It always starts with a voice in the night. “Switchboard of Miami. How can we help you?” “I’m tired, I’m real tired,” the caller says softly, his words a bit slurred with fatigue and liquor, and on this Thursday night the volunteer who answers the call in the switchboard’s fourth-floor…
On the highway of Dade County Republican politics, 32-year-old Emiliano Antunez is something of a go-cart — a relatively sturdy vehicle capable of puttering from one place to another. Trouble is, he keeps getting squeezed off the road by a Mack truck named Bruce Kaplan. Last year Antunez, a lifelong…
Rarely do police officers assigned to the liaison office at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building get to brave the perils faced by their comrades on patrol. Instead liaison officers spend numbing ten-hour shifts shuffling through the nine-story courthouse on NW Twelfth Street near Jackson Memorial Hospital. Metro-Dade Police Officer…
TV Marti is dead,” Democratic Rep. David Skaggs of Colorado said one month ago. “Let’s hold last rites for it and move on.” “To stop funding for TV Marti would be a propaganda victory for Fidel Castro,” countered Andy Brack, an aide for South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings, a fellow…
Hurricane preparedness manuals have been the rage this summer. Every local TV station, daily newspaper (all one of them!), and savvy business with an eye toward cheap public relations disguised as public service has jumped on the bandwagon. After going through several such publications and finding them brimming with the…
The smallest sounds stand out against the quiet of Saturday night on Elliott Key. Down in the nearly empty harbor, irregular tiny splashes mark the momentary surfacing of fish, reclaiming their territory from the boat hordes of afternoon. The day’s floating keg party is over; their stereos silenced, the thong-bikini…
This past July, during a special Miami City Commission meeting to consider construction of Dade County’s largest homeless shelter, city leaders heard dozens of variations on one theme: Miami — specifically the northeastern Overtown and Edgewater neighborhoods — is host to a disproportionate share of homeless facilities in the county…
Jay’s girlfriend, a short, emaciated woman with blotched skin from too many hours living homeless under the sun, walks up to the clerk at a small South Beach market and loudly drops six quarts of beer on the counter. She gives the market’s clerk a big smile, her head flopping…
On Monday, August 1, a man broke into the Coral Gables home of an 80-year-old woman — the wife of a federal judge — and raped and robbed her. Joan Fleischman, a veteran Miami Herald reporter and columnist, learned of the attack late the following day and quickly wrote a…
These are not the kinds of days James Burke probably dreamed of when he won election to the Dade County Commission in 1992. Since late last month he’s been defending himself against a torrent of criticism that he slipped behind the backs of county attorneys to request $9000 of taxpayers’…
It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m kneeling on the tile floor in my bathroom at the Fort Myers Comfort Suites Inn, puking into a toilet that earlier in the day, according to the paper strip I’m now clinging to, had been sanitized for my protection. Food poisoning, most…
During the great spring shakeup at WIOD-AM (610) — including a shuffle of the talk-show lineup and the hiring of a new program director — afternoon personality Phil Hendrie was, after just a few weeks on the air, suspended for vandalizing the studio. Then he took sick. The station’s hopes…
I am so convincing I scare myself. I’m standing in a small dingy room, staring into the lens of a video camera and demonstrating why I should be hawking Snickers on national television. A casting director is working the camera and lobbing pro forma questions about my vital statistics. Each…
Wanna see how nasty this business is?” asks chef Cindy Rothman, riffling through her Filofax and a stack of documents. “Take a look at this.” She holds up a sheet of paper on which is photocopied in block letters: “Don’t be fooled! There’s only one Cilantro and we lost our…
In dealing with Haiti, the young, gifted, and liberal policymakers at the White House and the U.S. State Department have faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: how to convince Haiti’s recalcitrant military regime that this E-mail-happy group is prepared to go to war. Gunboat diplomacy, international censure, a naval blockade –…
Is America ready for Harry Pussy? Kurt Cobain thought so. Several Miamians who attended Nirvana’s November 27, 1993, concert in Bayfront Park verify that Cobain urged the amphitheater crowd to catch Harry Pussy’s set later that night at Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti. Of course, Cobain didn’t actually go to…
Donna MacDonald’s first day as executive director of the Miami Coalition for the Homeless was a harbinger of events to come. She assumed the post on Monday, August 24, 1992 — the day Hurricane Andrew propelled homelessness to new proportions in Dade County — and promptly faced her first crisis…
About 100 residents of the James E. Scott Homes gathered last Monday in an auditorium near the Liberty City housing project to discuss how they might avoid eviction. Most lived with relatives who had been arrested for serious crimes, thus violating their lease agreements with Dade County’s Department of Housing…
To celebrate completion of the $224 million expansion of downtown Miami’s elevated transit system — the Metromover — county officials in late May threw open the gates: free rides for everyone until September 30. The penurious and the curious alike have had a chance to experience the high-tech, automated system…
A few years ago a small North Carolina cable company launched a bold experiment in television. For the first time in broadcast history, viewers were provided with around-the-clock coverage of…a fish tank. A fish tank, in point of fact, full of fish. Though FishTV received little critical acclaim (none, actually),…
A group of bare-chested green men with African features and leaves for hair are gathered together in a large, unfinished island landscape propped against the wall in the back room of Edouard Duval-Carrie’s Miami Beach house. Palm trees line the lush, painted shoreline, their slim trunks positioned in a row…
The news filtered through South Florida’s environmental community like polluted runoff into the Biscayne Aquifer. Mary Williams, the top state-level environmental official in the region, was being transferred to the home office in Tallahassee. After nearly two years as director of the southeast district of the Florida Department of Environmental…
