Social media fame is a race to the bottom. Concepts that seem novel one day get chewed up, memed, and worn out in days in a brutal system that ensures only the most outrageous, shameless people are able to achieve sustained fame. Alex Jones has millions of followers. People think the QAnon conspiracy is real. Teen rapper Tay-K scored a massive hit after writing a song about his capital murder charges.
Corey Jones was sitting in his broken-down car on the side of the highway in the middle of the night while he waited for a tow. Suddenly, Nouman Raja came barreling the wrong way up the off-ramp. Raja, an undercover cop in an unmarked white van, strode up to Jones’ window and demanded he put his “fuckin'” hands up.
Miami’s biggest honey caper began unraveling this past April 25, when William Steel bumped into a drum of honey at his company’s warehouse in Homestead. The drum was supposed to be full of 600 pounds of honey, but it wobbled like it was half-empty.
Another day, another South Florida cop suing his department because he feels persecuted for being white. Poor guy. In the latest case filed in Miami-Dade court last week, Miami Gardens Police Officer William Dunaske sued the force for “anti-white” harassment. The twist: Dunaske has repeatedly been accused of racism and abuse, and he filed the suit after a fight over why he had named his dog after a black officer in the department.
After Ultra Music Festival’s organizers had to shell out $400,000 to an innocent concertgoer who was thrown to the ground, beaten, and tasered by Miami Police officers who lied about their actions in official reports, festival organizers understandably asked the city to send different cops next time.
The utterly bizarre and horrid tale of Pennsylvania-turned-Florida-turned-Cuban priest George Zirwas has taken an even darker turn this week. More than 15 years ago, New Times published a meticulously reported feature delving into Zirwas’ 2001 murder in Havana, where he was injected in the neck with an overdose of muscle relaxant…
The last time a giant protest turned into a chaotic state of civil unrest in Hialeah was — well, it’s hard to point to a recent example. The city’s police stay busy chasing crotch-grabbing car dealers, fake veterinarians, and mail thieves, but a mob of angry rioters has yet to descend upon the “City of Progress.”
North Miami City Clerk Michael Etienne might have just committed the most wholesome theft of public money in American history. Sure, people steal a few thousand dollars in taxpayer cash all the time — but instead of using that money to cover something heinous, like dog-track gambling debts, Etienne legit stole some money to stare at Abraham Lincoln’s giant head…
When 25-year-old Cuban native Danay Ojeda got into her car last Wednesday afternoon, she had no idea she was being watched. By the time Ojeda loaded 26 pounds of marijuana into the back of her 2017 Dodge Durango, the cops had already been tailing her for weeks.
Bribing the head of an entire nation’s anti-corruption task force is apparently cheaper and way less glamorous than you might think. Luis Gustavo Moreno Rivera, who was the director of Colombia’s Office of Anti-Corruption, admitted in court today that he could be bought with about $132,000 and that he’d taken a portion of that money inside a bathroom at Miami’s Dolphin Mall.
Raymond Odigie Uadiale, age 41, is great with computers. Good enough to be hired by Microsoft as a network engineer. And good enough, according to the feds, to run a virus scamming ring that seized computers via a fake warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, charged people a $200 “fine” to unlock their desktops, and warned users they might be sent to prison if they didn’t pay up.
In 2014, Miami Police officers chased a 21-year-old graffiti artist named Demz who was tagging a wall in Wynwood during Art Basel. During the pursuit, the cops ran the artist over, killing him. The officer who ran over Demz, who just happened to be the son of a Miami-Dade prosecutor,…
Even in 2018, it’s a shock to actually hear cops admit to straight-up framing black suspects as a matter of policy. That’s exactly what’s happened in Biscayne Park. In June, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment alleging that Raimundo Atestiano, the former chief of the tiny Miami-Dade town, had intentionally framed…
Ever since the Parkland massacre, the Broward School Board and superintendent Robert Runcie have insisted that the school system did everything possible to help Cruz, who’d been a known violent threat for years. And yet the school board has also fought tooth-and-nail in court to avoid releasing detailed records about Cruz’s…
On March 7, Lighthouse Point Police Officers Christopher Thompson and Joseph Valdes knocked on the door of a third-floor condo with a brick façade and waited for Dominic Signorile. The cops in the small coastal town in Broward County wanted to check on Signorile after someone reported seeing him clutching…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s single biggest contractor, with more than $400 million worth of deals to run private prisons, including the Broward Transitional Center, a site housing “low-priority” detainees. As the Trump administration has ripped families apart and jailed immigrants with no criminal records, GEO has come under heavy fire…
America largely phased out the use of privately run, for-profit jails and prison facilities in the early 20th Century after the public realized the practice of making a profit from caging people was a particularly heinous piece of the capitalist economy. But amid a government privatization push under Ronald Reagan, the idea came back. Two private-prison firms — California’s CoreCivic and Florida’s GEO Group — dominate the for-profit human-caging business today.
Twenty-five years ago, Maria’s mom kicked her out of the house. Maria was 18 and had just arrived in Miami from Holland a few months earlier. She was also pregnant. “I was in a state of mind where I felt like I didn’t have anybody left, like everyone was leaving me,” Maria says.
When Vincent Gaines was sentenced to five years in prison on robbery charges in June 2013, state officials recommended he be placed in a mental-health unit because he had regular visual and auditory hallucinations. So Gaines was transferred to the Dade Correctional Institution in South Miami-Dade County, where he was placed on a “boneless diet” that left the five-foot-nine man 40 pounds lighter — dropping from 190 to 151 — in just 18 months.
After learning her brother hadn’t shown up for work at the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department for several days, Kathy Kavalin called Miami Police to report him missing. She didn’t know he’d been dead for more than a week.
Last month, Miami’s federal prosecutors unveiled a string of indictments in an international scheme to funnel a staggering $1.2 billion out of Venezuela’s state-owned oil firm and then launder that money in South Florida. In fact, prosecutors believe that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is wrapped up in the scheme, the Miami Herald reports.
Last week, the Hollywood Police Department conducted a useless, money-wasting “sting” on an adult store, where they arrested 13 men who were masturbating or having consensual oral sex in private, locked rooms. Rather than ask why the hell HPD thought it should be arresting gay men for no reason…
