New Times is proud to announce that the paper is now poised to accept legal notices from the City of Miami. “For too long we have been concentrating on political, social, and arts reporting,” asserts editor Jim Mullin. “Too little attention has been paid to real community service, specifically to…
If you are one of the dozens of people in South Florida who were terrorized by alligators in your back yard during the past year, you might have called Pesky Critters or some other wildlife-catching service. These folks are happy to come out and remove the animal in question. Manny…
The local independent film East of Overtown is not supposed to be a comedy. But this chronically underfunded, perpetual work in progress has threatened for some time to become a comedy of errors. Despite the dead-serious subject matter it fictionalizes (especially the Lozano and McDuffie riots), the seven-year-old process has…
Julie Davis left Miami in 1986 the same way I did, with new clothes, a halogen desk lamp, and her high school diploma beaming from a fancy lacquered frame purchased by her parents. Four years later she graduated from college the same way I did, her brain buzzing with the…
Probationary Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez loves to churn out initiatives. First came a five-point plan to clean up and beautify Miami. Then a proposal to light up Flagler Street. This week he is scheduled to debut his monthly “Faith in the City” prayer meetings. Leaders of several local churches have…
You can’t go around slashing dogs,” Rosie Heffernan warns a roomful of chattering high school students at Our Lady of Lourdes, an all-girl Catholic academy in South Miami. Not that any of the girls has converted to a religious cult with a penchant for cutting up canines. Rather, Heffernan, their…
Venezuelan citizen Guillermo Pena works as a district manager for the Falk Corporation, one of several subsidiaries of the multibillion-dollar manufacturer Sundstrand. Milwaukee-based Falk builds and sells industrial power-transmission equipment. Its Website advertises the company’s products for use in coal mines, paper mills, chemical plants, and oil refineries worldwide. On…
Hurricane Andrew assaulted Susan Alberti’s Saga Bay neighborhood with shattering winds and a twelve-foot storm surge. When she and her husband Louis returned to their home, east of Cutler Ridge off Old Cutler Road, they found water lines on the walls higher than their two young children’s heads, carpets caked…
For nearly three decades, Doctor Ali-Tyson Cool — world rag popping champion, friend to the homeless and the famous, supreme self-promoter — was one of South Florida’s more colorful characters, a peacock even in the exotic aviary that is South Beach. Yet when he drowned early this year in a…
Sitting in Ross Perot’s favorite booth at a fancy Dallas restaurant, Leigh Valentine eats half her low-fat redfish and then explains her husband’s “disguise kit.” The kit contained several fake mustaches and a $1200 custom-made wig. Robert Tilton, the Texas televangelist, carried it everywhere, and during their first year of…
The intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road in Coconut Grove is a well-traveled crossing for Miami commuters, but even in the sunlit roar of the morning rush hour it can appear ominous. One or two police cars are parked around the clock on a barren lot at one corner,…
Life wasn’t too bad for King the gorilla back in the summer of 1996. Despite his solitary and obviously inadequate living quarters — a small concrete enclosure at Monkey Jungle in South Dade — King benefited from the devoted attention of his keepers and fans. He routinely worked through a…
During the same November 19 press conference in which he introduced Alberto Ruder as his new city manager, Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez made another announcement — a warning, really: He was now grading Miami Herald articles for “mistakes and errata and corrections in their reporting.” The prospect of Suarez slowing…
As a story about heart disease fades from the screen, WTVJ-TV (Channel 6) news anchor Jennifer Valoppi gazes at the camera in front of her, glances at her notes, then looks back at the camera. “And coming up in just a little bit — well, actually right now — we’re…
When Nathaniel Burke is not in his Little Havana office, a machine answers the phone. “Thank you for calling the Coalition to Support Cuban Detainees,” a recording of Burke’s voice begins. It then repeats the message in Spanish and adds, “If you are in prison, please leave your complete address.”…
Eight-year-old Benlee Bruneau began having problems last year in his class for gifted students at the North Dade Center for Modern Languages, a magnet school in Opa-locka. According to reports filed by teachers, Benlee, who is Haitian American, was bothering other students, and his once sterling grades began dropping. The…
Walter Troutman’s two-story penthouse atop the original Jockey Club high-rise, which he designed specifically for himself when he built the place in 1968, is anachronistically opulent, with its spiral staircases, panoramic view of the Intracoastal, and indoor pool on the upper level. Still, with all the plaques, magazine covers, snapshots,…
In the South Florida equivalent of the Ice Bowl, with the temperature hovering in the low 40s at kickoff Saturday, the Gwen Cherry Bulls lost to the Goulds Rams 8-0 in the championship game of the 80-pound weight division of the Greater Miami Pop Warner football league. “We’re a better…
It’s 1:35 a.m. and Eunice Liberty is on the phone, fuming with anger. “I didn’t work all these years to be treated like this,” protests the 93-year-old, who, despite her advanced age, is decidedly more alert than the bleary-eyed reporter on the other end of the line. The object of…
For the past two and a half years music instructors at Miami’s New World School of the Arts have watched in dismay as a majority of their full-time colleagues, who had helped build a small but respected conservatory, abandoned the enterprise to join other faculties. Moreover, those who remain have…
It’s been more than six years, yet Ronnie Greenspan can’t talk about the staff party without feeling a rise of queasiness in the pit of her stomach. The shame she felt that night, though diminished by time, has never quite disappeared. Rather, it has spiraled down through the years to…
James Burke didn’t seem to want to leave. The November 18 county commission meeting had been adjourned, and while his colleagues quickly packed up and left, Burke remained in his chair, papers and reports scattered in front of him. Who could blame him for lingering? For the past fourteen months…
