, prominent businessman José Calvo was shot to death as he, his wife, and one-year-old son sat in a Mercedes-Benz in the driveway of their Coconut Grove home. A suspect has been arrested, but the murder case is far from resolved. Initially the crime appeared…
The stage is set at a shadowy intersection in a North Miami neighborhood. This is the meeting place for a group of young people characterized by a diversity of backgrounds and unified by a precarious plan — to jam the system by scamming cash from auto insurance companies. The first…
