In the five years since he left the City of Miami Police Department, Danny Felton has prospered. He has married, studied for his mortgage broker’s license, started a company, and become an upstanding member of the business community. He attends Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce meetings and takes out full-page…
Florida’s Sunshine Law is a beautiful thing. It allows any citizen to request documents from a public agency and, with a few exceptions, such as the content of open criminal investigations, requires officials to provide the information, usually for free. Say, for example, you want to look at the personnel…
Cue the giant whooshing sound. Add a bombastic voice-over, a flashing graphic, some dynamic music. Cut to a man and a woman sitting behind a curved gray desk inside a vast room. In the background: video monitors, red railings, the bobbing heads of lackeys answering telephones. Dark-haired female: Good evening,…
Daniel Budin set sail from Miami two weeks ago in his 110-year-old boat, Souqui. In about a month, if all goes according to plan, Budin and his five-man crew will have crossed the Atlantic, stopping over in the Azores before arriving at the picturesque seaside town of La Rochelle, France…
Just before the dawn of the new millennium, Latin Chamber of Commerce USA (CAMACOL) president and Miami City Hall political heavyweight Luis Sabines allegedly assaulted City of Miami firefighter Osvaldo Iglesias during a routine fire inspection. Miami police were called, but no charges were filed. Although the event occurred outside…
In March New Times made two unsettling discoveries. At least 31 billboards (21 of them illegal) along I-95, I-395, and I-195 clutter the landscape. And, though city and county codes prohibit construction of such signs oriented toward freeway drivers in an area east of I-95, five have gone up in…
It’s late afternoon and Jerry Babij is sitting in the lounge of Image Model and Talent Agency on Lincoln Road discussing the past year’s success. Babij (pronounced bah-bee) is a trim man who wears his brown hair brushed straight back from his wide, round face. Both his ears are pierced,…
Victor Diaz and Howard Simon have been in the news lately. Diaz, a local attorney, figured prominently in a story about efforts to discourage the Miami City Ballet and other arts groups from challenging Miami-Dade County’s so-called Cuba ordinance. That law prohibits the county from supporting any individual or organization…
The struggle to keep little Elian Gonzalez from the clutches of his communist father has galvanized Miami’s Cuban-American community like no other issue. Spanish-language radio buzzes with us-versus-them propaganda, political figures on both sides of the ethnic divide pander, and street-corner conversation focuses on exacting revenge from those who would…
Part-time security guard Conraad Hoever, sitting at a counter inside a small, tile-roof guardhouse on NE 50th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, watches dispassionately as a vintage white Honda turns toward him. The car slows, stops, doubles back toward Biscayne, and then continues northward on the boulevard. There goes another one…
Build it and they will come, but just build it, seems to be the Miami Heat’s new philosophy…even if it means jamming too much construction onto public property and breaking a sacred promise to voters to provide open space. The team has approached city commissioners twice recently with plans for…
As Joe Carollo stiffly marches down the stairs from his city hall office on the evening of April 27, an adoring crowd presses in around him. “Ca-ro-llo! Ca-ro-llo!” they chant as Miami’s mayor struts into the commission chambers with the rigid indignation of a temperance leader in a distillery. His…
The Marion 7820 Walking Dragline is a monster of a machine. Picture a crane on steroids attached to a truncated ocean tanker. When the dragline’s boom is fully extended, the Marion wouldn’t fit into Pro Player Stadium. It weighs more than four million pounds and rests on two 52-foot-long treaded…
Miami Mayor Joe Carollo has made some outrageous statements recently during dozens of appearances on national television. He’s been even more outlandish in Spanish, regularly taking the microphone at Radio Mambí (WAQI-AM 710) to tout his Cubanidad and excoriate enemies including ousted City Manager Donald Warshaw. His comments demonstrate, among…
In 1997 Maria Yopp-Mathias whacked a man named Luther Clark in the head with a wooden stick. Clark, she claimed, had stolen from her. She later was convicted in Miami-Dade Circuit Court of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. Authorities sent Yopp-Mathias…
In April, at an event called Canesfest, University of Miami athletic director Paul Dee unveiled snazzy redesigned uniforms for the school’s football, basketball, and baseball teams. Less attention was paid to a new logo, which soon appeared all over the shady Coral Gables campus printed on hats and T-shirts that…
The Miami Herald’s talented capital bureau chief Steve Bousquet joined with several lobbyists, including former legislator Mike Abrams, to rank dozens of Miami-Dade legislators last week. And the results were pretty much what you’d expect. Veterans like Rep. Alex Villalobos and Sen. Ron Silver did well. Rookies mostly fared poorly…
What kind of music will be played in South Beach clubs? What sort of dances will people be doing? How much will a drink cost? The music will be the soft breezes of the Atlantic. And South Beach will be gone as a result of Hurricane Madonna, which Santería priests…
What kind of music will be played in South Beach clubs? What sort of dances will people be doing? How much will a drink cost? Music might be a problem in the South Beach of 2100, since it will be situated beneath about twenty feet of green Atlantic Ocean water…
What kind of music will be played in South Beach clubs? What sort of dances will people be doing? How much will a drink cost? The year 2100 will probably catch the fourth South Beach renaissance (the first being Art Deco, the second now, the third and fourth still to…
What kind of music will be played in South Beach clubs? What sort of dances will people be doing? How much will a drink cost?Lots of retro, possibly jazz from the 1920s or 1930s. We1ll see ultrathin girls decked out in flapper gear. Madonna is sure to get into the…
What kind of music will be played in South Beach clubs? What sort of dances will people be doing? How much will a drink cost? People will be playing a form of Cajun zydeco. Instead of zydeco, though, it will be known as artdeco and will involve simultaneous steps that…
