On February 12, 1968, hometown fans at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica, upset with an umpire’s call in a sporting match between the West Indies national team and a visiting squad from England, express their outrage by launching beer and rum bottles onto the playing field. Ignoring appeals by both…
To the untrained eye, cricket looks like a lot of standing around. Which it is. But it’s more. It’s a lot of standing around with a purpose, the purpose that links all competition: to pummel the opposition. Cricketers just happen to do this for the most part with their hands…
The eighth item on the agenda at this past month’s meeting of the Metro-Dade Community Relations Board regarded the touchy subject of business cards. Seated around a long, narrow table in a cramped Government Center conference room, the 26 board members learned that it is against county policy to distribute…
Cable-TAP invites you to produce community programming,” teased a flyer distributed to nonprofit and educational groups around Dade County. To the operators of the Miami Beach-based Alliance Film and Video Cooperative, Cable-TAP’s offer of airtime for a TV series seemed like the ideal opportunity to showcase the work of local…
For more than a year basketball fans have fretted over whether the Miami Heat will remain downtown when their lease with the Miami Arena expires in 1998. Heat management claims the arena, built for the franchise six years ago at a cost of $46 million to city taxpayers, is not…
Lost amid the sordid tales of sexual harassment are the other allegations about Larry Hawkins now under investigation by the Florida Commission on Ethics. Though less sensational, they are just as revealing. Perhaps the most serious of these involve Hawkins’s former employment with Seitlin & Company, a local insurance firm…
Nearly 70 years ago, when it was built, the small red cottage on NE 89th Street was a well-to-do child’s toy, a playhouse constructed by a father as a gift for his nine-year-old daughter. Next week a wrecking ball is slated to turn it into a back yard. “After twelve…
David Ruffner figured his new tattoo would displease his dad, a conservative tax attorney with an office on Brickell Key Drive. So for six months the seventeen-year-old Palmetto High School senior endeavored to keep the oozing five-inch skull on his right shoulder blade a secret. It made no sense to…
About a month ago, during a wide-ranging, three-hour interview, Dade County Commissioner Larry Hawkins spoke about allegations that he had sexually harassed a woman who worked for Vietnam Veterans of America. Until recently Hawkins had been a member of that organization’s board of directors. Paula Ramsey, the San Francisco woman…
You know the girl is dead meat as soon as she shows up on-screen. Even before the swarthy killer’s ominous theme music kicks in, before he skulks (dragging his bad leg) into his victim’s cheap Miami Beach motel room, before she starts to scream and he falls on top of…
An ever-growing beast lurks deep within the Miami-Dade Public Library’s main branch downtown. Hatched there in 1986, it has been pulsing with life ever since. But while the creature dwells within the walls of the library, it is not of the library. The creature has a name. It is the…
Even fishing gets old. But this was a new one on me. “Bro, I just caught a 30-pound fish, about three feet long, using a blueberry for bait in the lake by the horse track.” Of course it was Zap talking. I searched my memory. Had I ever fished at…
It’s always a privilege to see a great performer at the peak of his form. Those who have witnessed Baryshnikov dance or Michael Jordan defy gravity on his way to the hoop understand this, and the experience remains permanently etched in their minds. Here in Miami, connoisseurs of another endeavor…
In the Big Time Productions studio space in the old Paris Theater on South Beach, two trendily clad girls are scampering around on a scaffold, lip-synching the backup vocals of “Money Makes the Monkey Dance,” the first track on Nil Lara’s soon-to-be-released four-song CD. The models are accompanied by a…
Nick Carter, a visiting lecturer at Florida International University, extended an unusual invitation this past semester. “Spend the Summer in the Amazon,” read the flyers he distributed to interested students, and they went on to describe a five-week expedition into the “most pristine rain forest left on the planet” with…
When a nine-foot owl creates a flap, people sit up and take notice. Hooters, the restaurant chain/Arena Football League franchise with the towering mascot, is crying foul at the Miami Herald’s noncoverage of the team’s arenaball games. “For fantastic coverage of arena football’s hard-hitting, fast-paced, ’50-yard war on the floor,’…
Even in this age of ultrahigh finance, it’s churchgoers’ blind faith that their contributions to the collection plate will be well spent by others. No receipts requested, no quarterly spreadsheets provided. Among a group of parishioners at Mount Hermon African Methodist Episcopal Church in Opa-locka, however, that trust has eroded…
Marie-Antoinette, a very rich French queen who owned many buildings in Paris, is said to have expressed her contempt for the poor by exclaiming, “Let them eat cake.” Thomas Kramer, a very rich German financier who owns many buildings in South Beach, apparently has devised his own bon mot for…
Two U.S. Customs agents hidden in a trailer office at the Opa-locka Airport captured the scene on blurry black-and-white videotape. The old DC-3 transport plane, its belly underlit and a cargo hold open, waiting on a runway in the dimness of night while five men drift distantly in and out…
South Floridians who are even vaguely familiar with the brief life and eventful times of the City of Sweetwater probably weren’t surprised to see this image played across their television screens last month: Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators leading Sweetwater City Councilman Ronald Mitro, unshaven, sporting a Flintstones T-shirt,…
Lazaro Albo provides a pointed new meaning to the old term “rugged individualist.” For more than a year now the 62-year-old businessman and close friend of countless politicians has absolutely refused to follow the crowd — the crowd of neighbors, city officials, and even some of those influential close friends,…
Dozens of crudely constructed little sailboats, canoes, rowboats, and rafts were strewn like scattered driftwood on the stone floor of a room in the Spanish Morro castle that overlooks Havana’s harbor. Arranged in the form of a ship with the bow pointing north, the clumsy, crowded armada of toy boats…
