1. On Saturday morning, December 1, 2001, Larry Brand parked his black Nissan pickup in the lot at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Brand’s a professor there, hired as a phytoplankton ecologist in 1981, and tenured in 1987. During his two decades at UM…
On April 30 it looked like Ebony and Ivory had finally gotten it together. Miami Beach commissioners okayed an agreement that effectively ended hotel developer R. Donahue Peebles’s seven-year-old business dispute with the city. Peebles has always contended that Miami Beach officials bear some of the responsibility for the $15.8…
If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought the news had it covered. It was April 23, and red dye was streaming through faucets and showerheads in northern Miami-Dade. Some underwear turned pink in the washing machines. On TV, there were live pictures of red water along the edges of…
Even before the start of the Gulfstream Park season in January, horse trainer Mark Shuman and his boss, New Hampshire mortgage banker Michael Gill, were talking large about their prospects. They had sauntered into Hallandale Beach like a couple of pistoleros, muscling their way into the pastoral confines of the…
By now, most sports fans know that the Miami Herald on May 10 published an apparent blockbuster questioning the integrity of the nation’s premier equine event, the Kentucky Derby. And by now, almost everyone knows the Herald blew it. Commentators around the world have hit the paper for falsely insinuating…
Friends don’t let friends read and drive. That might explain why so many of Miami-Dade’s municipalities come up empty when clicked on the city-by-city breakdown of best-selling books, music, and movies generated by Amazon.com. Kind of hard to turn the page when your eyes are glued to the bumper in…
Last week the Golden Beach Town Council voted to hire a new police chief — Greg Feldman, from the South Miami Police Department. He’ll be the fourth in three years, not including current stopgap chief Bobby Cheatham. I wish Feldman luck. He’s going to need it. The last chief in…
We’re a long way from God’s Waiting Room, as South Beach with its abundance of quietly rocking retirees was wryly dubbed in the Seventies. For a look at the Beach’s latest incarnation, one need only gaze around the pool at the swanky Shore Club hotel. The scene is a marvel…
Perhaps the most memorable scene of the 1979 classic The China Syndrome is when the A-team of scientists at the fictitious nuclear power plant is facing a meltdown. Lights are flashing on the control panel, buzzers are blaring, and a middle-age Jack Lemmon, who plays the conscientious plant manager, is…
Mayoral races in Miami are usually great political theater — drawn-out, divisive campaigns that satisfy our appetite for good old-fashioned blood sport. But, sadly, the contest for the county mayor’s job in 2004 has so far attracted a mostly lackadaisical bunch of gladiators: Nice guy comish Jimmy Morales, for example,…
As residents and automobile drivers in downtown Miami brace for an ominous high-rise condo boom, a romantic (yet lucrative) episode of urban pioneering is coming to a close. Over the past year Andrew Tobias, one of Miami’s leading financial geniuses and the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, quietly sold…
On April 19, long-time Univision and (recently) Telemundo sportscaster Norberto Longo died of a massive heart attack at HealthSouth Doctors’ Hospital in Coral Gables. He was 62, but a “young” man, and the most respected Spanish-language soccer commentator in the U.S. He and color narrator Andrés Cantor were the best…
This past March, Robert Blake, the University of Miami Medical School’s general counsel, chastised Michael Kosnitzky, who sits on the board of the Public Health Trust. Kosnitzky was just asking too many damned questions about how UM was going to spend the roughly $65 million the PHT pays it to…
Paul Novack finds himself in an odd position these days. As the veteran mayor of pint-size Surfside he’s built a reputation for being a feisty champion of the little guy, fearlessly taking on bigger, richer opponents, from Bal Harbour’s Stanley Whitman to other developers who threatened the low-rise integrity of…
Working closely with the U.S. Coast Guard, a small group of local volunteers has expanded a passive public watchdog program into an active intelligence-gathering operation. The idea may send a shudder down the official spine of the ACLU, but this handful of private citizens has turned up a number of…
If the City of Miami had forbidden Geraldo Rios to put up his peluches (stuffed animals) for Mother’s Day, many hearts would have ached, none more than Geraldo’s own. The bright, fluffy teddy bears and other fuzzy gifts look as darling inside the glass, waiting in his flower shop, as…
Miami Beach City Hall never looked so good. Lots of hair gel, sleeveless T-shirts and exposed bellybuttons, everything but the velvet rope. And despite the heavy cloud cover and rain, no one forgot their sunglasses. This, of course, was at the big club industry protest last week. Nightclub owners, promoters,…
The trouble with democracy is that all these people get involved. That’s why the MADA, the Museum of American Democratic Art, is such a mess. MADA didn’t cost much to build: just enough to silk-screen the names of museum movers and shakers on the canvas backs of 60 or so…
Politics in Hialeah is not for the faint-hearted. It’s intense. It gets up close and personal. It galvanizes the entire city. And it is played by a strictly enforced set of rules. As most people know, Mayor for Life Raul Martinez, the undisputed high priest of Hialeah, writes those rules…
The dismissal of six workers from a local office of the Department of Children and Families is one of the most surreal governmental dramas to play itself out in some time. Certainly you recall the incident. On March 4 an aide to state Sen. Rudy Garcia was accompanying the senator’s…
Long before he came to clean up a few small messes in Miami, this city’s new police chief John Timoney was a young cop in New York City in the early Seventies, when millions of dollars of heroin disappeared from one of NYPD’s warehouses. The case went on to inspire…
About a month ago Lois Spears, director of Miami-Dade’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, picked up the phone. She must have gritted her teeth when she punched the numbers to the Miami-Dade Police Department. No one in a position of power, especially in law enforcement, is fond of asking for…
