On March 6, the peripatetic Micky Arison, chairman and CEO of Miami-based Carnival Corp., took time off from running a pro basketball team and the world’s largest cruise line to fly to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of his fellow maritime tycoons. Their goal: To persuade key U.S. Congressmen to…
One chunk of the Florida Statutes was created with the notion that all public-policy making should be conducted not behind closed doors but in the open. It’s known as the Government-in-the-Sunshine Law, and it prohibits two or more members of the same elected or appointed board from discussing a matter…
In keeping with the absurdist temor of U.S.-Cuban relations over the past 35 years, at the very moment President Clinton was approving harsh trade sanctions against the island last week, Cuban technicians were putting the final touches on the national website of the Republic of Cuba. Their handiwork can now…
We’ve been training for this moment not just the past few hours or days, but for the past few years,” Monica Russo declares emphatically, her voice tinged with a southern drawl. “And now the moment has arrived.” She paces, lips pursed, pausing for a Haitian man to translate her words…
The hugs were a good sign. So were the back slaps and handshakes that followed Michael Goldstein’s presentation to the Miami City Commission last July. In ten short minutes on that summer morning, the environmental lawyer and activist had solved a twelve-year legal puzzle. Thanks to his work, it looked…
This past week Circuit Judge Juan Ramirez, Jr., granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of New Times Newspapers of Florida, Inc., thereby ending a two-year-old libel lawsuit filed by a prominent nursery owner against the newspaper company, which owns Miami New Times. The lawsuit was filed February 14,…
The call came in at 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. A man in a phone booth in Seattle had a question. He needed an answer fast. The question: Do chickens wear contact lenses? If so, why? Three thousand miles away, Bob Sherman booted up his computer in North Miami Beach and…
Cries of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay!” bellowed from tuxedoed revelers crammed inside a replica of Henry Flagler’s luxurious Royal Palm Hotel. Jazz music wafted from one stage, Latin music from a second, rock from a third. Partiers stuffed with cote de boeuf bourguignon slammed champagne while they admired the turn-of-the-century costumes worn by…
Three hours shy of sunrise on a frigid winter morning, Otto Garcia has green beans on the brain. Green beans are what everybody backing a truck into Enrique Produce’s loading dock wants today. Green beans are what they’re working their cell phones overtime trying to find. Green beans are what…
By most appearances, the area around Lincoln Road and the Miami Beach Convention Center was in the ascendant in 1993. Galleries, boutiques, restaurants, and bistros were proliferating along the pedestrian mall. The New World Symphony and the Miami City Ballet had made it their home. Condo conversions and world-class hotel…
More than 50 people, many dressed for church, packed State Rep. James Bush’s Biscayne Boulevard office this past Sunday with one thing on their minds: hair. Bad hair. Nearly everyone in attendance is a cosmetologist or barber, and they’re worried their profession is about to get blown away by lacquer-headed…
Sal Magluta visibly trembled with fear as he waited to hear the verdict in his drug-conspiracy trial. The jury slowly filed into the tenth-floor courtroom of federal Judge Federico Moreno, and Magluta’s breathing increased rapidly. His attorneys, Roy Black and Martin Weinberg, were sitting on either side of him, and…
Dick Ring, superintendent of Everglades National Park, wanted to go on a camp-out. He invited several colleagues to join him for a long weekend at Fort Jefferson National Monument in the Dry Tortugas, an archipelago of coral reefs 70 miles west of Key West. Staffers from the U.S. Army Corps…
Applications for political asylum, when done right, are painstakingly prepared. Immigration attorneys quiz their clients about minor details, seeking to firm up wavering memories and uncover contradictory recollections. They focus on dates, places, action, in a laborious effort to mine fact from a bog of anecdote. Did the applicant belong…
American presidential candidates have it easy. When Bob Dole and Bill Clinton want to raise cash, they never need to leave the country. A growing subset of self-funded politicos, such as Steve Forbes and Ross Perot, has so much money that they never need to leave their houses to pay…
He’s the guy you see minding his own business down at the end of the bar at Bobby Dykes’s Tigertail Lounge in Coconut Grove, or Bill and Ted’s in South Miami, or the Falcon up on the river near the 27th Street bridge, or the Last Chance Saloon south of…
Otis Wallace is the undisputed heavyweight champion of politics and power in Florida City. Last month the voters in this southernmost Dade community handed him his seventh term as mayor, a knockout streak nearly unprecedented in contemporary South Florida, where political success is normally measured by how quickly your constituents…
A week before Christmas, as Peter Dolara, a senior vice president for American Airlines, was hosting a party for friends and business associates at his Coral Gables home, a parking valet pulled him aside. There was a man outside asking a lot of questions and offering money for information about…
The denizens of a vacant lot in Overtown, as is their style, pulled up an old couch and a few milk crates, popped open some cold ones, and warmed their chilling digits over a fire that smoldered in a soot-stained trash barrel. Timothy Young of the Miami Police Department, as…
Mighty Mighty Bosstones vocalist Dicky Barrett has just one thing to say to all those music critics who once wrote off his Boston-based ska-punk band as a novelty act destined for obscurity: “Thank you.” Huh? “Seriously. I always felt it was a good thing when we got that kind of…
In the spring of 1968, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., photographer Jill Freedman hit the freedom trail with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, marching from New York City to a plywood lean-to on the mall in Washington, D.C., chanting “No More Hunger” and “Give Peace a Chance”…
Four years have passed since Laura Russell, an off-duty Metro-Dade police officer, shot and killed Andrew Morello while the sixteen-year-old and his friends were trying to steal stereo speakers from a Jeep Cherokee belonging to Russell’s neighbors. Russell claimed she shot the teen in self-defense as Morello was about to…
