When Miami Beach voters go to the polls on June 3, their heads will be ringing with numbers their public officials have been shouting at them like auctioneers. How much will a yes vote on the waterfront zoning referendum amendment cost the city? Some say $15 million. Others say $25…
In his classroom on Florida International University’s north campus, Campbell McGrath makes an announcement. “I’m invoking the High Plains Drifter rule,” he proclaims, sitting at the front of the room with his legs stretched out, his blue Converse sneakers sticking out from under his desk. “If you mention a Clint…
TONY “Last week I sold $5000 of Budweiser, you believe that? We’re like a — what they call it? — a premium account or something like that. Never mind the microbrew beer and all the other beer. We got our grocery aisle, we got our fishing aisle, we got our…
From the time he was let out of jail, and especially since the end of his civil trial, in which he was found liable for the deaths of his wife and the equally unfortunate Ron Goldman, O.J. Simpson has cultivated a growing appreciation for Florida, Miami in particular. Despite a…
In her 1991 book The Overworked American, Harvard economist Juliet Schor documents the alarming fact that work hours for most people in the United States have steadily expanded since World War II. Thanks to demanding bosses and a consumerist culture, Americans work longer and harder chasing after material possessions they…
The central courtroom of the George Whitehurst United States Courthouse in Fort Myers is an artless, modern box, set within an otherwise handsome old building faced with oolitic limestone. At a wooden table opposite the judge’s bench on the morning of April 2, 1997, at 9:10 a.m., three men in…
Bureaucrats in the Dade County park and recreation department, like many other people in South Florida, want to put Hurricane Andrew behind them. But nearly five years after the storm, as they attempt to close their accounts on federal hurricane-relief spending, they’re facing a problem: They can’t find several thousand…
Things get stale very quickly. And when something feels stale or something needs to be updated or something needs to be re-energized, we do it. We fix it!” As she speaks, Alice Jacobs, 33-year-old vice president for news at WSVN-TV, leans forward in her office chair, and props her elbows…
The evening of March 14, 1991, was crisp and windy in Washington, D.C., with temperatures dropping to the mid-50s after sundown. A car, a black Audi 5000, turned left off M Street onto 21st Street NW and paused briefly before the glowing windows of Galileo, an expensive Italian restaurant, while…
A ringing telephone awakened Norberto Fuentes just after dawn on a Saturday morning this past August. The acclaimed Cuban author couldn’t imagine who would be calling so early, but because his telephone number was unlisted, he assumed it would be someone he knew. When he picked up the receiver, however,…
Staff writer Robert Andrew Powell was one of fourteen winners in the fifth annual James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for stories published in 1996. The awards, presented this past Friday at a banquet in New York City, recognize excellence in food and beverage writing and are open to all journalists…
A dispatcher’s call crackles over the radio: Shop owner threatened, suspect is armed, location is one-seven and six-nine. Miami police officer RRonni Harris steps on the gas and zooms through the darkness toward the scene, which translates from police argot as NW Seventeenth Avenue and 69th Street. Harris knows that…
For decades three massive trees flanked the parking lot of a central Miami photography lab, inviting customers and strangers to linger in the shade of their lofty canopies. The leafy hardwoods provided respite from a desert of concrete buildings, chainlink fences, and paved lots in the anonymous industrial strip that…
The Miami Herald’s March 30 Police Report column was a typical hodgepodge. Two Surfside retirees scuffled over a taxicab. Thieves stole $16,000 in jewels from a Bal Harbour apartment. An exotic dancer was robbed at gunpoint at a North Miami motel. And there, nestled amid the minimalist chronicles of misdeeds…
Angel Dominguez and Anthony Romano are organizers with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). On April 9 they were standing outside Terner’s of Miami, a company in Allapattah that manufactures luggage and handbags, handing out flyers protesting the dismissal of a worker who had been trying to…
Thanks to a tireless effort on the part of an anonymous local civic organization, the legacy of Joe Gersten will not soon be forgotten, New Times has learned. A group calling itself Gersten Remembered: A Fitting Tribute (GRAFT) has commissioned a bust, as well as a series of plaques that…
Gerardo Loret De Mola had been working as a computer programmer for the Dade County Aviation Department for almost eight years when he was arrested by Miami Beach police officer Ron Shimko. De Mola says Shimko brutally beat him up because he is gay. In February the City of Miami…
He competed against bartenders who could pull flowers and live doves from bottles of champagne, toss flaming brandies in the air and catch them with one unscorched hand, concoct four arcane cocktails in 30 seconds, and recite on cue the ingredients of more than 100 blended drinks. Despite the stellar…
They set out in two boats from the mangrove-lined islands near Sugarloaf Key on the morning of May 23, 1996. Two dolphins that had spent years in captivity were lying on layers of foam rubber aboard one of the vessels, shielded from the sun by a tentlike structure and cooled…
To get to the building the CIA used as the nerve center of its secret war against Fidel Castro, you head south on the Florida Turnpike to the Coral Reef Drive exit, just as if you were taking the kids to Metrozoo. Then you go west on Coral Reef about…
No question about it: Manty Sabates Morse’s office isn’t what you’d call palatial. Her austerely appointed quarters, on the seventh floor of the Dade County Public School Board’s administration building at 1450 NE Second St. in downtown Miami, measure twelve by seventeen feet. That’s enough space for a desk, a…
When the unthinkable happens — when a commercial airliner plummets to Earth in a mass of twisted metal and flames — the emergency-response team dispatched to the crash site includes firefighters, rescue workers, investigators, and priests. Specially trained by the nonprofit National Catholic Conference of Airport Chaplains, the priests are…
