While being driven up U.S. 1 through Coconut Grove on her way to the Alliance Film and Video Co-op in Miami Beach, filmmaker Doris Wishman muses about the appropriateness of the title she’s chosen for her comeback project. “What do you think of Dildo Heaven?” she asks of the film’s…
Sucked into a narrow aisle at the Midem Latin American and Caribbean Music Market, among the glad-handing industry types and overlapping rhythms of reggae, salsa, soca, and samba, was the tiny booth belonging to Ahi-Nama Music, a Los Angeles-based licensing and distribution firm. A massive television set faced outward from…
What do Bob Marley, the Girl Scouts, Ivana Trump, and the American Welding Society have in common? All have been honored this year with their own official “day” by Dade County and/or the City of Miami. In fact, in a flurry of bond paper and fancy script, the city has…
Deborah Mash and her three colleagues from the University of Miami strolled into the meeting room of a Rockville, Maryland, hotel in August 1993, and right away they knew they had trouble. The room was set up for a crowd, and they hadn’t planned on this. At the far end…
It’s not that Patrick McCoy hates airplanes — after all, he’s a pilot for a major commercial airline, so his livelihood pretty much depends on the beasts. It’s just that he doesn’t like them flying so low over his home that he can’t talk on the phone. “If one were…
It’s just a 40-foot stretch of land on the north bank of the Little River Canal, but for more than four years that piece of Miami real estate south of 79th Street near Biscayne Boulevard has been a battlefield. Someone was always interested in sticking cable TV poles or sewer…
In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes what he calls “fishing” expeditions: Nation of Islam members trying to recruit new adherents. Sitting in the cramped office of Automotive Plus, 62-year-old Isiah El-Amin wipes from his hands the fine blue dust of automotive paint he has sanded from a battered Ford. Accompanied…
“!Barca!” An adolescent voice pierces the heavy midafternoon air. “!Barca! !Barca! !Barca!” Four others have joined the first; now five, six. Their voices fall into near-unison, like a song. Barefoot, the children stream out of their low-rent apartment building and across the scrabbly back lot off NW Eighth Street Road,…
Ask any toll clerk on the Florida Turnpike extension for directions to Everglades National Park and they will likely include a fruit stand called Robert Is Here among the stoplights and the right turns. The establishment at SW 192nd Avenue and Palm Drive, just west of Florida City and east…
The calls keep coming in to the Dade County offices of the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. Those funny-looking packs of cigarettes have been circulating for more than two years, but people still raise an eyebrow when they see a small red sticker on one side of their…
He could be almost anyone, the clean-shaven black-haired man in his thirties wending his way through the strolling, posing, gossiping, blading masses along Ocean Drive on a Saturday afternoon. He’s wearing a faded paisley shirt, brown pants, and rubber-soled brown leather lace-up shoes. In a black folder he carries several…
A twilight downpour slicks the potholed streets, and for the moment this crumbling bit of Hialeah glows like a busted rainbow. The huge magenta cube named Foxxy Lady is surrounded by guys braving chain lightning for live, nude girls. One corner down, cigarette smoke, music, and watery gold light spill…
The Beatles had drummer Pete Best. The Rolling Stones had keyboardist Ian Stewart. Pink Floyd had guitarist Syd Barrett. Unfortunate schlubs who, by their own choice or by the design of others, disappeared from the lineups just before the bands achieved cosmological stardom. Now add to that list another name:…
When Keely left her Bahamian home, with its pink sand beaches and silk cotton trees billowing clouds of white blossoms, to attend college in Miami, her father agonized. His modest fishing business provided no excess income to send her. How would she survive all alone in a big city full…
Bruce Udolf could not have joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office at a more auspicious time for an attorney who wanted to prosecute public corruption. It was 1987, and the federal investigation into Hialeah political malfeasance was beginning to peak. Two former city officials had already been convicted of attempted extortion,…
As Joe Wasilewski pulls on his wading boots, sprays some Deep Woods Off on his bare arms and neck, and begins to haul his supplies — spotlights, cloth sacks, a notebook, and scales and a ruler for taking measurements — down to the dock, he tries to explain the appeal…
The truth behind the misunderstood (and now sadly defunct) Marlins Relocation Search Committee The reviews are in, and they are uniformly positive: “A major league hoax!” — Boston Globe “A major league fish story!” — Associated Press “Yahoos at a weekly newspaper in Miami!” — San Diego Union-Tribune Well, almost…
It’s still early in David Dermer’s campaign for the Miami Beach City Commission. Plenty of flesh still to be pressed, luncheons to be attended, endorsements to be gathered, and issues to be advocated before the November election. For Dermer this is a different game entirely from the single-issue campaign he…
The predawn darkness of Opa-locka Airport teems with ghosts. This is the place where farm boys became fighter pilots in the face of Nazi menace, the site from which exiled Cubans flew out to reclaim their homeland from a bearded despot, and the departure point for covert arms shipments to…
Wayne Huizenga can’t seem to dispose of his baseball team — so New Times stepped up to the plate To the reporters gathered before him, Wayne Huizenga appeared to be not so much a billionaire sports mogul as a man shouldering an enormous burden. Head bowed, palms upturned in a…
Sara Fershko’s clearest memory from 1941 is that the most beautiful morning of her life as a young musician directly preceded a night so horrific she wanted to kill herself with cyanide. The 24-year-old Warsaw Philharmonic violinist and lyric soprano had embarked on a great adventure: The Russians had dispatched…
The name of the place — Stratogen Health — sounds like a high-tech diagnostic center, or maybe a medical consulting firm. Definitely streamlined and corporate. In reality, for the past five years the name was a front of sorts for something quite different: a pioneering HIV/AIDS treatment center, and the…
