Ben Bloom’s anger was uncontrollable. It forced its way up from his chest and through his knotted vocal cords and clenched teeth. “Don’t fucking talk to me that way — I AM THE MESSIAH! I was resurrected, and now I walk the Earth!” he would shout. Back in the Nineties,…
On Sunday, September 11, 44-year-old Jeffrey Krainess and 39-year-old Mark Shawley were walking south of Fourth Street on Washington Avenue when a silver Honda slowed alongside them and then came to a complete stop. At 3:30 a.m. this is never a good sign. “We had met a friend at Karma…
Havana canvases often come to dust in Miami, especially really old ones. Juan Diaz, a 68-year-old vice president of a corporation that manufactures microwave radios, was lounging with his wife in his high-rise condo in downtown Miami Sunday, September 4, when he received a telephone call from his brother’s wife…
Jacob DiPietre, Gov. Jeb Bush’s closed-mouth press secretary, has left his government job to join Team Disney in Orlando as Goofy’s mouthpiece. This past June, New Times described DiPietre’s refusal to answer three weeks of telephone calls requesting comment about a judicial appointment. That story also highlighted DiPietre’s stint as…
As if Hurricane Katrina victims didn’t have enough going against them, now they’re the latest targets of hate radio. Just listen to WFTL-AM (850), the 50,000-watt home of the Florida Marlins. It’s also the home of some of the most radical right-wing voices in America. One regular syndicated host, Atlanta-based…
When Sri Lankan MC M.I.A. released her debut album, Arular, earlier this year, she was quickly anointed brightest new star in indie music universe. For better or worse, fans fetishisized her Asian ancestry, while her vaguely revolutionary lyrics and Tamil Tiger father earned her the favor of the perennially left-leaning…
It should have been perfect, and maybe, for a while, it was. Although it’s difficult to derive the appropriate scale on which to measure a life (How good a person was she? How happy?), it’s easy to tell from conversations with friends: There were times in Marcy Hine’s life when…
On August 30, nearly seven weeks after Sonia Castro filed for divorce from her estranged husband Harry Castro, a suspicious fire raged through the couple’s house on SW 102nd Avenue and 58th Street. No one was injured, but fire inspectors did find traces of an incendiary device, and as a…
The United States can represent many things to the world’s impoverished, but in late September 1992, this country meant one very basic thing to Omila Foufoune Cesaire: safety. She was in a panic to escape the murderous gangs and lethally berserk military that prowled the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing…
They answered the call from as far away as San Jose, California. Some as young as six years old. Others accomplished professionals. They are the Miami Dolphins fans who agreed it was time to redesign the team’s goofy logo in order to give our boys a little more pride on…
It’s 4:42 a.m. Saturday, August 27, when one, two, three, four, five police cars on westbound MacArthur Causeway simultaneously flash their blue lights. Perhaps a carnivorous sea turtle has emerged from Biscayne Bay. Maybe a volcano has risen from the depths. Or Diddy has landed in his Buck Rogers backpack…
Disputes — even legal battles — over real estate transactions are far from unique in South Florida’s out-of-control market. So when real estate broker Elio Rodriguez sued developer Wayne Rosen over a $1.4 million commission he says he was bilked out of, it wasn’t news. But State Circuit Court Judge…
Though Jorge is best known in the States for his acting roles in the breakout 2002 Brazilian movie City of God (in which he played Knockout Ned) and 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the Rio de Janeiro resident has been a fixture in Brazilian pop since the late…
Those who live by the wind can also die by it, or at least get extremely hurt, which can be bad for commerce, particularly when it involves kiteboarding. After wind and wing conspired to hurl Claudio Silva headlong into a tree this past December 31, Francisco Escudero lost his permit…
The small airport at San Andros was exactly what Donna Weaver hoped it wouldn’t be: a desolate place. There was a hangar, a gasoline pump, trash-strewn concrete stalls with a handwritten sign that read “gabbage,” and a dilapidated gazebo. The parking lot led to a lonely, pot-holed road and a…
It wasn’t anything close to the physical assault on Wire publisher Carl Zablotny this past July 4, but in the early hours of Wednesday, August 10, Brian Bosserman also became a victim of anti-gay hostility, and he’s wondering whether South Beach is the gay-friendly enclave it used to be. In…
The Players A sinewy man in white sweatpants, white baseball cap, and an oversize white T-shirt sits on a picnic table next to his sullen, black-clad counterpart. The diamond studs in his ears sparkle as he talks on a cell, intermittently yelling at some basketball players. “You got to square…
Click here to view our special condo supplement Click here to view übertown amenities Signature Properties Gryphon Gryphon appeared to renowned artist Jacques Flack in a dream. “I knew Miami was the only place where my fantasy could be brought to fruition in the form of million-dollar condos,” Flack says…
As she sat at the end of the long, polished cherrywood conference table, Donna Weaver told the story of her husband’s murder. The calm pulling of the pistol on an Andros Island airstrip. The close-range blasts of the gun as bullets pierced her husband’s body. The makeshift burial alongside the…
For the past several months Keith Wilson has been waging a one-man war against Miami-Dade County’s governmental bureaucracy. It began when building officials condemned his dilapidated warehouse on NW 79th Street and Eighth Court, which Wilson had recently purchased and was slowly refurbishing (apparently too slowly) to house his roofing…
Sure, the VMAs may call Miami home for now, but how much of Miami is actually at the VMAs? Well, a little more this year thanks to the kindly populist folks at MTV. This Saturday a lucky few can purchase tickets to witness the glitz and glamour. The tickets are…
The Miami Dolphins logo has remained more or less unchanged for the past 40 years — an adorable, smiling sea mammal arching over unseen waves while sporting a bulbous football helmet atop its head. As battle flags go, it doesn’t exactly strike fear in the heart. In fact it is…
