The legends and truths (but mainly legends) that tell the story of Stiltsville represent local history at its most colorful — from the entrepreneurial fisherman known as Crawfish Eddie, who made some good of a bad thing in the early 1930s by building a bait shack on a barge that…
The drive from Brickell Key, in downtown Miami, to the federal prison in South Dade normally takes about 30 minutes. But for Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko the journey took a full year. This past Friday the West African millionaire entered the minimum-security facility, where he will serve 43 days for…
Robert “Chick” Weiner is a veteran Coral Gables attorney. Like more than half of all his fellow attorneys in Dade County, he reserves a portion of his practice for clients who can’t afford legal services. In fact, Weiner is somewhat of an overachiever in the pro bono arena, having been…
Florida law sets precisely three hiring standards for public school principals and their bosses: They must complete three years as classroom teachers, hold a master’s degree from an accredited college, and study a specified core curriculum. Though the core curriculum requirement has been in effect only since 1986, the others…
Back on April 11, the long nightmare on the Miami River appeared to be over. Under mounting pressure from state and federal authorities, the owners of the decrepit freighter Rex Bear had finally found a terminal willing to rent them space to dock their 40-year-old German-made hulk, which for a…
New Times staff writer Robert Andrew Powell and restaurant critic Jen Karetnick have won prizes in the Association of Food Journalists’ competition for stories published in 1996. The awards, presented September 6 at a banquet in Washington, D.C., are open to all journalists and are offered in two circulation divisions…
The aged rotary telephone in the third-floor hallway of this dilapidated Havana mansion — long ago partitioned into apartments — rings at short intervals throughout the day and night. Someone in an apartment near the phone usually answers the call and then yells, “AOctavio!” And Octavio, tall and skinny, wearing…
While being driven up U.S. 1 through Coconut Grove on her way to the Alliance Film and Video Co-op in Miami Beach, filmmaker Doris Wishman muses about the appropriateness of the title she’s chosen for her comeback project. “What do you think of Dildo Heaven?” she asks of the film’s…
Sucked into a narrow aisle at the Midem Latin American and Caribbean Music Market, among the glad-handing industry types and overlapping rhythms of reggae, salsa, soca, and samba, was the tiny booth belonging to Ahi-Nama Music, a Los Angeles-based licensing and distribution firm. A massive television set faced outward from…
What do Bob Marley, the Girl Scouts, Ivana Trump, and the American Welding Society have in common? All have been honored this year with their own official “day” by Dade County and/or the City of Miami. In fact, in a flurry of bond paper and fancy script, the city has…
Deborah Mash and her three colleagues from the University of Miami strolled into the meeting room of a Rockville, Maryland, hotel in August 1993, and right away they knew they had trouble. The room was set up for a crowd, and they hadn’t planned on this. At the far end…
It’s not that Patrick McCoy hates airplanes — after all, he’s a pilot for a major commercial airline, so his livelihood pretty much depends on the beasts. It’s just that he doesn’t like them flying so low over his home that he can’t talk on the phone. “If one were…
It’s just a 40-foot stretch of land on the north bank of the Little River Canal, but for more than four years that piece of Miami real estate south of 79th Street near Biscayne Boulevard has been a battlefield. Someone was always interested in sticking cable TV poles or sewer…
In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes what he calls “fishing” expeditions: Nation of Islam members trying to recruit new adherents. Sitting in the cramped office of Automotive Plus, 62-year-old Isiah El-Amin wipes from his hands the fine blue dust of automotive paint he has sanded from a battered Ford. Accompanied…
“!Barca!” An adolescent voice pierces the heavy midafternoon air. “!Barca! !Barca! !Barca!” Four others have joined the first; now five, six. Their voices fall into near-unison, like a song. Barefoot, the children stream out of their low-rent apartment building and across the scrabbly back lot off NW Eighth Street Road,…
Ask any toll clerk on the Florida Turnpike extension for directions to Everglades National Park and they will likely include a fruit stand called Robert Is Here among the stoplights and the right turns. The establishment at SW 192nd Avenue and Palm Drive, just west of Florida City and east…
The calls keep coming in to the Dade County offices of the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. Those funny-looking packs of cigarettes have been circulating for more than two years, but people still raise an eyebrow when they see a small red sticker on one side of their…
He could be almost anyone, the clean-shaven black-haired man in his thirties wending his way through the strolling, posing, gossiping, blading masses along Ocean Drive on a Saturday afternoon. He’s wearing a faded paisley shirt, brown pants, and rubber-soled brown leather lace-up shoes. In a black folder he carries several…
A twilight downpour slicks the potholed streets, and for the moment this crumbling bit of Hialeah glows like a busted rainbow. The huge magenta cube named Foxxy Lady is surrounded by guys braving chain lightning for live, nude girls. One corner down, cigarette smoke, music, and watery gold light spill…
The Beatles had drummer Pete Best. The Rolling Stones had keyboardist Ian Stewart. Pink Floyd had guitarist Syd Barrett. Unfortunate schlubs who, by their own choice or by the design of others, disappeared from the lineups just before the bands achieved cosmological stardom. Now add to that list another name:…
When Keely left her Bahamian home, with its pink sand beaches and silk cotton trees billowing clouds of white blossoms, to attend college in Miami, her father agonized. His modest fishing business provided no excess income to send her. How would she survive all alone in a big city full…
Bruce Udolf could not have joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office at a more auspicious time for an attorney who wanted to prosecute public corruption. It was 1987, and the federal investigation into Hialeah political malfeasance was beginning to peak. Two former city officials had already been convicted of attempted extortion,…
