Thanks to the Elian Gonzalez saga, things in las dos Havanas are becoming surreal. In Little Havana reporters spend hours waiting for a six-year-old kid to wheel by on a bicycle, and tourists pose for photos in front of the home where he is staying. Across the Florida Straits, Fidel…
Nat Wilcox is the nemesis of gay Miami. He’s shown up regularly at public meetings in recent weeks to badger officials into overturning the county’s gay-rights amendment. And he is the mouthpiece for a homophobic bunch called Families Strengthening Communities for the Good Life. But that’s not all. Wilcox also…
In an obscure corner of the Port of Miami, a floodlight haze surrounds a huge tiki hut, where two men from a faraway land sit at a picnic table and contemplate their so-called lives. Directly before them tennis players swat balls on an illuminated court and nearby, dance music blasts…
After four days of looping around the Caribbean, the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Fascination eased into its berth at Port Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of July 23, 1998. Legions of flushed, sunburned tourists descended the gangplank, luxuriating, no doubt, in the last few hours of their tropical escape before…
In September 1992 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, stepped out of his congressional office. He was on his way to the Capitol to vote for a bill that would restrict so-called cruises to nowhere (gambling trips outside the three-mile limit of American territorial waters) to U.S.-flagged ships. Taylor had…
Here’s a quiz in which both long-time residents and recent arrivals can test their civic knowledge of Miami. What can you call all of the following city-owned properties: a waste dump, a boat ramp, a shopping mall, a sewer plant, and a cemetery? (Hint: If you are a newcomer, remember…
Che Guevara was not the reason I took the Number 13 train from Havana to Santa Clara, Cuba, though it’s true Guevara is buried in Santa Clara, along with 23 of his comrades in arms, all of whom died 32 years ago in a quest to spread Cuba’s communist revolution…
It was an oak gone bad. It was going to pay. The dirt-ball tree was going down. Oh, sure, it was beautiful — too beautiful. Unprincipled, unwashed humans gathered beneath its branches at NE 80th Terrace and Third Avenue, behind a strip mall. Lowlifes sought shade under the wide, welcoming…
Lack of institutional control. The phrase regularly appears on the sports pages, usually to describe a college athletic program run amok. In 1995, after the hammer fell on the rogue University of Miami football program, the NCAA reprimanded school leaders for their “lack of institutional control.” Ditto for Notre Dame…
We always begin with a cheer. The referee, waiting to drop the puck at center ice, refers to it as the rah-rah shit, as in “Go do your rah-rah shit so we can start this game.” The cheer is a relic from the serious, organized, desperately important sporting events we…
On a warm Friday morning in mid-December, the local Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) coalition held its monthly meeting at Miami-Dade Community College’s downtown Wolfson Campus. The troubled agency’s mission is to ease program participants off welfare and into the work force, a transition that has been rocky at…
The scene outside Elian Gonzalez’s Little Havana home was rather subdued this past Saturday afternoon. A few network news crews and photographers staked out the house from a neighbor’s yard, huddled around a television set atop a milk crate, watching the NFL playoff game between the Washington Redskins and the…
The erection of a large, pink, ugly thing in plain view of Miami city offices is provoking disgust and outrage among some neighbors and city officials. “I’m looking at it right now,” exclaims Assistant City Manager John Lindsay, peering out his tenth-story window atop the glimmering Riverside Center. The offending…
Remember Danny Couch, who was creamed in his 1995 run for Miami mayor? Well, he sure is lucky when it comes to cash. On December 5 the City of Miami Beach sent Couch, a midlevel public-works employee and union steward, the following correspondence: “Dear Mr. Couch: An error was made…
Off South Dixie Highway in Naranja, down at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, is the winter home of a low-rent traveling carnival. On a football-size field, amusement rides in spiral shapes and bright colors stand jumbled together in various states of disrepair. A row of buses and the trucks…
Sign of impending apocalypse on the brink of the millennium, or cheery reminder of the redemptive power of incarceration? Interpret this omen how you will, but its significance speaks for itself: At a sidewalk table at Rosinella’s restaurant on Lincoln Road in late November, Miami Beach Commissioner Simon Cruz had…
It’s just another storefront tucked in among the flea market, the wig shops, and the styling salons at Liberty City’s aging Northside Shopping Center on NW 79th Street and 27th Avenue. But the wares at this store, which has been open for about five months, are beauty supplies of a…
DANIEL LUGONothing had gone according to plan. Frank Griga was dead, and there was no money. All Lugo managed to salvage from this misbegotten mission were the contents of a mailbox. ADRIAN DOORBALDoorbal was having a field day — one victim strangled, another overmedicated. Now he was about to try…
The Miami City Cemetery today is in transition. Located at 1800 NE Second Ave., the landmark covers ten and a half acres, and is the final destination for some 10,000 dearly departed South Floridians, many of whom were members of the area’s pioneer families. The place is bordered to the…
UPDATE: In 2013, director Michael Bay released an adaptation of this three-part series. That same year, New Times revisited Pain & Gain and tracked down what’s become of the Sun Gym Gang two decades later. Golden Beach millionaire Frank Griga thought he was getting into a lucrative overseas investment deal…
MARC SCHILLERThe Miami businessman had barely escaped with his life. His health was ruined and his assets were gone. His kidnappers owned everything, even his home. But he had names and a paper trail. Why would no one believe him? DANIEL LUGOThe Sun Gym manager liked Schiller’s big house. And…
In late August, after Miami businessman Teo Babun and three anonymous partners founded a company to help Cuban exiles reclaim their former belongings on the island, 75-year-old Vicente Lago Grassot shuffled into the corporation’s sixth-floor Biscayne Boulevard headquarters with the help of a cane. He carried a red-plastic folder bursting…
