Cuba Affidavit Citizens’ Auxiliary **CONFIDENTIAL** TO: Supreme Commander, Cuba Affidavit Citizens’ Auxiliary FROM: Robert Andrew Powell, Sergeant at Arms RE: Morale problems among the troops Attached are volunteer Ofcr. R. Guerra’s first reports from the field. Please read them carefully. I’m afraid the initial reception of our Cuba Affidavit Citizens’…
Mabel is just another member of the fruit-loving resistance. A 54-year-old snowbird who long ago moved south from Greendale, New York, to Allapattah, she has a big smile and, like many of her neighbors, a steely distrust of anyone entering her property. Her small leafy yard is adorned with three…
William Oertwig, Jr., is a born-again Christian, a 25-year veteran of the Miami-Dade Police Department, and every speeding motorist’s dream come true. For the past two years, the 47-year-old road patrol officer has refused, on principle, to write traffic citations. Although he pulls over drivers for violating the law, he…
From a distance Flagler Memorial Monument appears pristine against the backdrop of a cerulean sky. Looking northward from the MacArthur Causeway during daylight hours, one sees a 96-foot obelisk that resembles a smooth ivory sword pointing toward the heavens. It stands on a two-acre island surrounded by shimmering Biscayne Bay…
A county commissioner, a top professional football player, a judge, a police major. It seems that to be anybody in Miami, you have to get caught in a prostitution sting on Biscayne Boulevard. The latest aspirant to infamy is schools watchdog Norman Lindeblad, who approached Hermina Salas, a police officer…
By the time Dondre Johnson was a teenager, his mother had begun to suspect something. Johnson was a tall, thin boy with a timid smile. In most ways he seemed like an average child, trooping around the neighborhood with his stepbrother and stepsister, and playing trumpet in the Norland High…
It was more than 40 years ago now, but Gelding has no trouble recalling the day his life took a very odd turn. He was twelve, riding the school bus. It was crowded and there was no place to sit, so he stood. The bus hit a bump in the…
Sam Burley sweeps his arm over an undulating grass field adjacent to Southridge Senior High School, where Burley is the head track coach. He’s pointing to the area where the school board has long promised to build a running track for his athletes. The board won’t build the track, though,…
Until he was recently cast adrift and left artistically homeless, Alberto Sarrain had been a fixture on Little Havana’s cultural scene for two decades. As founder and director of La Má Teodora theater company, he not only brought some of the best Spanish-language drama to South Florida but introduced the…
Alberto Turienzo raps his fist on the hardback cover of El Padrino, a Spanish translation of The Godfather, that venerable Mario Puzo novel about the Italian Mafia. “This book,” explains Turienzo in a husky voice, pausing dramatically, “has taught me a lot about what has been going on in my…
On June 22, 1999, 150 women, all residents of a Liberty City housing project, turned up at a Miami City Commission meeting to beg for deliverance. After living for years in some of the most poorly maintained buildings ever to curse the inner-city landscape, these tenants wanted out. But the…
Picture King Kong, belly bulging from his diet of lead, mercury, and cadmium cakes, splashing across Biscayne Bay and proceeding to wade up the Miami River, evacuating his bowels as he goes. And say, at the end of the day, the toxic doo-doo was of such quantity that it would…
Just a year ago the Allapattah Mini Park was so trashed that some of its neighbors didn’t even know it was a park. The 18,000-square-foot property did boast a passable basketball court, but the rest of it was a treacherous, overgrown jungle, bristling with shards of glass and metal, syringes,…
Hurricane season may be well under way, but county emergency workers and firefighters are still busy making preparations. This week — and for the next two — they will be moving into a new, $24 million headquarters in West Miami-Dade. The place is beautiful. Flat computer screens, satellite dishes, marble…
Those who know Demetrio Perez say they rarely see the man, publicly or privately, without a suit and tie. Whatever else his critics and his supporters say about him, no one can deny the Miami-Dade County School Board member and private school kingpin is a snappy dresser. Still, he will…
A handful of people waited quietly in the sparse community room on the ground floor of the northern building of Rebecca Towers this past March 14. Neil McGuffin, the Miami Beach Housing Authority’s (MBHA) executive director, sat on the far right of a dais, seemingly not sensing his job was…
Looking like a battered Spencer Tracy, 49-year-old Julian Jorge Reyes stands beside his 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in the parking lot across from Little Havana’s Domino Park. At 3:00 a.m. the bright lights on the marquee of the newly renovated Tower Arts Center theater turn the gray at his temples…
Lola Bar owner David Bick wants to do things differently. The New Jersey native arrived on Miami Beach eight months ago, intent on managing a business free from the pretension and shadiness common in the South Beach scene. “We don’t run our nightclub like the average nightclub,” he says. “We’re…
If you haven’t had enough post-Elian flag foolishness, consider these recent events attended by Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas. Several patriots claim they were turned away from a June 3 Homestead/Florida City municipal picnic at Harris Field for the following reasons: They were (1) carrying flags, (2) driving with flags mounted…
It’s 3:00 p.m. on a weekday, peak passenger time, and Elucien Cheridor is driving Miami Mini Bus number 29 with about $60 in singles stuffed inside the jitney’s ashtray and four people onboard. On the fourth round of a not so profitable day, Cheridor departs downtown Miami indignant. “This is…
Because this is her typical morning, Edie Laquer is a very unusual woman. She arises from the exquisitely carved wooden bed in her opulent Coconut Grove penthouse at 3:00 a.m. After a workout, she dresses in a black turtleneck, black blazer, and black skirt. With her kinky auburn and blond-streaked…
If you trust the folks who deliver your kid to school, read this! Back at the beginning of the 1998 school year, a disabled four year old named Christopher Trujillo boarded a school bus in Kendall. Driver Sylvia Holliman and aide Belkis De La Rosa were supposed to deliver little…
