After evading any sort of criminal consequences for Tasing an 18-year-old skateboarder to death, the City of Miami Beach will pay a comparatively paltry $100,000 to settle the final wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from the case. On Friday, the Florida Bulldog reported that the city has finally settled a suit filed by Israel…
A few months ago, Miami Beach Police spokesperson Ernesto Rodriguez joked over the phone with a New Times reporter that someone had made a parody Twitter account pretending to be him. At the time, the page seemed like a gag.
For 12 Miami-area police officers, killing an allegedly drunk driver in a hail of 116 bullets, shooting four innocent bystanders, costing city taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements, refusing to speak to local prosecutors, and drawing national scorn and embarrassment were not fireable offenses.
When Miami SWAT Officer George Diaz fired eight shots into a moving car outside Club Space in 2011, his case should have been clear-cut for internal affairs investigators: Miami cops aren’t allowed to shoot into moving cars because they could cause an accident or hit innocent people inside the vehicle.
In June 2015, a 17-year-old girl told multiple news outlets that Hialeah Police Sgt. Jesus “Jesse” Mercado Jr. threatened to sexually assault her while he was on-duty. The teen told multiple TV stations that Mercado arrested her for making an illegal U-turn, cornered her in a Hialeah Police station, and…
America is reeling this morning from the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history. At least 400 people were wounded and 50 killed in Las Vegas when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire with at least ten rifles from the 32nd floor of a hotel onto a concert crowd below.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to believe that Jim Larrañaga, the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes Men’s Basketball team, doesn’t know the identity of the anonymous UM coach named in FBI corruption documents this week. Larrañaga is something of a folk hero in South Florida — he’s taken an upstart…
Calling him a suspect in an ongoing murder investigation, the City of Miami fired Officer Adrian Rodriguez for administrative violations in June 2016. Rodriguez — who has never been charged in the 2007 killing in question — appealed his termination, and in May an arbitrator said he should get his job back.
The FBI today arrested 10 people including a top Adidas exec on charges that the company illegally funneled cash to high-school athletes in exchange for pledges to attend Adidas-sponsored universities. The University of Miami isn’t named in the complaint, but details strongly suggest the feds have tied the school to…
Tiny North Bay Village has been the scene of big-time drama this year over old drug charges and new blackmail attempts. The case centers on Commissioner Douglas Hornsby, a local physician who stunned residents earlier this year when he revealed that he’d been convicted on cocaine charges back in 1992 — and…
As Hurricane Irma plows toward Miami, plywood and bottled water are roughly as hard to find as a good Donald Trump Twitter take, and lines for gas have grown to Soviet proportions. Through it all, the vast majority of Miamians have acted with grace, patience, and good humor. But not everyone has been totally cool under fire.
Hurricane Irma is still a few days away from making landfall in Florida, but plenty of meteorologists are already predicting the worst. If the Category 5 storm does hit Miami directly, as some models anticipate, the damage could be astounding. One estimate says the tab could reach as high as $300 billion.
At a dilapidated Knights Inn in Homestead, Almlak Benitez stood in front of a camera with a black mask covering his hazel eyes and a long robe obscuring his tattooed biceps. Cockroach carcasses lined the worn-out carpet of the $69 room, which he and his friend Mohammad Skaik had pooled…
Miami-Dade County Police officers pulled over 27-year-old Anthony Ford last night in Liberty City. According to a departmental news release, Ford and another man fled from their red Nissan, and then “confrontation ensued and shots were fired.” Ford died last night. Investigators have reportedly learned he was unarmed.
Corruption and bribery are as central to Miami Beach’s history as art deco hotels and poolside mojitos. This is a town where a former mayor was convicted on 41 counts of bribery and where hotels and restaurants have always known that the solution to bureaucratic red tape is an envelop stuffed with cash.
James Eric McDonough, a South Miami-Dade activist with a doctorate in organic thermochemistry, has received little but trouble since reporting a Homestead Police officer for speeding in 2012. He’s been thrown out of public meetings, harassed, and even had to sue Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle for threatening to arrest him for recording a conversation with Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle.
Alfredo Ballester was sitting on his motorcycle at a red light in Little Havana when a police officer suddenly pulled in front of him and jumped out of his patrol car. To the 19-year-old’s surprise, the officer hurried toward him and tore him off his motorcycle, explaining he thought Ballester would try to flee.
No city does comedically blatant public corruption quite like Miami. Case in point: A Miami-Dade County Public Schools principal was arrested yesterday for allegedly using taxpayer money to pay his at-home nanny/housekeeper for two years before anybody noticed or bothered to tell the police.
Ryan Masti could hardly believe what he was hearing. The soft-spoken college senior who’d grown up on a farm in a speck-size New York town listened breathlessly as a World Patent Marketing rep told him the company wanted to partner with him on his invention. In fact, the man told…
The Dolphin Mall in Western Miami-Dade County is on lockdown and is currently being evacuated due to a shooting situation, according to multiple witnesses on social media. Officers with the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Sweetwater Police Department are at the scene following reports of an active shooter within the…
For years, the FBI has been pushing police to adopt “rapid DNA” testing technology, which would let cops quickly obtain the kind of analysis that crime labs usually take months to pull from hair samples or cheek swabs. But privacy experts have long warned that the emerging technology could also lead to huge databases of DNA used for all sorts of reasons by the federal government or local forces.
The clip begins with police lights blasting red and blue strobes across an entire block of NW Fourth Street in Fort Lauderdale. A teenage girl stands handcuffed next to a white Infinity SUV as her mother screams at the officers and asks what they’ve done wrong, what law they broke,…
