In the week leading up to Sunday, April 21 last year, a tiny notice appeared in the Miami Herald’s classified pages: “ESTATE SALE!” the ad read, “Furniture, Bric-a-brac, Clothing. 7701 Biscayne Blvd.” The address was instantly recognizable to any old-time Miamian, particularly if he were male, heterosexual, and past 50…
“Sheepish” is not a word you’d ever use to characterize Metro-Dade firefighter Douglas Jewett. During his nineteen years in the department, he has acquired a reputation as a topnotch firefighter and paramedic, but one who will step on anyone’s toes to get the job done. This is a man who,…
Pity mild-mannered Michael Wolok. Since late August the 38-year-old free-lance futures trader hasn’t dared venture forth in his rust-color Ford LTD. All his life, Wolok says, he’s eschewed such vices as caffeine, alcohol, red meat, and marriage. Now, thanks to a “bashful kidney” and a run-in with a by-the-book state…
Jack D. Gordon Democratic state senator, 35th District “The incredibly discourteous drivers in Greater Miami, especially on the expressways. The people who try to get one place ahead by switching lanes, often without signaling. I think it’s worse here and I think that it has to do with a number…
With the success of his first two novels, To Speak for the Dead and Night Vision, mystery writer Paul Levine’s future as an author seems bright. He has abandoned the practice of law, a career that not long ago earned him an annual salary of nearly $180,000, and for the…
For 26 years the hits kept coming: Requiem For a Heavyweight, The Odd Couple, A View from the Bridge, Steel Magnolias, Driving Miss Daisy, Oklahoma!, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, and many other Broadway successes headed directly to South Florida from their sold-out runs on New York’s Great White Way…
“Miami-based rock quartet Nuclear Valdez have channeled the breadth of vision, tunefulness, and integrity of their widely heralded Epic debut I Am I into an exciting and surprising follow-up, Dream Another Dream, set for a January 14 release.” So begins a November 13 press release from Set to Run Public…
The two women in pressed pantsuits and high-necked collars look on in near shock, tittering to themselves as Tara Solomon strolls up the steps of the Compass Cafe on Ocean Drive. Even amid the mobile mosaic of the beach-front sidewalk, the high priestess of South Beach nightlife draws stares. Tonight…
What do you have in mind for this New Year’s Eve? A trip downtown, perhaps, to take in the King Orange Jamboree Parade, and a stroll through Bayfront Park afterward, to dance the night away? For the better part of the past decade, the post-parade revelry drew crowds primed to…
During the 1980s, American corporate chieftains spent four times more money on fine art than did the United States government. Inspired by sudden wealth and juicy tax breaks, arbitrageurs gobbled up Old Masters, and Wall Street CEOs decked their halls with Expressionists. But today, with the New York art market…
There was a time when almost any hip person could discuss, in impressively minute detail, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and the dense tangle of conspiracy theory that has sprouted around it. As the decades roll on, and more people grow up who don’t remember where they were…
For those of you who want to execute something approaching the full Ulric Shannon, a short list of books you may find useful: Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (a/k/a “The Warren Report”) 1964. Sorry, Jim Marrs, but it really isn’t kosher to skip…
From where he lay in the drifting, battered lifeboat, Julian Bravo could see the fat American tourists leaning over the ship’s railings eleven decks up, the lenses of their cameras and camcorders glinting in the Bahamian morning sun. And he could see the staff captain yelling urgently. But that was…
Julius Knipl “is sort of an idealized, disgusting world,” Ben Katchor says. “It’s a place where you can eat pastrami and not die of a heart attack.” Maybe to you that doesn’t sound like an effective sales pitch for his first book-length collection of Julius Knipl comics, Cheap Novelties: The…
It appeared that the person who shot Danny Donovan for stealing some mangoes had gotten away with near murder. More than a half-dozen men had chased Donovan, a 30-year-old handyman with a record of small-time crimes, and his pal Mike Lemus for miles on rural South Dade roads minutes before…
When Sheila Sowell set out to buy a dog, she didn’t strap a leash on the first mutt she laid eyes on. After she finally gave in to her husband’s demands that the couple acquire a canine companion, the 37-year-old nurse and Pembroke Pines resident scoured pet shops and kennels,…
For months officials at Biscayne National Park have been fretting over the proposed expansion of the South Dade Landfill, a squeezed-to-capacity dump that seeps untold gallons of toxic run-off into the park’s fragile underwater ecosystem. But chief ranger Wayne Landrum says the throwaway mentality that built Mount Trashmore has done…
In some distant, breezy January a century from now, the pundits will congregate along Ocean Drive to herald the 100th Art Deco Weekend. In the shadow of whatever remains of Miami Beach’s architectural splendor, they will celebrate the colorful history of that narrow spit of land, the legacy of South…
“When I come over from Cuba, people see my bags, sure, but they don’t see what I keep up here,” whispers Jose Galvez, tapping a pate dusted with brown hair and speckled by age. “What I keep here is the secret formula. It is in my brain the whole time…
It would be a ruse, though a convenient one, to claim that the mojitos served in various Miami restaurants vary in earth-shattering degrees. They do not. There are, after all, only so many ways you can mix rum, sugar, lime, yerbabuena, ice, and soda water. Then again, for the budding…
Erny Fannotto’s resume is, by his own account, a testament to small-fry fame. For 39 years Fannotto was one of New Jersey’s premier golf pros. During the Sixties, after moving to Miami, he served for several years on the city’s zoning board and did half a dozen hitches as a…
He had spent months on the campaign trail, maintaining a grueling schedule that required him to forgo most aspects of a normal life. Family, friends, sleep, even food were sacrificed in J.C. Alvarez’s efforts last year to be elected clerk of the Dade Circuit Court, a post with an annual…
