Chris Paciello, deposed dark prince of South Beach nightclubs, shocked many people when he pleaded guilty this past October to racketeering, murder, and robbery charges. Immediately the rumors began to fly: He was going to sing against his mob capos and enter into the federal witness-protection program. “Did ya hear?”…
The petition drive aimed at repealing Miami-Dade County’s human-rights ordinance, which protects homosexuals from discrimination, is a time bomb capable of ripping apart the community if it is certified by county elections officials. So say members of SAVE Dade, the nonprofit political organization that worked for passage of the ordinance…
Late last year Miami-Dade County administrators announced that Miami International Airport workers would pay five dollars per month more for parking privileges, effective this February 1. No one seemed too concerned about the increase since it wasn’t too steep, and, in any case, most companies doing business at the airport…
They came, they spied, they typed on their computers. But they never intended to make the contents of their floppy disks public. Indeed the idea of that happening was perhaps their worst nightmare, one that came true on September 12, 1998, as they slept in their various apartments in Broward…
Late in the afternoon on a recent Wednesday, the Metropolitan Planning Organization meets in the county commission chambers. Up on the dais, Commissioner Natacha Seijas is droning on about the necessity of widening a street in her Hialeah district. Only a couple of lobbyists sit in the gallery, joined by…
It’s really nothing special, seeing the guy. There he is shopping at Wicker House furniture near the Falls, or nibbling on pasta at Perricone’s Marketplace off Brickell Avenue, or having his picture taken at a charity auction held at the Hotel Inter-Continental. Since he moved here for good last August,…
This past October 13 Lourdes Franco made a gruesome discovery. In apartment 908 at Carlyle on the Bay, a ten-story residential tower overlooking Biscayne Bay, just north of the former Omni Mall, she found 81-year-old Joseph Witten lying dead, face-down on the floor, a dark stain of dried blood under…
While introducing Steve Shiver as his choice for county manager, Mayor Alex Penelas repeatedly referred to the 34-year-old Homestead mayor’s business experience as proof he is qualified to run Miami-Dade County. The sum of that experience? Shiver owns a franchised real estate office, a construction company, and a security-equipment firm…
“Give me a beat, DJ. This child wants to walk!” demands Jojo Infiniti, who is MCing the House of Quest’s Awareness Ball at club Oz this past November. As the music starts, a lanky man waiting by the side of the dance floor in a petulant pose begins to strut…
Marilyn Bell moves a white plastic chair, approved for outdoor use by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, on to the small cement porch of her apartment and takes a seat. Light saturates the sand-colored buildings of Perrine Gardens on this late November afternoon, turning them an incandescent golden yellow. For Bell…
Richard Bliss found paradise in 1977. That was the year he bought a large parcel of land in the Biscayne Gardens neighborhood of North Miami-Dade County. The property, a full acre and a quarter, was shaded by majestic oak trees and sloped gently to the shoreline of a large manmade…
From time to time the employees at Aljoma Lumber, Inc., watch nonchalantly as José Lamas descends in his helicopter, touching down in the middle of the Aljoma compound in Medley. After the rotund white-haired Lamas steps unsteadily to the ground, and the chopper has risen overhead again, a haze of…
On September 18, 1979, City of Miami voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the city charter. Residents endorsed a proposal requiring that all future development along Biscayne Bay or on either bank of the Miami River below the Fifth Street bridge be placed 50 feet…
In the spirit of the holidays, Hialeah Police Chief Rolando Bolaños, Sr., wanted a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for his family. Who could blame him? The year past had not been very kind. His two sons, who eagerly followed in their father’s footsteps to become police officers (in…
The weather. Sports. Not-so-subliminal political messages. More weather. Soap operas. More sports. Those topics were front-page news during the last two weeks of December, if you get your news from South Florida’s premier Spanish-language newspaper. And they were not mere mentions tucked away in the corners somewhere. No, like all…
8:20 a.m. A woman, outfitted from head to toe in T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, fanny pack, floppy denim hat, and sunglasses stands on a manicured front lawn in Miami Shores. Balancing unsteadily on the balls of her feet, she cranes her neck and tries to steal a peek into the house…
Juan Galan has always known that people get a great education at Miami-Dade Community College. Galan graduated from the college in 1963 before going on to earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in administration from George Washington University. A prominent businessman…
Read Part 1 of this story The case of Bridget Garcia and Regina Greenhill has come to a close without a clear resolution. Citing a lack of evidence, the State Attorney’s Office has decided not to charge Garcia with exploiting Greenhill, a widowed stroke victim for whom Garcia worked as…
Kreyol-language AM radio is the most important medium of communication within South Florida’s Haitian community and its most immediate link with the larger society. Which is a sobering thought, considering what’s currently on the air. A small but influential collection of brokers buy and sell Kreyol-language airtime on a few…
As a group of women and children gather this past September at a New Haven Gardens public housing community meeting in Little River, Martin Siskind bursts into the stuffy room with the flair of a thespian. The aspiring activist and devotee of seminal Twenties lawyer Clarence Darrow speaks in smooth…
The day we moved into our new house in Little Haiti, a thin white woman with sallow skin walked along the sidewalk past our gate, head bowed and shoulders hunched, coughing as she passed. A white man in an expensive car had dropped her off and then driven out of…
On his sixth birthday this past September, Jamie Maitre was surrounded by a handful of strangers. Two adolescent girls and a rambunctious toddler played with balloons, petted a squirmy Chihuahua, and chased a long-haired cat. Grownups took turns sitting next to Jamie, and Naomi Maitre never left her son’s side…
