Please look to the left of this text. Thank you. You are very good at following directions. That woman with the dead-ahead gaze, the determined jaw, and the mahogany skin is Octavia Anderson. She is 33 years old. She is the mother of six children. She lives in the James…
On June 20 a Cuban Interior Ministry official revealed some startling news on Cuba’s state-run television show Mesa Redonda. Three Miami-Dade residents had been under arrest on the island since April, he reported, for boating to the island from points unknown and going ashore with AK-47 assault rifles, an M-3…
Alphonso Branch is doing his part — Monday through Friday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. — as a janitor at the Culmer-Overtown Neighborhood Center. The sixteen-year-old varsity receiver and cornerback was there last week, broom in hand, flicking the detritus of a rainy Tuesday off the center’s speckled-brown linoleum tile floor,…
Democrats hate him. Journalists scorn him. Most Americans ignore him. Which is fine with Matt Drudge. He’s taking it to the bank.
“Don’t come in, he’s just exposed himself,” yelled Steve Hollabaugh, rake in hand, speaking from inside Merrimac House, a low-income boarding establishment at 189 NE 26th St. Merrimac is home to fifteen mostly male residents. Some tenants are formerly homeless and trying to get it together. Others are substance abusers…
In May 1999 the Miami-Dade County Commission unanimously approved a “living wage” ordinance. Laws like it are not common around the nation, and for workers in South Florida, where many businesses thrive on the backs of abysmally paid immigrants, it is truly significant. The ordinance fixes the minimum wage for…
Juan Muchotrigo made enormous sacrifices for his job. During the sixteen years he worked at East Coast Fisheries restaurant, the 39-year-old wrecked three serious relationships with girlfriends who demanded he spend more time with them and less time at work. He punched the clock instead of using vacation time to…
More peace signs dangle from the ceiling and microphone stands on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on May 15 than from the rearview mirrors of a caravan of hippies. A woman is singing with her eyes closed, straight hair framing her face like a medieval Madonna. Tall and angular,…
One afternoon a little more than a year ago, Ginette walked into a women’s bathroom at the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Krome Service Processing Center in western Miami-Dade County. There in front of her, sitting on a toilet but fully clothed, was a leering, uniformed detention officer. For…
Less than a year ago, architect Jacqueline Pepper was known publicly only to a small circle of zoning enthusiasts who attended meetings of the Redland Community Council, on which she sat. Then she joined the race with six other contenders for the District 7 school board seat. There she passed…
About eight months ago, Miami Police Lt. Israel Gonzalez was sitting in his office at the department’s downtown headquarters when his boss, Maj. Frank Christmas, burst in and began berating him about the conduct of several officers under Gonzalez’s command. At the time the lieutenant was head of the department’s…
John de Leon is attracted to conflict like an umpire to a baseball game: It’s a fair ball as long as everyone plays by the rules of the U.S. Constitution. During the past four years, it often seemed as if no major controversy or protest occurred in Miami-Dade County without…
Pizza joints, like sushi bars, are not in short supply along Washington Avenue. On the eleven blocks between Sixth Street and Lincoln Road, there are eight pizzerias slinging cheesy Italian slices at the passersby. Though the kitchens are hot and loud, and the guys wrestling the dough sweat and grunt…
On the night of May 6, the horrible news crackled out of police scanners all along the Tamiami Trail, from Naples to the Big Cypress National Preserve, 50 miles west of Miami. Fatal hit and run on State Road 29 north of Everglades City. Victim: ten months old. Female. Nature…
Morning broke uneasily over Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood, a once-wonderful artists&supl; colony that, despite the best efforts of some of the most annoying community activists in the world, has evolved into a chain-store-clogged shopping mall. In the Carollo household, tension percolated. At a little after 7:00 a.m. on February 7,…
It’s showtime at Miami Beach’s Club Tropigala on a recent Saturday night, and Cuban comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes is headlining. He’s half an hour late for his stand-up routine, and the audience is starting to squirm. Finally, at midnight, he ambles onstage — even that is funny. His top two…
A month ago Miami Beach city planners sat down and soberly mapped out their vision for the future of South Beach, specifically the Lincoln Road pedestrian mall. It’s a future in which families stroll along a high-end shopping strip and eat pricey meals unmolested by street performers and panhandlers. But…
This past April 11, a heart attack took the life of 74-year-old Mary Ellen Bethel Hanna. Her children, Larry and Jacqueline, wanted a simple burial for their mother, whom they affectionately describe as old-fashioned. Mary Ellen had not remarried after losing her husband, World War II veteran Wilbert Hanna, in…
1997 •In September New Times reveals that superintendent Roger Cuevas and a few dozen of his top administrators received graduate degrees from diploma mills, a loophole that allowed many of them to take shortcuts to higher-paying administrative jobs. (Cuevas’s 1974 master’s degree in curriculum instruction comes from the University of…
Will someone from the City of Miami please toss Melissa Meyer a bone? At this point it doesn’t seem likely. Audrey Eckert, a veteran police officer and animal-rights activist who also is the Coconut Grove Neighborhood Resource Officer, isn’t going to do it. Grumbles Eckert: “I have no idea why…
In the midmorning sunshine outside one of Miami-Dade County’s most impenetrable bureaucratic fortresses, a tightly packed crowd of journalists forms a small arc three rows deep around a podium. Behind the podium a well-dressed man in his late fifties stands under the shadow of the Metrorail line that runs between…
Lee Lawrence grabbed a bagful of trash and pushed open the front door to his convenience store. He was on his way to the Dumpster. As he stepped outside on the evening of May 20, 1989, a barrage of gunfire cut the air. Moments later the 52-year-old grocer lay dead,…
