When the lawyers first saw Rachel Better, she was on a cot at the Fort Lauderdale City Jail, hunched over a book. The small blond woman was huddled into herself, oblivious to her cellmates’ noisy fraternizing and the blaring television. “She just looked so desperate and forlorn and forgotten,” remembers…
Just after sunrise on the last day of the year, gangs of squawking turkey vultures and clowning crows are already working for food in the Royal Palm Hammock parking lot and the adjacent picnic area. A couple of small alligators cruise slowly through the water in a marshy pond; nearby…
City of Miami employees generally keep their lips buttoned. Despite pervasive incompetence and corruption, most employees decline to speak up. Manuel Garcia is not one of those employees. The 58-year-old Watson Island marina aide has always been outspoken, even when candor has been imprudent. Before arriving in Miami in 1979,…
Rose Warner, a 34-year-old actress/ model and mother of two young boys, moved to South Florida about a year ago from a town just outside Houston, Texas. Looking for “that big break,” as she puts it, Warner went right to work finding an agent and networking with the glamour-industry elite…
For the past two years, County Manager Armando Vidal has accepted dozens of rounds of free golf from the company hired to operate the county-owned Golf Club of Miami. During this same period of time, the county manager recommended changes to the company’s contract that financially benefited the firm, the…
Info: Edward Albee’s Mindscape The acclaimed playwright (and part-time Coconut Grove resident) remains an unparalleled observer of our culture — and a genuine stickler for details By Pamela Gordon Edward Albee stands in the light while everyone else is in the dark, and he doesn’t like it that way. Two…
Back in the old days — which is to say before Miami became the laughingstock of the entire nation — city officials weren’t scrambling to fix a budget mess. They were busy creating one, by cavalierly throwing taxpayers’ money around with no clue of the consequences. Take Willy Gort’s brainchild,…
The trouble started when Prince Guram Eristavi slipped on the ice outside his residence in the Czech Republic, breaking his ribs. What with the Christmas merrymaking and the spectacular New Year’s party and now the unexpected hospitalization, the prince’s return to his winter home in Miami was much delayed. When…
State Rep. Steven Geller had a disturbing experience last October. He turned on his radio for a news update, only to find that the format on WINZ-AM (940) had been altered. “It was like a slap in the face,” Geller exclaims, his voice rising in volume as he recalls the…
Kenny Merker exits through a wrought-iron gate in front of his grand, two-story house and heads north along NE First Avenue to a dilapidated building on the corner of 47th Street. On its east face, the street number, 4620, has been unevenly handwritten. The door hangs open as if someone…
Last week an old man in a golf cart handed out eviction notices at Dinner Key boat yard in Coconut Grove. The carpenters, mechanics, and sailmakers who received them will have to end their tenancy and move out by January 31, leaving the historic city-owned boat yard to the next…
Seems that around every corner these days there’s a cabal of disgruntled citizens plotting civic revolt: Some are forming new cities, others are trying to dissolve old ones; or they’re taking to the streets in support of better parks, a cleaner environment, lower taxes. One of the most recent expressions…
They all want to ride a wild horse,” says Taras Lyssenko, explaining why women love him. “But if you ride a wild horse, is it wild any more? I basically don’t stay with a woman longer than one night. If they want to cook breakfast, okay, but that’s it. I’m…
There were times back in the mid-Seventies when Wayne Cochran would wake up in the middle of the night, cold and clammy, soaked with sweat, terrified. He’d run to the bathroom and just lose it, his moist hands gripping the back of the toilet bowl, puking his insides out, thinking…
Defend the borders and pick up the garbage. That’s the heart of good government, right? Miamians who face higher garbage fees — and the possible abolition of their city — might consider moving to tiny Surfside. Residents of this square-mile beach town, snuggled between Bal Harbour and Miami Beach, pay…
If the citizens of Miami really want to solve their city’s financial problems, all they have to do is reach into their wallets, grab a couple of C notes, and send them off to city hall. Some 350,000 residents times $200 equals more than enough to cover the deficit. Voila!…
It being the time of year when hope gets a steroidal shot in the arm, we thought it might be illuminating to (temporarily) put aside our predilection for nit-picking and pose one constructive question to a wide variety of South Floridians. Money is no object, we said — spend as…
Like any other profession, law is practiced by both zealots and goof-offs, overachievers and slackers, crusty experts and inexperienced novices. But it is safe to say that within the diverse legal circles of South Florida there are no practitioners who come close to the relentless fecundity of pro se litigant…
In a quiet, wood-paneled West Palm Beach courtroom last week, far from clattering plates and customers’ chatter, South Florida’s best-known female restaurateur tried to explain why Joe’s Stone Crab has hired so few women for high-paying server jobs. Jo Ann Bass, Joe’s president from 1984 to 1995, testified for three…
Infants ranging in age from new to 18 months spend much of the day napping in tiny cribs. Slightly older toddlers ramble to and fro with no real direction or purpose. The oldest kids — those up to five years of age — scamper around outside in a narrow playground…
In 1994 Miami-based Rodven Records issued a series of compact disc compilations that quickly began turning up in music-store discount bins and at used CD outlets, where some can still be found languishing. The discs have vaguely nostalgic titles (Yesterday … Today, Sounds from the Motherland), and homely, manila-colored covers…
The masterful fourteen-year reign of Draino, queen of the King Mango Strut, ended at 7:29 p.m., Thursday, December 19, and was handed off to Virginia Whitmore, better known as Ellen, an unemployed psychic. By all indications Ellen will be an enduring and worthy successor. Where Draino (a.k.a. Duane Sawatzki) was…
