In September 1997 New Times published a story describing how several top administrators of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, including superintendent Roger Cuevas, had received advanced academic degrees from institutions widely denounced as diploma mills. What was the fallout from the piece, which was titled “How to Succeed in Education…
Former Miami Commissioner J.L. Plummer may have been clobbered at the polls by Johnny Winton, but the seasoned pol isn’t leaving office empty-handed. Plummer will soon receive $30,000 per year retirement pay. Back in 1993 the city adopted a measure to give a $2500 annual pension to commissioners who served…
After more than a decade of suburban, middle-class existence in a Kendall condominium, Armando Fernandez Larios has lately felt obliged to resume his secret-agent ways. The former undercover operative for Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate in the bloody postcoup years of the mid-Seventies does not live where he says he lives,…
It’s 1:00 a.m. on a muggy Friday in September. While most of Miami sleeps, ten sleek foreign automobiles speed toward the metropolis’s western edge. Young men steer the growling, low-riding vehicles west on lonely Tamiami Trail. When the convoy reaches Krome Avenue, it turns right and travels north about five…
The Freedom Tower, Miami’s 75-year-old architectural landmark, is still beautiful. Its sixteen stucco stories, inspired by the Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain, rise in decrepit elegance over Biscayne Bay. In its time the building, which sits on prime Biscayne Boulevard real estate near the new American Airlines Arena and…
On a still night beneath Biscayne Boulevard’s sagging palm trees and dull streetlights near 54th Street, Heather Klinker offers redemption in the form of size-three blue jeans. About 8:30 p.m. the 40-year-old Colorado native sees two young prostitutes by the side of the road. Krissy, a pale blond 33-year-old, and…
Across Hialeah in the early morning darkness of October 21, more than 125 people awoke with the same purpose and pulled themselves from bed. Drawn from the ranks of the elderly and the unemployed, they shared a 7:00 a.m. rendezvous and, unknown to them at the time, a full day…
November 3 was just another day in court for Scott Kasdin, the roguish older brother of Miami Beach Mayor Neisen Kasdin. No, he’s not a lawyer like Neisen. He’s a screenwriter by trade. He just has this knack for ending up in front of a judge. You know, a bad…
Television Martí, the $9.4 million per year U.S. government station that broadcasts to Cuba, has been fighting for survival since its birth nine years ago. Fidel Castro’s regime has long jammed the signal so intensively that the station barely registers on Cuban viewership surveys. In the United States a congressional…
Radio Martí’s news director is out. And the story of his departure is a doozy. William Valdes, one of the most important opinion shapers at the U.S. government station that broadcasts to Cuba, was recently transferred to the wildly unpopular Television Martí. Why? Consider his background. Valdes was fired from…
A pile of 34 shoes sits just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell’s comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the seventeen people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell’s living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall…
By 1997 Vincent Bonitto had been smuggling drugs through Miami International Airport for at least a year, prosecutors say. But the 27-year-old American Airlines ramp worker’s alleged foray into the criminal underworld didn’t prepare him for the events of July 14 that year, according to what he told police and…
I will anxiously wait to see the light of dawn, of every dawn. That the smell of life should excite me when it brushes against my bones and my gratitude, that of a banished man, always responds to its call All of us, all of us are in Memorial Park…
Rewind to January 1999, Super Bowl weekend on South Beach: Traffic paralyzes the streets, cars overflow from parking lots, and partygoers cavort on sidewalks. Fast-forward to New Year’s Eve 1999, the end of the millennium: Pairs of cops stand watch on every corner, buses transport revelers to the Beach in…
Twelve years ago, when Dale Ayres was an unhappy gay kid growing up in a small Illinois town, he put the business end of a shotgun into his mouth and prepared to pull the trigger. His mom caught him in the act, though, and knocked the gun aside. Dale, now…
The weight of the moment is getting to Martin Shapiro. The wiry 63-year-old sits uncomfortably in his dark gray suit before the 100-odd residents, candidates, and press seated in rows of aluminum chairs within the whitewashed walls of the public Normandy Isle Golf Course clubhouse. He waits his turn to…
In a pond-splattered, melaleuca-filled corner of the Everglades, five shotgun-toting men take shelter beneath a green-and-white-striped canopy. After a brief but heavy rain subsides, they step into two golf carts and drive twenty yards to a wooden platform. They could have walked that distance, but conserving energy is critical out…
A lot has changed since the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) embarked on a legal jihad against the City of Miami on behalf of 5000 vagrants in 1988. Senior U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins, whose ruling in Pottinger v. Miami created a national stir, has died. So have…
In the evening of October 9, more than 3000 determined music lovers defied a bitter, expletive-ranting, bottle-throwing gauntlet of protesters to enter the Miami Arena. After spending a few hours getting down with Cuba’s most popular band, Los Van Van, concertgoers faced the same treatment while exiting. The toxic brew…
Think things have been tough for former United Nations ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick lately, what with soul sister Elizabeth Dole dropping from the presidential race? Consider the problems of Kirkpatrick’s son, John, a Miami lawyer. The Florida Bar recently suspended junior for three months after he improperly withdrew $9535 from client…
Many people say that Ricky Martin’s crazed career was never going to get any better than on the night of February 24, 1999, when his electrifying performance at the Grammy Awards jolted Anglo America out of its indifference to barely Latin pop music. Others say the pinnacle was achieved on…
There is a certain type of drug trafficker who doesn’t fit the popular image. These dealers aren’t rich and don’t live large. They’re underground outlaws who usually look more bedraggled than menacing. They are indigent AIDS patients who sell their sophisticated and costly HIV medications on the street for cash…
