Michael Wixted and Michael Boze met at Miami International Airport on Saturday, June 10, 1995, for the purpose of thwarting a federal crime. Word was out that their bosses, high-level supervisors at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), were preparing to hoodwink a visiting congressional delegation. The seven representatives…
This is not a joke: The City of Miami Beach has intentionally reduced the number of parking spaces available on weekends. Toward midnight on Friday and Saturday, at about the same time that half the population of South Florida is crossing the causeways for some unabashed frivolity, city workers assiduously…
It’s unlikely that you will ever meet Alan L. Stein, even though you indirectly pay part of his salary and, a little more directly, you work for him. Stein lives in Houston, Texas, and holds the title of vice president of Browning-Ferris Industries’ Materials Marketing Group, a small but important…
“Grab a beer. We’ll go sit on the porch where we can smoke, and I’ll tell you the whole story. It’s the first time I been interviewed, so I feel almost famous. You got me remembering a lot of things I haven’t thought of in a while. Here, knock the…
After weeks of police planning, passionate debate, and bomb threats, the controversial Rosita Fornes show at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts won’t, in fact, go on. An attorney representing Fornes’s producers told New Times earlier this week that they planned to send a letter to the…
It was about 2:00 p.m on a recent Sunday — low tide — when a couple on a water scooter cut the motor and floated to the south side of a City of Miami boat ramp. They studied their prospects for pulling the craft out of Biscayne Bay. The ramp,…
Veteran observers present at the December 21, 1994, Miami Beach City Commission meeting may have known the mayor was about to erupt. His characteristic tics — the unconscious shoulder shrugs, the merry gaze triangulating from the audience in the commission chamber to the speaker to the documents in front of…
Nobody could get the indomitable Jean Rich to slow down until cancer finally grounded her. One of the first women in the United States to own and operate her own airline, she was relentless in her pursuit of success. At the headquarters of Rich International Airways, located in the northeast…
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Miami Beach tourists could almost roll out of their hotel beds and fall into the sea. In the early Seventies beach erosion was so severe that there wasn’t much beach to speak of. In some places that famous band of sand…
The 911 call was answered this past August 7 at 4:44 a.m. According to a tape recording of the call provided by the Metro-Dade Police Department, this is how the conversation began: Operator: County police and fire. Caller: Hello? Operator: Police. Caller: Yes. I’d like to report — um –…
The men who wait every morning just east of the Palmetto Expressway know the routine. “Once a month,” says Carlos Sanchez, a broad-faced Managuan in a paint-spattered Calvin Klein T-shirt and sagging jeans, “a team of police come here and pick up a lot of people. They’re not in uniform,…
Like many people looking for money, Maria Elena Duran turned to the City of Miami. She headed a parents’ support group at Shenandoah Middle School and wondered if the city might sponsor the school’s gifted-student program. Her letter asking for help arrived on the desk of Commissioner Willy Gort in…
Rhaynetta Cheatham, AIDS outreach worker and often-acerbic advocate for victims of AIDS in Miami’s black community, died early this past Wednesday morning in the hospice unit of North Shore Hospital. The 40-year-old Cheatham had been diagnosed with HIV eleven years ago and had suffered from full-blown AIDS for about four…
This Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Andrew’s unwelcome visit to South Florida, a devastating rampage that traumatized thousands of families and resulted in billions of dollars in damage. For many people in Dade County, Andrew’s depredation has yet to be fully resolved. One extraordinary example of that has…
The Loading Zone in Miami Beach — with its interior walls lined with wire display cases containing leather jackets and chains for sale — hardly seemed the right setting for a clinical discussion of safe sex and HIV. The fifteen people gathered on a Monday night in the dingy light…
The half-block stretch on the north side of Bird Road beyond 68th Avenue is known as a gathering place for gay men, mostly young gay men. A windowless and signless bar that closed about six months ago is bounded by an adult bookstore on the west and a funeral home…
Allapattah is an unlikely place to find a kingdom. A mostly industrial landscape dotted with paint-chipped garages, dingy warehouses, and an endless line of pawn shops and used-car lots, the north Miami neighborhood bears the distinctive marks of urban blight, and it wears them with neither shame nor pride. It…
At the corner of NW 10th Avenue and 23rd Street in Allapattah, chips of orange- and cream-color paint litter the base of America’s Finest Baseball Park, flecking the detritus that rots there. Shards from bottles and from the broken stadium office windows glisten among the wet clothing, pigeon carcasses, and…
Insurance-claims specialist Richard Wickliffe has seen just about every auto-theft insurance fraud Dade County con men can dream up. There’s the chop shop fraud, in which an automobile owner reports that his car has been stolen after he has actually sold it for parts. There’s the car-in-a-canal scam, in which…
The August meeting of the Sweetwater City Council has been called to order in the town’s cozy wood-paneled council chambers. TV cameras are trained on the dais, where the seven council members, the city attorney, the city clerk, the mayor, and the mayor’s lawyer sit. The meeting is getting under…
During his fifteen years on the city’s police force, Ofcr. Michael Flynn has worked some of Miami’s meanest streets. But until one day in Morningside in early March, he had never had occasion to fire his gun in the line of duty. “I’ve worked narco-undercover, riots, and been shot at…
Not long after the invention of carjacking, alert South Floridians noticed another hit-and-run phenomenon: the advent of the drive-by novel and the home-invasion travelogue. As practiced by such notable out-of-towners as Joan Didion (Miami), T.D. Allman (Miami: City of the Future), and David Rieff (Going to Miami), the nonfiction version…
