The strange saga of Alberto Chang-Rajii — the tech guru who wowed Miami with an elaborate backstory that turned out to be totally made-up — took an even stranger turn earlier this year when he fled to the tiny isle of Malta as his business imploded and criminal charges were filed in his native Chile.
On December 8, 2014, 60-year-old Charlie Bradley drove from Sarasota to Miami for a meeting of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, a group that has sought to restore the historic, graffiti-covered structure on Virginia Key. Walking around the stadium that Monday, Bradley — a retired schoolteacher who grew up in Miami —pulled out his cell phone and began recording video of the colorful graffiti that adorned the walls. That’s when a police officer stopped Bradley and threatened to throw him in jail.
Mary Luis Brown, a disabled woman missing both her legs, was caught panhandling for a single dollar at a Chevron gas station this past Saturday when two Miami-Dade Police officers tried to arrest her. Thanks to a bystander’s footage of two cops handcuffing her and dropping her to the ground, that confrontation went viral.
Last month, a truly heroic traveler strolled into Miami International Airport, strode up to the TSA security line, and whipped out a gold-plated gas mask spiked with high-caliber ammunition. Turns out, as the TSA notes, “post-apocalyptic, bullet-adorned gas masks” are not allowed aboard airplanes. Who knew?
Mary Luis Brown is missing both of her legs. She’s also 52 years old, gets around in a wheelchair, and isn’t armed with any kind of weaponry. It’s hard to imagine any situation where she’d be a serious threat to trained police officers. So why did two Miami-Dade cops…
Just after sunrise on a muggy September morning, Steve Dutton and Tom Lang sip coffee at a sidewalk table in downtown Miami. Steve, who has warm brown eyes and an easy smile, drinks black coffee from La Provence; his husband of 11 years, Tom, blue-eyed behind the oval-shaped lenses of…
Three years after Israel “Reefa” Herandez’s Taser-induced death, his family still clings to the young artist’s dreams as a way to keep him alive. This Sunday, they’ll make one of them come true by displaying his artwork at a Wynwood gallery.
For years, Alberto Chang-Rajii charmed Miami power brokers with his rags-to-riches story of immigrating from Chile to attend Stanford University, meeting Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and investing in Google before the company blew up. He turned that origin story into a multimillion-dollar tech investment fund and a board seat with Endeavor Miami.
A former Miami Gardens Police officer says he was fired for blowing the whistle on the department’s practice of stopping and frisking all 15-to-30-year old black men, which sparked outrage after it came to light through a man stopped more than 400 times.
Will Donald Trump strip a group of Miami cops and U.S. military veterans of their citizenship? If he makes good on his promise to crack down hard on anyone caught desecrating the U.S. flag, he’ll now have to: Today the City of Miami Police Department tweeted a photo of a group of military veteran officers signing their names on an American flag.
In most instances, it’s perfectly legal to record police officers in public. Yet cops regularly arrest and harass people filming them, which is why one of the most followed police-accountability websites is called Photography Is Not a Crime. City of Miami Police still haven’t figured out that they can’t pester…
Paulo Berejuk’s deep voice cracks over the phone from southern Brazil. He now lives in Santa Catarina, which boasts hundreds of miles of white-sand beaches crowned with lushly jungled hillsides. But to Berejuk, it feels like a prison, worse than the federal pen in North Carolina where he finished an…
Many unarmed motorists shot by police officers don’t live to tell their side of the story. Michael Gavins is the exception. And the story Gavins tells is disturbing. He was unarmed and says he was not resisting when South Miami Police Officer Aryo Rezaie shot him in the back…
City of Miami Police promise this time will be different. Standing in front of the Miami City Commission yesterday, Police Chief Rodolfo Llanes — who was caught this week fudging the truth about when he learned about destroyed murder case evidence — promised that if Miami PD was allowed to purchase 148 new Bushmaster AR-15-style rifles…
Thousands of Miamians have taken to the streets since last week to protest Donald Trump. By all accounts, they’ve been entirely peaceful. Miami Police Commander Albert Guerra even took to Twitter after a Wynwood protest on Saturday to “thank the protesters for peacefully exercising their [First Amendment] right.” But the Miami…
Murder evidence is pretty important, so you’d think the Miami Police Department would have a good place to store all of those key items in unsolved cases. But it turns out that for years MPD has kept vital evidence in a metal storage container under an I-95 overpass. As blogger Al Crespo revealed last month, the container rusted, letting in water and pests that destroyed evidence in more than 500 cases.
Thanks to the National Rifle Association, academic studies examining the impact of gun laws on public health are hard to come by. The gun lobby helped force the federal government to ban funding for studies that track how gun rules affect the homicide rate.
In March, citing an uptick in mass shootings and terrorist events, the Miami-Dade Police Department upgraded its officers’ gear to powerful AR-15 rifles and the most up-to-date bulletproof vests on the market.
The blond corpse floats in a blood-filled bathtub. The face bobs just barely above the surface. She wears nothing but a thong. Her hands are tied with a ribbed fabric sash. The feet are bound with a beige electrical cord. Stab wounds dot her body. The sprawling Mediterranean-style home is a…
When behavior technician Charles Kinsey was shot by a North Miami Police officer while trying to help an autistic client this past July, the outrage was pretty much universal. A witness released video of Kinsey lying flat on his back with his hands in the air, and dozens of horrified…
By now, you’ve probably made up your mind in the most important race on this year’s ballot. If you’ve been paying even a little attention, you know that medical marijuana is back up for a vote and that Florida’s Amendment 1 solar initiative is actually a trick…
Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Grieco’s Sunday routine rarely varies: He begins the day with an early-morning, three-mile jog on Ocean Drive. Yesterday that routine took an unexpected turn. Although Ocean Drive has been bedeviled by crime this year, Grieco says he rarely sees any trouble along the iconic…
