Forty people — including one New Times staff writer — are standing in line at a Miami Beach drugstore early on this Saturday morning. They haven’t come to get their prescriptions filled, though. Today is September 17, and at 10:00 a.m., throughout South Florida, Ticketmaster will begin selling the 45,000…
It wasn’t exactly the stuff of a John le Carre novel, but it was espionage nonetheless. Cloak and dagger, public utility-style, you might say. On August 18, several Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (WASD) workers armed with cameras boarded five county trucks and headed for Hialeah. Their mission was clear:…
Jorge Mas Canosa is running late. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says. “I was with the ambassador.” Mas turns and introduces Otto Reich, the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under President Ronald Reagan. “He was also a member of the National Security Council,” Mas says in a hushed tone. The…
Wade Harris used to join Joe Kostick and Bob Derosiers for dinner on most weeknights. The pair did yard work for him and lived a block away on a quiet street in North Miami Beach. Fellow aging divorces, they were among Harris’s closest friends, and they engaged him on a…
It was a hot Friday night on Biscayne Boulevard, and they were out under a full moon: the hunters and the game. Here at 73rd Street, across from the Vagabond Motel and in front of a gutted office building, was the game. A young black woman in a low-back jumpsuit,…
Art conservator Garth Francis is at work outside the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (TOPA), restoring renowned pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Mermaid sculpture. It’s a job Francis estimates will cost the City of Miami Beach nearly $10,000. Francis, a specialist in outdoor sculpture restoration, holds up two snapshots…
The Lincoln in the parking lot turned out to be a key clue, but it wasn’t enough to close the case of the invisible candidate. When the votes were tallied on September 8, Andres Rivero had defeated the reclusive Isaac Klayman in the District 107 Democratic primary, garnering 60 percent…
New Times examined the records of 50 popular local restaurants to see how health inspectors graded them over the past two years. Of 57 possible violations — as outlined by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Division of Hotels and Restaurants — we concentrated on seven categories generally…
Nobody is having more fun at the Commissioner James Burke Labor Day Family Picnic than Commissioner James Burke himself. “Welcome!” he says to guests filing through the gates of Arcola Lakes Community Park, just north of Liberty City. “And oh boy, are you gonna have a good time today!” As…
It is a cinematic moment that can be relished by anyone who has ever overpaid for a bad meal: Donald Sutherland playing a health inspector in the 1978 remake of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Nervously shadowed by owner Henri, Sutherland prowls the kitchen of an exclusive…
Most of the dozen defendants sitting in county courtroom 2-1 this past Friday had cause to celebrate. Though they had been cited by Miami Beach police officer Ambrose Sims for speeding, Sims urged Judge Allan Atlas to dismiss their tickets because of their “good attitudes.” The defendants were so grateful…
When Miami’s black communities need help from the federal government, local black leaders are accustomed to calling the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service. Since the days of the civil rights movement when it brokered deals to avoid confrontations between protest marchers and racist state governments in the South, the…
The elevator doors open, wafting a sweet strawberry smell through the sterile, silver-toned lobby of Estefan Enterprises, a gated building on Bird Road at 62nd Avenue that separates a commercial strip from a quiet residential area just west of Coral Gables. On this hot summer afternoon, the outside parking lot…
An animated, middle-age white guy strides into the jumbled offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on NW Seventh Avenue at 56th Street. Ray Fauntroy, president of the local chapter, and his assistant Bernie Meyers see him via their low-cost burglar alarm — a mirror they’ve set up in the…
You’d never know it by looking at him, but Joseph Weinstock is not a well man. At age 73, he suffers from chronic pancreatitis, coronary artery disease, and reflux esophagitis, an inflammation of the esophagus that makes swallowing painful. Under a full head of wavy hair, he bears the scar…
In the pantheon of great American empire-builders Nelson Long’s name may not immediately spring to mind. Rockefeller had oil. Vanderbilt was master of the railroads. J.P. Morgan ruled steel and financing. The Hearst name became synonymous with the publishing industry. Long, in his own obscure field, was equally unsurpassed. His…
You don’t have to be a legal scholar to pass judgment on our judiciary. You don’t even have to be especially alert. In the past four years alone, ten Dade judges have been spanked for breaches of the public trust. There was the judge who took dirty money to fuel…
Beth Keiser left Miami last week because she couldn’t tell you a story. After working for five months on a project about the lives of suburban Broward gang girls, the Miami Herald staff photographer quit her job when the paper’s senior editors killed her piece. No one at the Herald…
Like many tips, this one came at the racetrack. But it wasn’t about a horse. At a Hialeah Race Course fundraiser for Gov. Lawton Chiles, a young lawyer in suspenders came over with a story to tell. “Looking for something interesting to write about?” said the hotshot. “Check into the…
They lined the walls, filled every seat, and stood two deep in the back of the West Miami City Hall chambers. Rarely had the Dade County Republican Party drawn such a crowd for its monthly conclave. And while the agenda contained plenty of interesting items — including a resolution calling…
While the vast majority of judges and lawyers view judicial elections as an abomination, there are others among us who may look upon the biennial circus as something more benign. Something intriguing. Something very much like a golden opportunity. The following ten-step guide is intended for those visionaries who would…
In the early Sixties, in the spring of the Cuban revolution, five slim young black men who wore sharkskin suits and sang like Smokey Robinson were all the rage. Friends from a Havana neighborhood with no professional musical experience and not much else to do, they formed a finger-snapping group…
