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…
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…
