It was considered the deal of the year. In order to finance the ongoing expansion of Miami International Airport, county commissioners needed to issue $200 million in bonds and were looking for an underwriting firm to oversee the transaction. The lucky winner could expect to earn hundreds of thousands of…
As Gwendolyn Ramsey, in T-shirt and shorts, shuffles into the powder blue waiting room at South Florida State Hospital, it’s easy to see the ugly scar on her right leg where a Metro-Dade police officer shot her nearly two years ago in an attempt to take her into protective custody…
Amnau Karam will never forget the day she learned that her picture was on Metrorail fare cards all over the county. It was a sweltering July morning in 1997 and her husband Clifton Mallery had left their South Beach apartment to pick up some groceries at the nearby Art Deco…
It’s late Saturday night when Doo pulls the pump shotgun out of its hiding place. A bare bulb illuminates the gun’s short barrel, ventilated with several holes to cool it during repeated firing. The stock is polished wood. The barrel is painted a dull olive green. A tiny plaque on…
By the light of a full moon, the Big Cypress swamp seems far closer to the world of dreams than to that of everyday experience. The trees — thin-trunked, ruler-straight slash pines and skeletal, twisted pond cypress — stand above moon-silvered palmettos like eerie, silent sentinels. The ground underfoot is…
Ignacio Fiterre is about as unlikely a candidate to assault a police officer as one could find. The 52-year-old well-dressed industrial engineer is short and pudgy, his thinning hair a distinguished shade of gray — hardly the image of a menace to society. In his spare time, in fact, he…
The big Bud Light clock, ringed in orange neon, was marking 10:00 p.m. at the Rinconcito de Noche cafeteria in Little Havana one night last month when the jukebox stopped. Owner Linda Huerta, who was on her way out of the kitchen with two plates of food, knew right away…
“This park’s always had problems, you know,” Helen Prater says. “It’s an old park, the plumbing’s old. “They say it’s an eyesore,” she adds, referring to the residents of the neat single-family homes that border the dilapidated Villa Fair Trailer Park on the south and west. “And you know what?…
The time has come once again to invoke Miami’s winter flock of turkey vultures as convenient metaphor. Though the real-life carrion corps continue to favor the downtown courthouse as a perch, their figurative brethren have lately been eyeing nearby county hall. The State Attorney’s Office continues its investigation of Miami-Dade…
On January 30 the Miami Fusion soccer team signed Peruvian forward Jerry “El Samurai” Tamashiro to a multiyear contract. Tamashiro becomes the second El Somebody to sign with the Fusion and at least the fifth El Whatever to appear recently in the news. How the El do you tell them…
The glamorous Madame La France trained David and Lurel Julius in secret and by night, with the windows of her Flagler Street shop heavily draped. If any white passersby had seen them, the black couple could have paid for their forbidden lessons with their lives, lynched by the Ku Klux…
When David White was a boy back in the 1930s, he and his family used to walk the three blocks from their one-story house in the Bahamian section of Coconut Grove to Plymouth Congregational Church in the white neighborhood, just through the trees to the south. The Whites’ house was…
Shanie Jacobs turns over a giant plastic garbage bag and out tumbles Ed Wood’s idea of Heaven. Angora sweaters pile up on the sofa and fall onto the floor, enough fuzzy rabbit fur to have sent the cross-dressing B-movie director into a tizzy. Jacobs is having quite a time herself…
A few years ago the people who care about the economic future of the area west of Brickell Avenue sat down to consider a catchy new name for their neighborhood of bistros, barber shops, and dry cleaners. Sitting around a conference table, they brainstormed possible new monikers: Brickell Commons. West…
A U.S. Justice Department attorney eager to extricate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from its long and troubled supervision of the cleanup at the former Munisport landfill in North Miami misled a federal judge, a top-ranking federal official alleges. Robert Martin, the EPA’s national ombudsman — an independent liaison between…
From the raft he saw kaleidoscopic mirrors reflect the light defeated of a beautiful dusk that, in its falling descended to the most plebeian of topics. Fluvial city of the south of Florida facing Havana, rose of the tropics, you raise your telescopic stained-glass eyes: obscure bonanza darkly forewarned. Guided…
Jose Garcia-Pedrosa wanted some reassurance. Before agreeing to become Miami’s new city manager last month, he took the unprecedented measure of visiting all five Miami city commissioners and asking each the same question: Will my job security be affected by the fate of Xavier Suarez? It’s a question much of…
It’s the year 2018 and business is booming in the Homestead area. The two-runway commercial airport at the former air force base is the landing spot of choice for tens of thousands of cargo and passenger flights each year. And the long-awaited ancillary development around the base is proceeding apace…
Never underestimate the people who run Miami-Dade County’s public schools. And certainly don’t write off Dr. Henry Fraind, whose remarkable rise from driver’s ed teacher to deputy superintendent has become the stuff of local lore. Despite a career trajectory that has landed Dr. Fraind in the position of trusted confidant…
Beneath a full moon, Nicolas Quintana gazes up at the spires of Barcelona’s Gothic cathedral. The year is 1953, and the 28-year-old Cuban architect has just concluded a remarkable chapter in his professional life. He has come to Spain from the south of France, where for ten days he took…
Profoundly religious Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez intends to declare today, January 22, “Sanctity of Human Life Day” in the City of Miami. “It was 25 years ago that Roe v. Wade was passed,” explains Josue Morales, a minister at Little Havana’s House of Praise and the mayor’s liaison with the…
After a turbulent 1997, the public and private entities that run troubled Metrozoo seem to be taking the first tentative steps toward peace. Though they have not yet embraced warmly, the county staff of Metrozoo and the nonprofit Zoological Society of Florida have at least relaxed their grip on each…
