Crime & Police

In September, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission slapped Miami biotech billionaire Phillip Frost with a massive lawsuit accusing him of stock fraud. According to the SEC, Frost and his co-conspirators artificially inflated the price of stocks and then exited with millions, leaving other investors with virtually worthless shares. After the charges were announced in national media, stock prices for Frost’s company, Opko Health, plummeted.

Rayan Rodriguez just wanted to play a few rounds of dominoes in Máximo Gómez Park — better known as Calle Ocho’s famous Domino Park — where tourists line up all day to snap photos of viejitos slapping tiles down on the park’s tables. But instead of snagging a table, Rodriguez…

Flavio Musmanno lost his wallet August 28. He has lived in North Miami Beach on an expired visa since emigrating from Argentina in 2000, but he’d since married an American citizen and is in the process of applying for permanent residency.

Miami Police officers nearly just won the right to do drugs and get away with it. Last month, New Times obtained a copy of the police department’s new labor contract, and its language would let cops caught doing illegal drugs keep their jobs as long as they entered rehab after failing a drug test. Many critics found the rule hypocritical because one of the police department’s main jobs is to arrest people doing drugs.

“The [City] Manager has informed me that the officer in question is in the process required by law and collective bargaining before an officer can be officially terminated,” Gilbert said in a written statement sent to New Times. “The behavior of which [Clarke] is accused, and the poor judgement which he has allegedly shown, is not consistent with the high standards to which we hold all City employees.”

A few seconds after storming into a flea market parking lot with a handgun, firing that gun into the same car where her kid was sitting, and then grabbing her son and speeding away, the woman with bright green hair suddenly realizes she perhaps shouldn’t have let her friend film…

Clarke has been investigated by MGPD’s internal affairs unit twice for having inappropriate relationships with women while on duty. The first complaint against him in 2016 was sustained and resulted in a five-day suspension, though that didn’t stop him from becoming a finalist for the 2017 Dade County “Officer of the Year” award this past May.

Only about 3,000 people live in Biscayne Park. Yet despite the village’s small size, for years city documents bragged about how its cops were making hundreds of arrests and thousands of traffic stops every year. In 2011, Raimundo Atesiano was named 2011 “Officer of the Year” after making 2,236 traffic stops and 305 arrests…

As he turns the corner of SW 113th Place in Richmond Heights, Chuck Berriman hits the brake pedal of his red Toyota pickup and looks over his shoulder toward the place where his youngest brother died. “That’s it right there,” he says, pointing toward a dilapidated beige townhouse with an…

When the controversial Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted premiered in 2015, some sex workers were upset about the film and argued it was a needlessly negative take on the porn industry. Some porn performers said the that film was demeaning to actors who consensually have sex on camera and that the movie, produced by Rashida Jones, cherry-picked negative stories from porn stars to make the industry look worse than it really is.

The U.S. government says Pedro Luis Martin Olivares is an international drug trafficker who exploited his position in the Venezuelan government to move narcotics through his country. According to U.S. officials, he “facilitated the movement of cocaine,” “accepted bribes from drug traffickers,” “bribed other Venezuelan officials,” and “worked closely with other…

If a City of Miami Police officer suspects you have drugs in your car, you’d better believe you’ll get arrested. Sure, prosecutors might eventually drop your case or send you to a pretrial diversion program, but there’s also a good shot you could end up in jail. Either way, the process is humiliating and expensive.

Under Miami Police Department rules, cops aren’t allowed to post selfies on Instagram showing them grinning next to detained, handcuffed people. The rule might seem self-evident, but in January, New Times caught Miami Police Captain Javier Ortiz — the city’s former police union chief known for insulting dead children…

Miami is unique. No other major city on Earth is wedged between the ocean and an endangered river of grass. No other metropolis in the United States was founded by a woman. So it makes sense the Magic City’s criminals are also an unusual breed.

Miami-Dade’s weird-crime chronicles include a fellow huffing dust-cleaner at a Homestead bus stop and a man allegedly tinkering with the dead at Miami cemetery.

Pro tip: If you want to work in a job where you arrest people for doing cocaine, don’t do cocaine yourself. That advice might seem obvious, but the Miami Springs Police Department says former cop Christopher Dweck failed to follow those wise words. Now, after failing a test for coke and amphetamines and getting fired, he is suing the department in federal court.

In 2014, Miami-Dade County prosecutors said Rickey L. Davis was a killer. State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s office, working with Miami-Dade Police, announced it had determined Davis had strangled then-26-year-old Joycelean Burrows to death in Liberty City in 1986. Reporters blasted Davis’ mugshot all over the press and claimed new DNA evidence had solved the case after nearly 30 years.

Bryan Deneumostier helped run the website StraightBoyz for roughly four years.

If you’ve ever played soccer in Miami, you’ve seen it happen dozens of times: Someone makes a hard tackle or calls a borderline foul. Suddenly, the testosterone flows like cafecitos from a ventanita. Sweaty faces are pushed together. Someone screams, “¡Puta!” Chests are shoved. An irate striker grabs the portable goals and tries to walk off the field.

Clarens Desrouleaux spent five years in prison for burglary before he was deported to Haiti last year. The problem is that he never stole anything from anyone. Desrouleaux was, in fact, a victim of a heinous scheme by former Biscayne Park Police Chief Raimundo Atesiano in which he told his cops to frame black residents for burglaries in order to make his department seem competent.

Bud Conlin, a heavily bearded former high-school principal with a grandfatherly demeanor, has been showing up at the Krome Processing Center once a week since 2014. He’s the co-coordinator of Friends of Miami-Dade Detainees, a nonprofit that visits people at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, buys them books, and puts money…