It had been a long, hard-fought political campaign, and for months Katy Sorenson had been promising her family that when it was finally over, they would take a much needed vacation. And so this past November, during the week of Thanksgiving, Dade County’s newest commissioner flew off to Hawaii with…
The U.S.S. Wilkes-Barre lies deep. The ocean’s surface offers no hint of her presence, only the clear blue waters of the Gulf Stream a dozen miles off Key West, like a vastly thick, indigo-tinted window with nothing on the other side. But there is something on the other side of…
It started innocently enough. On the evening of November 29, 1993, Robin Ables, a Metro-Dade police officer, reported to the Team Police Station off NW 22nd Avenue in Liberty City, at the request of her commanding officer, Dante Starks. Starks, who had been promoted to sergeant two months earlier, initially…
When the City of Miami’s Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) advisory board designated the recipients of millions of dollars in federal AIDS funding earlier this past month, it should have prompted a sigh of relief among AIDS activists countywide. After all, internecine bickering had delayed this crucial step…
A small man with close-cropped hair sits behind a conference table at Mercy Hospital, clenching a pen and glowering. The room, located on the sixth floor and overlooking a glistening expanse of Biscayne Bay, is sprinkled with about twenty people, most of them infected with HIV, the virus that causes…
On the evening of February 23, some twenty law school students from Nova and St. Thomas universities convened at Dino’s Upper Deck, the bar atop Dino to Sushiya, a year-old restaurant at 11220 Biscayne Blvd. It was supposed to be a casual get-together. A little beer. A little billiards. And…
An ageless philosophical question: If a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a noise? How about a brain teaser with a local angle: If Miami’s only daily newspaper invites a Cuban official to town and doesn’t report the visit, is it still news? Barbara Gutierrez, editor of…
Turning west off of Krome Avenue onto the Tamiami Trail, 32-year-old repo man William Negron began the eighteen-mile trek to the Miccosukee Indian reservation and what he hoped would be an easy automobile repossession. Riding with him in his customized tow truck was Dinavon Bythwood, a private investigator hired by…
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. — Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal It’s not the money,” scoffs John Spadavecchia. Not many men could brush off a million dollar payday as convincingly as…
Deep in the heart of Texas hold ’em Texas hold ’em, the poker permutation favored by the pros and the game played in the annual World Championship of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, is a particularly treacherous variant of seven-card stud. The basics can be learned in…
The League Against AIDS is in such financial disrepair that last weekend most of its eighteen employees were dispatched to the streets of Little Havana, donation cans in hand, to solicit change from passersby. The Dade-based nonprofit, known to its clients (the majority of whom are Hispanic) as La Liga…
When Joaquin Avino announced last October that he would be resigning as county manager at the end of the year to take a new post in the private sector, no one on the Dade County Commission publicly asked him what he intended to do after he stepped down from his…
Healthy Males Needed For Research Study,” beckons the tiny announcement in the Miami Herald classifieds. “Ages 18-45; 5 days confinement; 18 clinic visits.” Then, in slightly larger type: “We Pay You $1100.” A call to the listed phone number yields a curt female receptionist and an address on NW 22nd…
A paved two-lane street called Arthur Lamb Jr. Road snakes through the 1000-acre island known as Virginia Key, veering here and there as it nears the public beach area at its farthest eastern coordinate from Rickenbacker Causeway. At one point, the road empties into a small parking lot. Nearby a…
To hear Newall Daughtrey tell it, the winds of change have finally breezed across Opa-locka. Gone are the fat cats who once ran Dade’s poorest city, who sopped up budgetary gravy with exorbitant salaries and pensions, then stuck taxpayers with the bill. Daughtrey should know. Opa-locka’s city manager from 1979…
Ever since the camera was invented, it has been used to capture images of despair and destitution, evocative glimpses into the eyes of the less fortunate. Now one advocate for Miami’s homeless has devised a way to focus the lens a little differently. “The idea is to get the homeless…
There’s a whole lot of back-slapping going on among hurricane-recovery officials these days. On February 24, two and a half years after Hurricane Andrew displaced about 250,000 South Floridians, the last residents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mobile homes moved out of the Coral Roc Mobile Home Park…
Biscayne Boulevard motel owners operate under conflicting pressures A from the police and community to refuse to rent to criminals, and from the economy to rent to anyone who can come up with the roughly $25-per-night charge. Motel managers, unless they are members of the owner’s family, almost always are…
Life has been more complicated than usual lately for Miami Police Department Confidential Informant Number Eleven, ever since her identity became known to just about all of Biscayne Boulevard. She doesn’t own a gun or any other deadly weapon, so when she goes out she stashes the next best thing…
The dead manatee lay on Watson Island. At dawn its carcass would be retrieved by a state biologist and shipped to St. Petersburg for a necropsy to determine the cause of death. Such is the destiny that the state government has mandated for deceased sea cows in an effort to…
A strange, disturbing ailment is, by some accounts, rampant in South Florida and across the country, ruining lives, destroying relationships, even bringing people to the brink of suicide. This menace is an equal-opportunity destroyer, afflicting both gays and straights, men and women, young and old. AIDS? Hepatitis B? Alcoholism? No,…
There were a number of odd things about the anonymous tip that was called into the Florida Marine Patrol on the afternoon of May 19, 1994. The patrol’s Lt. Angel Vega discovered odd thing number one when he arrived at Key Biscayne’s Crandon Marina and found Dr. Eric Prince, a…
