Identification cards, wallets, clothing fragments — the flotsam of the downed ValuJet Flight 592 — are continuing to float up from below a mat of muck and seared sawgrass at the crash site in a northeastern corner of the Everglades. Recent repeated rains have caused the water level to rise…
Info: Copping an Excuse Faced with evidence their cop shop is in disarray, town fathers practice some first-rate denial By Kathy Glasgow A ten-page report released Friday by the Dade State Attorney’s Office minces no words: The Surfside Police Department is “in disarray,” has suffered from “years of apparent mismanagement…
Tell us a little bit about yourself.” The 30-year-old man in a pressed gray suit sits like a deer in headlights; the three-person panel scrutinizes him across a brown-linen-draped table. After 43 consecutive applicants, the man now has about a three-minute opportunity to suitably impress the panel that, yes indeed,…
Call it the case of the purloined papers — 40 Sunday newspapers, mysteriously waylaid two and a half weeks ago on their way from London to Miami. No one seems to know exactly what happened to them, but dark allegations of a conspiratorial sequestration have elicited all manner of speculation…
Miami Mayor Joe Carollo was surprised enough by the results of his first request. Acting on a tip that then-city manager Cesar Odio was abusing his power to spend up to $4500 without city commission approval, Carollo asked Odio for a copy of every city check of $4500 or less…
Those incomparable, indefatigable (and sometimes incorrigible) Odios! Last month, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office bagged then-Miami City Manager Cesar Odio on corruption charges, a groundswell of indignation rose from the community. The radio airwaves fairly crackled with outrage at the injustice. Defense fund machinery was quickly cranked up, with promises…
The Sunday sun is brutal and scorching, bathing the manicured diamond at Fort Lauderdale High School in a high-beam glare. Surely, though, none of the ten players on the field this morning is as hot as the one at the plate, a batter for the Broward White Sox facing the…
A bodhisattva in a flimsy orange sari flowing from his nappy head to his crusty ankles fondles the pita bread in aisle nine. Orthodox Jewish newlyweds, she with wide eyes Easter-egg blue, confer over Betty Crocker’s strawberry and chocolate icing. In the produce section: “?Hay malanga?” “Si.” A stocky Russian…
This past week, while Congress was wheeling out its latest weapon in the ever-escalating fight to curb illegal immigration, an equally potent — if far more obscure — piece of ammunition was quietly making its debut in the red- tape-festooned halls of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)…
Phil Hendrie has had it with the goodbyes. Throughout his two and a half years as a comedic force at WIOD-AM (610), callers to his show, whether true suckers or fans playing along with his lunacy, have fueled some of his most hilarious bits. But ever since news of Hendrie’s…
Every so often another unsuspecting motorist comes zooming down SW Thirteenth Street into Coral Gables. All at once, a few blocks past Le Jeune Road, the pleasant residential route becomes a nightmare of a country road, complete with monster potholes, pint-size boulders, and a gloomy absence of streetlights. “The next…
Every month Florida’s seafood dealers record and report the amount and type of saltwater fish they buy from commercial fishermen. The graphs on this page reflect the “landings” in Dade County between 1978 and 1995 for six popular species, as compiled by the Florida Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg…
Whenever Timothy Ivory reads a newspaper, he starts to laugh. Hurricanes? Hah! Home invasion robbers? Tee-hee! Noise pollution? Heat waves? Third World tyrants with nuclear weapons? Wahoo! The things that worry normal people don’t apply to Ivory. He’s the latest lucky local to discover Miami’s best-kept real estate secret –…
Molson Ice at twelve o’clock. The sky is bright, the breeze onshore. A charter fisherman — white shorts, turquoise shirt, gold chain — kicks off his Topsiders and swigs from the perspiring bottle. “Fishin’s slow today,” he sighs, extending his arms like outriggers over the back of a bench. The…
In 1993 Steven Polakoff and Michael Carver bought their dream house, a 1925 Old Spanish-style mansion on NE 57th Street in the Miami enclave of Morningside. They paid $385,000 for the bayside estate and proceeded to roughly equal that sum in restoration, renovation, furnishings, and a swimming pool. Now there’s…
There are more than a few travelers in this world who wouldn’t shed a tear upon learning that airlines throw out tons of uneaten food every day. Even chow that has gone unserved by the end of a flight is given the heave-ho. This wasteful practice doesn’t warm the hearts…
Assistant City Clerk Maria Argudin handed a slip of scratch paper to the four City of Miami elected officials who weren’t facing federal corruption charges. Each politico dutifully scrawled his own name at the top, and underneath that the name of the person he believed should replace Miller Dawkins, who…
The day begins early and ends late for Pat Tornillo. He rises at 5:30 a.m. to take his vigorous morning walk along Brickell Avenue — his mind already alive with plans, for he has many jobs to do. Most mornings, he arranges a breakfast meeting, either at his office near…
What was perhaps the biggest disappointment in all of Diobelys Hurtado’s 24 years came in the spring of 1992, when the coach of Cuba’s powerhouse national boxing team told him he wouldn’t be going to Barcelona to compete in the Olympics. Though the elusive right-hander with the surprising left hook…
By all accounts, the recent Mike TysonBruce Seldon fight in Las Vegas was a fiasco, but it was a financially rewarding one for those involved. Seldon, who was knocked out (or at least down) after 109 seconds of awkward combat in the ring, reportedly left town with five million dollars…
The smoke from the contraband Cohiba languidly wreathes the bar, mingling with the law-abiding haze produced by locally rolled cigars. Most of the 147 guests at the Cigar Club of Miami’s Wednesday-night smoker at the Astor Hotel are happily puffing Morro Castles and Domino Parks donated by the Caribbean Cigar…
Again and again on a Friday night, Hector Perez Paez walks over to a mound of chalk on the floor to the left of the stage at Gaucho’s Cafe, an Argentine restaurant tucked into a corner of SW Eighth Street. The tango instructor rubs the slick soles of his brown…
