You could imagine Hollywood making a movie about Omero Catan and Michael Katen, the two brothers with different last names but a shared passion for being first in line at the openings of new bridges, or riding on new subway lines, or skating on new ice rinks, or landing at…
Few things in life are as sure to pay off as a City of Miami towing contract. Each month the six private companies that hold city contracts are asked to tow about 350 broken-down, illegally parked, or otherwise offensive automobiles. The car owners, in turn, pay the towing company $55…
A registered nurse with 23 years’ experience, Lizabeth Ekalo likes to describe herself as a “patient advocate.” She urged the patients under her care at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center to question their doctors, to educate themselves, to take charge of their own health care. Her philosophy:…
Franklin Jacobs’s Southern-accented voice grows pained when he discusses Lucious C. Conway. “We love Lucious and pray for him, and we can all say with all our hearts we did everything we could to help the man,” laments Jacobs, an ordained Baptist minister and professional gospel singer with a ruddy…
Last week the Board of the Miami Arts Exchange (MAX) honored New Times and editor Jim Mullin with a MAXIE, awarded to persons who have made outstanding contributions to the city’s cultural life. Mullin was among eleven recipients, including Robert Heuer of the Florida Grand Opera and Loretta Dranoff, who…
In May 1993, on her last day of work at the Miami Herald, Tracie Cone’s colleagues gathered to bid her farewell. During her six years at the Herald, Cone had become one of the paper’s rising stars, her talents having led her to a coveted position as a feature writer…
El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, is an odd hybrid of American and Latin journalistic conventions. While El Nuevo is considered to be autonomous by the Miami Herald Publishing Co., which produces both newspapers, it is, in fact, a supplement of the English-language paper. The confusion is…
It doesn’t take much to get the natives gossiping in South Beach. — celebrity indiscretion. A few bounced checks. A new designer drug. So it should come as no surprise that the SoBe rumor mill has been churning for the past two months over a club promotion known as the…
On the Friday night that ushered in Memorial Day weekend, Neil Cohen looked every bit the successful club owner. The dance floor at his new club, S.O.B.’s, was packed, and the room reverberated with the salsa sounds of Lefty Perez and His Orchestra as Cohen sat at a table with…
Miami City Manager Cesar Odio loves rowing. Almost every Saturday he can be seen in the waters off Virginia Key, arching his back and timing his stroke in rhythmic bursts of intensity. He loves rowing so much that he founded a rowing club. He loves rowing so much that he…
New Times staff writer Judy Cantor was one of twenty recipients of the first annual Music Journalism Awards, a nationwide competition whose winners were announced this past Thursday during ceremonies held at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. Cantor’s “Viva Albita!” won for best feature story in a weekly or…
THE RECEPTIONIST The receptionist did not look happy. Her mascara was streaked from tears, her dress rumpled to the hem, and her eyebrows, once slender brown lines, were now hoisted into apprehensive question marks. The frosted glass window behind which she generally sat, protected from the world, was flung open…
If buildings were cats, the Priscilla Apartments in downtown Miami surely would be an abused stray. Hunched at the corner of Nineteenth Street and Biscayne Boulevard, the mangy three-story structure is pocked with holes. Its windows are broken out, the entranceways boarded up. The walls are plastered with tattered promotional…
Omar Corzo admits the allegations in his federal civil rights lawsuit are incredible, even by Hialeah standards. He and his wife Carmen, residents of Dade County’s second-largest municipality, accuse a Hialeah city councilwoman and the town’s police chief of using their political might to orchestrate a five-year campaign of harassment…
The two young moguls perched over mozzarella cheese sticks and iced teas at a Hallandale Denny’s are trying to explain why their business idea is going to sell to South Florida, perhaps the entire state, maybe even beyond. Their product: beer. By definition a festive beverage. On the other side…
Send a professional photojournalist into the streets to capture images of the homeless and you’ll likely end up with portraits of a cliche. The rough, craggy face of a battered soul, perhaps lighted from the side to elicit pity. A broken man — or woman — framed by squalor. A…
Never a body to shy away from imposing its moral will on the citizenry, the Coral Gables City Commission has tentatively approved regulations that prohibit more than two unrelated people from living together under the same roof. Were they to call the City Beautiful home, the Golden Girls of TV…
Don’t expect cake, party hats, or revelers dancing in the hallways of Dupont Plaza, but today marks the one-year anniversary of a watershed event in the Miami City Attorney’s Office. On May 25, 1994, City Attorney A. Quinn Jones III distributed a memo announcing that none of his 21 assistant…
Winners of the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) inaugural Sunshine State Awards were announced this past Saturday at a banquet in Boca Raton. In the competition, judged by SPJ chapters from out of state and open to dailies and weeklies in twelve south and southwest Florida counties, New Times staffers…
Rush-hour traffic rumbles down the 1100 block of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho at 8:00 a.m. on a humid Thursday morning. Young men wearing work clothes and boots, as well as older men in guayaberas, huddle over coffee at the window counter of La Reina Restaurant. A similar group has settled…
For the past five months state investigators have been trying to determine whether Susanna Timor, a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, committed insurance fraud by submitting bogus receipts for repairs to her Coral Gables home after Hurricane Andrew. Though the dollar value of the alleged fraud is…
Former Metro-Dade police officer Pat Yodice and her housemate Mary Butt had just finished dishing out slices of a birthday cake when some uninvited guests showed up at their Sunday afternoon backyard barbecue. A swarm of law enforcement types — members of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s vice squad, agents…
