Steve Smith liked his old job. In fact he loved his old job, and his boss, and his colleagues. An investigator at the Miami office of the state Division of Insurance Fraud, he did his work well, earning consistently good evaluations during his seven-and-a-half-year career. He had no intention of…
The subpoena landed on the judge’s desk with an offensive slap and was quickly whisked away to the office of the county attorney, where it became the object of some consternation. As long as anyone in the office could remember, no lawyer had ever had the temerity to attempt to…
Black and Hispanic environmentalists are scarcer than Florida panthers. If that doesn’t change soon, the whole movement faces extinction. This was the Everglades brain trust, people who cared so much about the dying River of Grass that they were actually doing something about it. Activists, government regulators, scientists, lawyers, engineers,…
Someone called the City of Miami police just after midnight March 5 reporting that a man was crawling toward NW 79th Street from the unlit, trash- and bush-clogged alleyway behind the Edison-Little River Neighborhood Center. An officer who arrived soon afterward found Darryl Butts lying face-down in broken glass and…
On a six-foot-square piece of aluminum that leans against a wall behind Mario Del Castillo’s house in West Hialeah, the words Calle Ocho 96 are spelled out in foot-high letters of lavender, red, yellow, green, and blue, all fashioned from Styrofoam. Along with several other signs stored in the yard,…
For twelve years Charles Felton had not smoked. He’d quit cold. Quit forever, he told himself. Never again would he light up a cigarette and invite demon nicotine into his body. Then in October 1993 he went to work for Dade County, and within a few months of taking over…
Ruth Regina’s Kane Concourse salon sports the kind of glitzy, Hollywood-French Provincial decor that Morris Lapidus designed for the Fontainebleau Hotel lobby in the Fifties. A curved red velvet loveseat and two white leather chairs surround a mirrored coffee table set with a plaster-of-Paris bust of a classical hero –…
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…
