“Miami is not poor in a static way,” observes Daniella Levine, one of the founders of the aspiring and grandly titled Greater Miami Prosperity Campaign. “It’s poor in a progressive way, meaning we will continue to have more and more poor immigrants and low-wage workers.” According to Levine, executive director…
“What makes people so entrepreneurial in Miami is they have no other options,” says Luz Gomez, program director of ACCIN USA’s local office. ACCIóN, the largest business microlender in the nation, opened a branch in East Little Havana this past April (with a second outpost in Little Haiti) after conducting…
One year ago New Times spilled a great deal of ink chronicling Miami’s long, slow decline into poverty, the grim result of a combination of overwhelming immigration, middle-class flight, an overtaxed and unequal education system, massive job losses, and deteriorating housing. Since then city officials have taken small but encouraging…
“You take checks?” Loraine Hibbert asks Kenny the Juice Man. “Honey, we take everything,” Kenny Aube, self-described juice hustler, assures the owner of Shrimp, Wings & Things. Aube recently wandered into Hibbert’s tiny Model City restaurant on a mission to sell her some juice. His pitch is simple — he’ll…
With the school year in full swing and the recent newsworthy personal advancements of some old schoolmates, I can’t help but recall some past relations. Time has obviously tempered my views, but with someone like Noelle Bush, who was recently and successfully discharged from a court-appointed drug-rehab program, I (like…
As America is learning, the war on terror is a costly undertaking. In his address to the nation in early September, President George W. Bush spelled out some of those costs: $87 billion, on top of the roughly $63 billion already requested, for the war and reconstruction in Iraq. This…
In the grand scheme of things, it could be worse. Mario Mora Medina could still be in a dank jail cell in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, stranded with dozens of other Cubans in a legal limbo — they had finished prison sentences for various crimes but remained in custody of…
It’s not every day that an entire municipal police force publicly castigates an elected official, but that’s exactly what happened last week when 25 officers from the North Bay Village Police Department signed a petition demanding the resignation of city Commissioner Bob Dugger. Petition signatory Sgt. Roland Pandolfi says the…
It’s no secret that Hector Pesquera, special agent in charge of the FBI’s South Florida operations, is friends with convicted felon Camilo Padreda. It may not be a secret, but the friendship is strange enough that it’s now the subject of a preliminary investigation by the Department of Justice. Padreda,…
Fane Lozman moved back to South Florida early this year to rock on a houseboat in the warm waters of Biscayne Bay and let the stress of his Chicago software business drift in and out with the tides. Unfortunately for him, he chose to moor his floating home along one…
For some people who know Denise Calvo well, the shock, anger, and sorrow caused by the September 18 murder of her husband, José Calvo, must have been informed by a very specific sense of remorse. Their regret would be even more acute because they’ve known all along that undercover cops…
Victor Monzon-Aguirre this past July pleaded guilty to forgery, fraud, and providing a false notary for his part in a scam in which a company he helped run submitted forged documents to Miami-Dade County in order to receive $500,000. By the time Monzon-Aguirre was being investigated he had left the…
Start with her body. The scar she has always taken such care to conceal is visible now, snaking along her spine where the surgeon sliced open Gloria Estefan’s skin after she broke several vertebrae in a tour-bus crash in Pennsylvania in 1990. Thirteen years later she is lying nearly naked…
The Miami International Film Festival took eighteen years to become a legitimate, beloved cultural event, the kind of thing people eagerly anticipate all year. It took just three years, under the sponsorship of Florida International University, for the festival to morph into a celluloid-steroid behemoth, wobbling on the brink of…
It ain’t easy being Steph. And it sure ain’t easy being on the other end of the line when seventeen-year-old Stephanie Fleitas has something to sell you. “Don’t tell me you don’t have the budget,” she warns a hapless ad director at a local company. “I don’t want to hear…
I wasn’t going to say anything. Who wants to spoil a birthday party, even if it’s the Herald’s ballyhooed 100th anniversary? No, I was just going to let it slide — their endlessly self-congratulatory centennial, their costly new redesign, their coy suggestion that perhaps they’d actually reinvented journalism. (“The next…
Sergio Bendixen and the polling creature that ate your telephone Surveys have become an intrusive fact of modern life. Every day, it seems, the news carries word of some new poll that shows Americans favor this candidate or that policy, are eating more or reading less. And those are just…
Robert Meyers is often asked a rather impertinent question by complete strangers: Justify your existence. “It’s the first thing people ask,” admits the executive director of Miami-Dade County’s Commission on Ethics and Public Trust www.co.miami-dade.fl.us/ethics/. “It’s hard to measure effectiveness considering what we do. We’re not arresting people. But we’re…
David Byrd has been around — and in — the Miami River for most of his 55 years, and he has one word for the river these days: “Garbage.” Byrd isn’t talking about the actual floating detritus that plagues the 5.5-mile waterway. He uses the word to describe the long-heralded…
The Rev. Carlton “King” Coleman, 71 years old, is wide awake at 3:00 a.m. and halfway through his Nothing But Love! show on Miami Beach gospel station WMBM-AM (1490). The phones light up. “Look at that!” he thunders, reaching for line one. “They never stop!” “WMBM, we rolling!” he bellows…
What do parents really know about their children? Tara Jadun’s mom thought she knew everything about her daughter — until the day she disappeared. The fourteen-year-old walked out of Nautilus Middle School in Miami Beach and simply vanished into the humid metropolis. That was four months ago, and all the…
The topic of the weekend gathering at Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center two weeks ago was the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Miami this November. But those who showed up weren’t interested in tariffs and treaties. They were getting ready to rumble. “We just want to disrupt the…
