On the night of April 22, 1988, Miami art collector Ramon Cernuda presided over an auction at the now-defunct Cuban Museum of Art and Culture. “Going once, going twice … and sold for $500,” the auctioneer announced. The pounding of the gavel sealed the fate of the painting, which was…
The latest brouhaha at the Miami Herald: a supposedly offensive photograph of Lipton Tennis Tournament winner Venus Williams that appeared Monday, March 29. The paper’s internal electronic bulletin boards are buzzing with debate about the picture. Seems some people, including black reporters, are incensed that the artsy photo, which ran…
Edwin H. Garson is girded for battle. With sun visor pulled low and bullhorn held high, the wiry, leathery-skinned 70-year-old wails his slogans at the procession of well-dressed visitors easing their cars up to the entrance of the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. “Shame!” he hollers, his nasal voice…
About two dozen men and women are assembled around a conference-room table in a small building on the campus of the Southeast Fisheries Science Center on a Friday morning in late February. Even though pictures of endangered turtles and a plastic cast of a 300-pound tuna hang on the wall,…
The drive from Miami to Meridian, Mississippi, takes fourteen hours, but Tag Purvis doesn’t mind. He likes to make the trip to his hometown behind the wheel of the baby-blue Lincoln he has on long-term loan from his father. When he passes the Alabama border into Mississippi, a place he…
Florida Marlins owner John Henry is floating several radical proposals, including changing the team’s name, in hopes of generating public support for a new domed stadium in downtown Miami, New Times has learned. Plans, which officials warn are in the “preliminary stages,” call for building a new facility on the…
Passover, which begins this week, is a celebration of food and faith. The Passover dinner, called the Seder, commemorates the exodus of the Jews from oppression in Egypt. Kosher standards are especially important during the holiday. For four Jews memories of Pesach 1998 hold a bitter taste. Adi Nimni, Goren…
It’s not long after lunchtime when Justin Styer and Bob Glazer climb into a longbed, white GMC pickup truck. They drive half a mile to a boat launch and back their twenty-foot fishing vessel into the water. After some blue smoke plumes from the 150-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor, they head…
Bane, a lanky 21-year-old graffiti artist, is highstepping it across a weed-choked patch of ground spiked with broken bottles and shards of scrap metal. “Watch out for the needles,” he warns over his shoulder. He’s heading to a burner, a large mural painted on the side of a warehouse off…
Talk about big names in wet places. After months of horse-trading, a group of Miami political insiders is ready to remake Dinner Key. No, not city hall but the boatyard next door. The state oversight board approved a 40-year lease on March 12. Who’s going to make out in the…
Clutching reins in one hand, cigars in the other, the two horsemen ride at an easy gait. Three other riders trail a few paces back. The group is crossing SW 152nd Street, so far west that Everglades National Park is just a half-dozen miles to the south. The horsemen are…
This past week Inoelia Remy Yautiel, an unassuming woman with implacable resolve, visited Miami to speak about things unheard of by most Americans. Remy periodically travels from her native Dominican Republic to address radio and television audiences, academic workshops, and anyone else who’ll listen. Remy’s life is her story. It’s…
No one who follows football can avoid Drew Rosenhaus. The omnipresent sports agent with the slicked-back helmet of hair craves airtime like an asthmatic in an iron lung. He also is a man who knows how to exploit a controversy. Three years ago, when Sports Illustrated called him “the most…
It was about 1:00 p.m. on December 31 and Peter Zage was standing next to a new red Buick Riviera on one side of the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Out of gas. Zage was sun-drenched, his gray hair a bit matted with perspiration. But he appeared Old World suave in his…
Rick Springfield is a rock star. At least he was in the early Eighties, when he hit number one with the single “Jessie’s Girl.” A few followups also cracked the Top 20 (“I’ve Done Everything for You,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers”), though none since Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term. Springfield…
At odd moments faint smells from the streets of Bangkok come back to George Petrie — pollution from gasoline engines, meat roasting on spits, sweat, overripe fruit. Whether the fleeting odors have clung to his clothes and hair or whether they’re purely remembered, Petrie can’t tell. A pervading despair has…
Sporting a Jimmy Johnson haircut and a bolo tie, Richard Hoagland gazes down at the Miami Circle from the Sheraton Hotel garage on Brickell Avenue. He has been one of the strongest advocates of saving the now nationally renowned ruin, appearing often in news accounts and demonstrations at the site…
The Miami-Dade Police Department’s response to a recent bomb scare in his city was inadequate, claims Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez. And he’s using the incident to push for his municipality’s secession from Florida’s largest county. About 6:30 a.m. on Friday, February 19, an unknown caller warned of an explosion at…
On the morning of January 6, on the ninth floor of the James Lawrence King Federal Courthouse, the man for whom the building was named, Senior U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King, presided over what will long be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments in South Florida’s…
On October 12, 1998, Hialeah police officer Rolando Bolanos, Jr., filled out an arrest report on case 98-42048. It states that 63-year-old Valerio Gonzalez entered the station soused and turned himself in for drunk driving. Bolanos administered a Breathalyzer test, read Gonzalez his rights, and locked him in a cell…
The victim was female, in serious condition, sprawled bellydown in her tattered, brown, velvety coat near the Sears store on the edge of Coral Gables. When Luzandra Diaz arrived on the scene early in the evening of February 10, people were poking at the incapacitated little body with car keys,…
The Miami Circle has become a cyberspace cause celebre. Famous cynic James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, has sent out thousands of e-mails allegedly debunking it — though he’s never even visited. Randi questions the authenticity of the downtown site, which archaeologists suggest may be part of a centuries-old culture…
