Read Part 2 When Ron Gregory first leased his Hollywood Shell station in 1994, he had high hopes. The station was rundown, and the price he paid the former dealer seemed steep at $155,000, but Gregory had a promise from his area manager in Miami that it would be rebuilt…
Probably no bus driver at the Metro-Dade Transit Agency knows the official rules and regulations better than Ezell Robinson, who’s been driving county routes for twenty years. And no one has been more outspoken or determined to use any leverage or technicality to ensure that his rights, and those of…
North Bay Village boasts a long tradition of colorful characters, controversy, and power grabs. In the Sixties the small community on Biscayne Bay was a favorite meeting place for organized-crime figures. In the Eighties its police department was regarded as a haven for rogue cops even before three of its…
Skateboarding is a great Miami pastime. For devoted aficionados there is no more idyllic a place for it than the “Rooftops,” a series of concrete peaks and valleys that form the top of the old Miami Marine Stadium on Virginia Key. No cars or pedestrians to spill into here. With…
Katherine Fernandez Rundle is trying to sign an oversize placard in the lobby of the Miami Police Department, but the felt-tip marker she’s holding won’t work. This is a signing ceremony to kick off a fundraiser for victims of domestic violence. Police chiefs from all over Miami-Dade County are standing…
Imagine being 80 years old, frail, in need of almost daily care. Imagine you have little money and no family willing to take you in. Chances are you would either end up in one of Miami-Dade County’s 600 licensed assisted-living facilities, or in one of countless illegal homes. The sheets…
During recent weeks, drivers heading south on South Dixie Highway beheld a man in a chicken suit alongside the road. Often the chicken was holding a sign: “Gore Is Chicken,” “Bush Is Chicken,” or “Open the Debates.” Some drivers honked in appreciation. Others scratched their heads in wonder. Given that…
To be black and gay in America is difficult enough. But to be a gay black clergyman seeking official sanction from one of the spiritual cornerstones of African-American life is beyond difficult. As Rev. Tommie Watkins discovered recently, it’s impossible — at least for now. Watkins preaches at the Greater…
It’s fitting that Jason McGee, a senior account executive in the New Times classified department, spent the week before his October 19 murder on a family vacation with his mother, grandmother, and his two young children. By all accounts McGee doted on his three-year-old daughter Molly and two-year-old son Liam…
On a typically balmy summer day in late July 1999, the family and friends of Alex McIntire gathered at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove to bid him farewell. McIntire’s body had been found days earlier inside his 1993 Mercury Villager minivan, submerged in seventeen feet of water in…
Three inches. That’s all that separates Stanley Whitman from perfection. For now. Whitman is standing on the second floor of his Bal Harbour Shops — he built the mall, he owns it — observing his latest improvement project, an expansion of the walkways delivering shoppers from the parking garage into…
The City of Miami finally condemned a filthy, vermin-infested, physically dangerous Wynwood apartment building on September 13, after years of pleas for help from tenants. Thirty families renting apartments there had endured horrendous living conditions, and their torment only worsened when the city ordered the 44-unit complex vacated. Few of…
If you were to look at the Village of Key Biscayne from the air, you’d think open space would be the least of its problems. The town, which incorporated as a city in 1991, is sandwiched between county-owned Crandon Park, with nearly 1000 acres, and the Bill Baggs Cape Florida…
Hey, kids, guess what? After four years without a home, your Miami Children’s Museum may have found one, in a magical place called Watson Island. The board of directors hopes to begin building it next February with seven million dollars in public and private money it has collected over the…
Read “The Assassin Next Door, Part 1” The man who has just finished eating a plain yogurt at his black metal desk is so steadfastly intent on obliterating his past that when someone with those years in mind leans toward him and asks in a low voice, “Excuse me, are…
Over the course of 31 years, the King Stable Bar and Lounge, on NE 54th Street and Miami Avenue, evolved into one of the more prominent watering holes among black Miamians. The clientele was solidly older, working- and middle-class. Postal employees, schoolteachers, and politicians frequented the saloon, drawn by the…
During the three years since Mohamed Ibrahim’s first appearance in the pages of New Times (“Loads of Dirty Laundry,” November 20, 1997), the man has been busy. In addition to running his Little Haiti laundromat and strip mall, Ibrahim last year opened a Montessori school and a second coin laundry…
Frank Gachelin is sweating. Even with pain shooting through his shoulder, he grinds through an early morning weightlifting circuit. Military press, bench press, triceps pushdown — a series of exercises so strenuous that perspiration soaks through his torn Jackson Generals T-shirt. Biceps curls, sit-ups, incline presses. Gachelin throws a rusty…
In late June of last year, a deranged bounty hunter smashed Daniel Walker in the mouth with a gun barrel, shattering eight teeth. But Walker wasn’t even the intended target of 34-year-old Albert Scaletti, Jr. The vicious bail bondsman was seeking a passenger in Walker’s car. Regardless, since that time…
The Tower Theater, with its beautifully subtle curves and its three-million-dollar facelift, waits on Calle Ocho, all made up with nowhere to go. Or anyone to take her there. City officials have allowed the recently restored Art Deco theater to deteriorate into a two-dollar movie house featuring second-run rejects like…
After midnight, on an oppressively steamy Saturday in August, the Miami Karnival 2000 “band launching” was just beginning to heat up. A few thousand people had squeezed through the Mahi Temple entrance turnstiles and filed into a cavernous auditorium, where two columns of tents and booths clustered along the west…
Alan Farago, Sierra Club Miami conservation chair, has a nightmarish vision for the future of South Florida. It’s 2030 and the population of the four-county region has almost doubled from today’s just under five million people to nine million. In Miami-Dade the urban development boundary has expanded like the waistline…
