Tuesday, April 25, 1995, was a good day for long-boarders and a bad one for Portuguese man-o’-war. Throughout the morning the surf near the Government Cut jetty came thundering in from the east, mean and green. Surfers in wet suits showed up on Miami Beach at sunrise to pick their…
On Saturday, May 18, the South Florida Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists announced the winners of its annual Sunshine State Awards. New Times won nine awards and two honorable mentions in competition with other weekly newspapers throughout the state, as well as one award in a category open…
At half past nine on Easter Sunday evening, April 7, Gina Cunningham drove south on Miami Beach and turned right from Euclid Avenue onto Fifth Street. She was headed for Tap Tap, the popular Haitian eatery/art gallery she co-owns, but she was about to get sidetracked. It began when Miami…
To the untrained eye, the mass of turfy green may have appeared to be just another strange sea plant common to Looe Key reef in the Florida Keys. No big deal. Food for the fish, perhaps, or somewhere for them to hide. To Bill Matzie, though, it was, in his…
The sunlight this February afternoon is piercing and yellow, and a gusty wind shoves around the crumpled litter on NW Seventeenth Avenue, outside Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church. Cars fill the church’s back parking lot and line the rutted streets to the north and south. Men in dark suits and…
Like South Beach has hotels, Opa-locka has churches. In its 70-year history, the four-square-mile city has become home to 30 different sanctuaries. The religious proliferation is most visible on the southeast side of town, where cross-topped towers are easily discernible above single-story homes and warehouses. A spiritual hub of sorts,…
Month in and month out for thirteen years, Dade County’s 1.2 million telephone customers have shelled out eleven cents to support a conundrum called Manhole Ordinance #83-3. The mysterious charge shows up on every bill for every residential and commercial phone line, lumped on the same page with federal, state,…
For the past three years, residents of West Dade’s Schenley Park neighborhood have been on a crusade to make their community a better place. Homeowners have organized garage sales to raise money to purchase palm trees and have them planted along Southwest 34th Street west of Red Road. Every four…
The questions began shortly before 9:00 that morning and continued for ten hours, ending in the early evening. The three opposing lawyers took turns grilling the woman before them, probing her private life, searching for inconsistencies. She sat calmly through it all, gazing every once and awhile out the window…
Hypothetical situation: You live in Opa-locka. On a cool Sunday evening, your neighbor drops by to return the hacksaw he borrowed a week ago. During his visit, as he stands on the front porch drinking some of your lemonade, he casually reveals his plans to kill you. What do you…
A mile from Miami City Hall stands Mercy Hospital, a private, not-for-profit institution owned by the Catholic church and positioned on a first-rate chunk of bayfront real estate. The hospital has never paid any city taxes on the bulk of its land or buildings, but every time a fire alarm…
It was 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, April 23, and cars were quickly filling the rear parking lot at Palmetto Elementary School. Men and women, some with children straggling behind, walked briskly to the cafeteria, which had been converted, by the addition of a ballot-counting machine, into election central for this…
The City of Miami’s purchase of the Riverside Center office building was, by all accounts, a heckuva deal. Florida Power & Light surrendered the brand-new marble structure for only $16 million A $7 million less than FPL wanted and almost half as much as it would cost to build the…
Chapter Nine EGO, EGO EVERYWHERE, AND NOT A DROP OF SENSE Earlier this year, when it looked as though the Miami Heat almost certainly would move to Broward, Dade County Commission Chairman Art Teele sat at the downtown arena watching the team take on the Chicago Bulls. Alongside him during…
In a freshening breeze somewhere south of the Marquesas Keys, the yacht veers due west, baring its starboard side to the rolling swells, and suddenly a voyage that had started out so serenely at the docks in Key West turns foul. “We should have a very pleasant ride out there,”…
People move to deep South Dade because they want peace and quiet, a semblance of life in the country. Less traffic, less noise, fewer people. That seems to be why Christine Fuchs moved to Princeton in late 1989. Her house, near the intersection of SW 248th Street and 133rd Avenue,…
Ray is handing out flyers on Washington Avenue at four o’clock in the morning, looking for girls the way his boss told him to: young, but not too young. Pretty. Sexy. Girls with other girls. Girls without guys. Girls who are alone. Girls who look like they might be up…
Felix Morisseau-Leroy speaks six languages fluently, but when he writes poetry it is not in French, English, Spanish, or in the African tongues Twi or Wolof. He writes in Creole — in the voice of the people. His people. The people of Haiti. “Peeee-pulll.” When Morisseau says the word in…
Chapter Five THE RETURN OF CRAZY JOE CAROLLO Within hours of his election this past November as a Miami city commissioner, Joe Carollo was busy extracting promises from his colleagues to appoint him chairman of the Miami Sports and Exhibition Authority. More commonly known by its acronym MSEA (pronounced mee-suh),…
Beverly Causey is quite the connoisseur. In August of last year she telephoned Rochambeau Wines and Liquors in Dobbs Ferry, New York, proffered her American Express card number, and ordered a bottle of ’91 Chateau Montelena zinfandel for $14.99 plus $11.50 shipping and handling. In September she followed up with…
You might say Jorge Delara got a wild hair up his ass a few years back. A 35-year-old free-lance graphic artist who lives in Hialeah, Delara self-published a little pamphlet in 1993. Entitled The Book of Ass, it consisted of two dozen cartoon drawings illustrating English phrases that include the…
People move to deep South Dade because they want peace and quiet, a semblance of life in the country. Less traffic, less noise, fewer people. That seems to be why Christine Fuchs moved to Princeton in late 1989. Her house, near the intersection of SW 248th Street and 133rd Avenue,…
