For two consecutive years, Commander José Hernandez, a chaplain with the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department, has survived investigations into the work he does in the jail system and possible conflicts of interest with a women’s center he founded fifteen years ago. In fact he’s thrived despite the probes. Late…
Money changes everything. When Leslie Bowe finally returned to the office that Monday, after he had recovered from the chicken pox and made a quick trip to Tallahassee, he was a different man. For starters he was rich, having cashed in a lottery ticket worth $17 million. And he seemed…
Dear Students: Welcome to the start of what I know will be a rich and rewarding time for you at the Electoral College of the Americas. Founded in 1982, the College is the undisputed leader in the area of electoral arts and sciences, and the only institution offering the distinguished…
Nearly 15,000 gay men and lesbians gathered in Miami over Thanksgiving week to attend the string of opulent celebrations that have come to be known as White Party Week. Created in 1984 as a modest AIDS fundraiser, the affair now generates hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to combat…
Last week, just hours after two momentous court decisions dealt severe blows to Democrats’ hopes of retaining the White House, local party activists filed into the county’s Joseph Caleb Center in Liberty City. They had not come to rally around their wounded leader, Al Gore. Nor had they gathered to…
Shawn Lewis lives alone in a $3.3 million, six-bedroom villa on Miami Beach’s North Bay Road. The home features columns out front, marble floors and a limestone staircase inside, and a swimming pool fed by a man-made waterfall in the back yard. The style is more suited to a deposed…
It started as morbid curiosity, like rubbernecking a car crash. The Broward County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), where the manual recount for the presidential election was going on, is just two miles from my house, and I kept seeing the place all over the national news. So, on November 18…
Just a few hours before his avuncular mug would appear on national television as an expert commentator on the judiciary’s role in the presidential election, retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan made an offer to the Miami-Dade County school board: He would draw up ground rules for a…
The box of 25 Cohiba Esplendidos was presented to me as a gift. A distant relative from Pinar del Río, Cuba’s mountainous western countryside where tobacco grows in fertile valleys, brought three boxes of the island’s renowned cigars to Miami on a recent visit and offered them to family members…
The call came over the airwaves as it had so many times before. On Wednesday, November 22, Radio Mambí (WAQI-AM 710) and La Poderosa (WWFE-AM 670) reverberated with the cries of political advocates, among them U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and state Sen. Mario Diaz-Balart, urging people to descend on the…
Fifteen years from now, part of downtown Miami could look like Times Square. At least that’s what Jacob Sopher believes. And, right or wrong, what he thinks matters because he owns a big chunk of the empty lots in prime locations, including those near the American Airlines Arena and next…
Havana’s Kid Chocolate auditorium, a spacious wood-floored gymnasium named after the great Cuban boxing champion of the Thirties, seemed the perfect place, in 1991, to debut a new sport. There in the central Havana auditorium, on the second floor of a building across the street from the historic ornate capitol…
Temporarily blinded by the blizzard of chad that has smothered South Florida, many people have forgotten that the November 7 ballot contained numerous other contests and issues. North Bay Village bravely vowed to clean up the “linguistic errors” that sullied its city charter. Hialeah embraced professional baseball without any help…
Three weeks before election day, Al Gore dispatched some of his top advisors to South Florida to shore up support among environmentalists. With Green Party candidate Ralph Nader looming larger and larger in the final weeks of the campaign, Gore needed to make sure his own base was secure within…
Read Part 1 of this story. Discovered in the fall of 1998 by Miami-Dade County archaeologists Bob Carr and John Ricisak and surveyor Ted Riggs, what came to be known as the Miami Circle quickly drew international attention, much of it centered on the possibility that it was some sort…
It might be called the Andy Hancock Review Board, even though its official name is the Outdoor Advertising Review Board (OARB). Hancock is the owner of at least three illegal billboards that have gone up along Miami’s expressways over the past three years. He was a high school buddy of…
Read Part 2 If you spend much time talking with Bob Carr about the Miami Circle, you’re almost certain to hear the story about his encounter with the Oklahoma Seminole medicine man. It took place in early February 1999, when the archaeologist was still Miami-Dade County’s historic preservation director, and…
When he decided this past Monday to allow ballot recounts by hand, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks ensured that the political madness engulfing South Florida would rage on. For a few days at least, the future would be known: Lots of people would be examining lots of ballots. One…
I’m a control person. — Suzy Stone Suzy Stone thinks we should start with the video. “I think we should start with the video,” she says in her disarmingly girlish voice. “This will really give you a great overview of what we’re all about here.” Here is the modest world…
Read Part 1 When the verdict came down in 1995, Jim MacDonald was elated. Three years after 22 Southern California service station dealers sued Chevron, and three months after the trial began, a jury ruled that the company had defrauded the dealers and owed them a total of $3.4 million…
If you’re the type of public official who likes to prowl Biscayne Boulevard looking for the illicit thrill that comes with paying for sex with hookers, and if you like to do it with impunity, here are a couple of helpful tips: (1) Learn to tell the difference between a…
It was a brief courtship, a heady honeymoon, and then an ugly trip to Splitsville. For five months former state Rep. Darryl Reaves ran an organization that represents the county’s 45,000 public-housing tenants. During that time the future of the Overall Tenant Advisory Council looked bright and ever brighter. And…
