Tatiana F. Tascon had a good little scam going for a while. Out of a showroom set up in her pricey Coconut Grove home Tascon peddled fake designer handbags from the likes of Louis Vuitton and counterfeit Rolex watches. Through selling clients a fake version of the good life earned over $700,000…
For months, Marco Rubio has resisted increasingly desperate calls from his colleagues to throw his name back into the ring for the bruising race for his seat in the U.S. Senate. But Rubio hinted yesterday that he might just be softening that stance because the massacre in Orlando had pushed…
Outside of Orlando itself, few places have been as closely impacted by the massacre at Pulse Nightclub as Miami — and in particular the Magic City’s LGBT community. South Florida’s gay scene is closely linked to that in central Florida, and at least one of the victims who died Sunday…
In the horrible hours after 49 club-goers were massacred in Orlando early Sunday morning, everyone in Florida grasped for how to respond to the brutal tragedy. Family members texted and checked in safe on Facebook. Hundreds lined up to donate blood. And one Florida sheriff decided the moment…
At least fifty people are dead, authorities have now confirmed, in an overnight mass shooting inside a packed gay nightclub in Orlando. At least 53 others were wounded and are in local hospitals. Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency and leaders asked for blood donors to step…
The call came in to police at 1:16 a.m. November 22, 2009: a burglary in progress at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina, a former yacht club that had become a resort hotel perched on the Intracoastal Waterway just off the 17th Street Causeway. Kenneth Post, the burglar, was a 46-year-old,…
Eleazar Gadea thought that all it takes to get your way with Miami-Dade County government is a few discretely handed off $100 bills. He even thought that perhaps the county would look the other way if he wanted to hold a paint party until 4 a.m. despite local zoning laws…
Last week, Miami Beach Police busted a brazen cocaine and gambling operation run out of South Beach’s VFW hall. An illegal betting machine ran out in the open in the smoky South Beach bar, police say, while a bartender and a regular openly sold drugs. But the police failed to mention…
Financial schemes are so common in Miami that not even one of the area’s most respected research institutes is safe from fraudster’s sticky fingers. The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the University of Miami’s highly regarded Virginia Key-based oceanography school, was embezzled out of $2.3 million over a…
While the general consensus is that the calamity and controversy surrounding Urban Beach Weekend has continued to calm down since its peak in 2011, the arrest totals in Miami Beach over the 5-day Memorial Day weekend period were slightly up from last year. Police made 195 total arrests in Miami Beach…
Mention Miami today to an out-of-towner and a few images immediately pop to mind: Crockett and Tubbs in glorious pastel, white sand beaches and lots of extremely attractive people in scant clothing bathing in the sun. Miami is sexy. There is no denying it. But at heart the Magic City…
VFW Hall 3559 is a bizarre relic of an earlier time in glitzy South Beach. Hidden inside the Floridian condo tower, patrons have to ring a bell at an unmarked side door and get buzzed in via hidden camera. Inside, sweeping views of Biscayne Bay contrast with a grimy, smoke-filled…
Proving complaints against police officers can be nearly impossible — a he-said, she-said situation putting cop versus suspect almost always ends in favor of the police. That’s one reason so many forces are now adopting body cameras. But Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel, an independent city board that looks into complaints about…
In the grand scheme of violent crime in South Beach, an October 2014 drive-by shooting outside Ocean Drive’s Fat Tuesday outpost seemed far from notorious. In the wee hours of a Sunday morning, a group in an Altima fired at someone sitting in a dark-colored car and then sped away…
Miami Beach police have finalized their plans for controlling crowds and traffic on Memorial Day weekend, with one major change: This year, cars coming onto the Beach won’t be subject to a DUI checkpoint. Officer Ernesto Rodriguez, the department’s spokesman, said the checkpoint, which has been used for several years,…
On a Sunday afternoon one week before Easter 1999, Mark Williams pulled his SUV into the parking lot outside his estranged wife’s West Palm Beach apartment with his 11-year-old son Lamatra riding shotgun. For most of his life, Lamatra had shuffled between his mother and his grandmother, but this week…
Three years ago, a soft-spoken mobile app developer named Jesus Rodriguez was hailed as one of the up-and-coming bright lights of Miami’s emerging tech sector. Rodriguez’s company, Kidozen, was among the first local companies chosen by tech business incubator Endeavor Miami for a grant. Rodriguez quickly claimed runaway success. He…
“Opa-locka Hialeah is the place to go,” goes the familiar jingle. “It’s more than just a market, it’s a great big…” center of food stamp fraud, apparently. Multiple agencies raided the iconic Opa-locka Hialeah Flea Market this afternoon. 22 shop owners ended up being indicated, and some were hauled off in zip…
Jeffrey Jason Cooper lured Asian college students to Florida for the summer with the opportunity of doing clerical for his Miami Beach yoga studio. When they arrived, the students were informed that no such yoga studio actually existed. Instead, Cooper ran an erotic massage parlor and forced the students into performing…
It was 1 a.m. Saturday, January 16, when a pair of uniformed men shook Jaiema Pierre awake. The petite 18-year-old nursing major had fallen asleep in a friend’s dorm room at the Indian River Towers on Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus. “What year is it?” one of them asked…
Six months after the Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s previous death penalty sentencing law was unconstitutional, a Miami circuit court judge has ruled that the new law approved by the legislature and Governor Rick Scott is also unconstitutional. Eleventh District Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch struck the law down while considering the…
In a scandal that rocked Miami-Dade back in the ’90s, then County commissioner and chair of the county’s finance committee James “Jimmie” C. Burke was caught on tape accepting $5,000 in bribes. It was the downpayment on what was planned to be a $400,000 kickback in exchange for steering a…
