You probably weren’t at the Orange Bowl on June 24. You probably spent that Saturday rejoicing at the end of a week of torrential rain. Maybe you went to the beach, or headed out to a park for a picnic. There’s a good chance you were at home, using a…
Now you see them. Now you don’t. Such is the ephemeral nature of officers’ disciplinary records at the Metro-Dade Police Department. Thanks to the strenuous negotiating efforts of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the union that represents Metro-Dade cops, black marks are periodically purged from departmental personnel files. According to…
During the past five years, Miami animal dealer Matthew Block has been hailed as a hero and excoriated as a villain; he has played the role of outlaw and law enforcer. Now Block may be closer than ever to assuming another identity: that of a federal prisoner. Barring, of course,…
A list of childhood abuses hangs on the glass partition in the tiny cubicle used by Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) protective investigator Lulus McQueen. It serves, in some ways, as a stark reminder of the cruelties that he may uncover each day on the job. The list is meant…
Sgt. Niki Lawrence lives in a world that has been diminished. Placed on compulsory unpaid leave from the Metro-Dade Police Department, she spends her days alone in her Deerwood Estates home north of Metrozoo. After 22 years of police work, Lawrence survives on just $250 per week in unemployment benefits,…
The Metro-Dade Police Department has nearly completed its program to have all 4300 employees — sworn officers and civilians alike — view a training video explaining the department’s sexual harassment policy, which was adopted in 1985 and revised several times since then. According to the video, any act or statement…
Since moving here just over a year ago, Sylvester Stallone has endeavored to become Miami’s nouveau civic icon. He made his debut by plunking down eight million dollars on a bayfront mansion next to Villa Vizcaya, then wasted no time in casting himself as a patron of the arts and…
After more than seven years spent dodging prosecution for embezzlement, Roberto Polo finally stood trial three weeks ago in Geneva. Accused of skimming $124 million from wealthy investors, the former art collector, whose case became a cause celäbre within Miami’s Cuban exile community, pulled out all the stops during the…
When Metro-Dade Police Cmdr. Antonio Prieto transferred Sgt. David Simmons out of the Juvenile Investigations Bureau to a patrol unit eighteen months ago, the comment most frequently heard among Simmons’s subordinates was, “What a joke.” Exile a recognized expert in the field of child-abuse investigation? “What a joke.” Risk dashing…
You could imagine Hollywood making a movie about Omero Catan and Michael Katen, the two brothers with different last names but a shared passion for being first in line at the openings of new bridges, or riding on new subway lines, or skating on new ice rinks, or landing at…
Few things in life are as sure to pay off as a City of Miami towing contract. Each month the six private companies that hold city contracts are asked to tow about 350 broken-down, illegally parked, or otherwise offensive automobiles. The car owners, in turn, pay the towing company $55…
A registered nurse with 23 years’ experience, Lizabeth Ekalo likes to describe herself as a “patient advocate.” She urged the patients under her care at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center to question their doctors, to educate themselves, to take charge of their own health care. Her philosophy:…
Franklin Jacobs’s Southern-accented voice grows pained when he discusses Lucious C. Conway. “We love Lucious and pray for him, and we can all say with all our hearts we did everything we could to help the man,” laments Jacobs, an ordained Baptist minister and professional gospel singer with a ruddy…
Last week the Board of the Miami Arts Exchange (MAX) honored New Times and editor Jim Mullin with a MAXIE, awarded to persons who have made outstanding contributions to the city’s cultural life. Mullin was among eleven recipients, including Robert Heuer of the Florida Grand Opera and Loretta Dranoff, who…
In May 1993, on her last day of work at the Miami Herald, Tracie Cone’s colleagues gathered to bid her farewell. During her six years at the Herald, Cone had become one of the paper’s rising stars, her talents having led her to a coveted position as a feature writer…
El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper, is an odd hybrid of American and Latin journalistic conventions. While El Nuevo is considered to be autonomous by the Miami Herald Publishing Co., which produces both newspapers, it is, in fact, a supplement of the English-language paper. The confusion is…
It doesn’t take much to get the natives gossiping in South Beach. — celebrity indiscretion. A few bounced checks. A new designer drug. So it should come as no surprise that the SoBe rumor mill has been churning for the past two months over a club promotion known as the…
On the Friday night that ushered in Memorial Day weekend, Neil Cohen looked every bit the successful club owner. The dance floor at his new club, S.O.B.’s, was packed, and the room reverberated with the salsa sounds of Lefty Perez and His Orchestra as Cohen sat at a table with…
Miami City Manager Cesar Odio loves rowing. Almost every Saturday he can be seen in the waters off Virginia Key, arching his back and timing his stroke in rhythmic bursts of intensity. He loves rowing so much that he founded a rowing club. He loves rowing so much that he…
New Times staff writer Judy Cantor was one of twenty recipients of the first annual Music Journalism Awards, a nationwide competition whose winners were announced this past Thursday during ceremonies held at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, California. Cantor’s “Viva Albita!” won for best feature story in a weekly or…
THE RECEPTIONIST The receptionist did not look happy. Her mascara was streaked from tears, her dress rumpled to the hem, and her eyebrows, once slender brown lines, were now hoisted into apprehensive question marks. The frosted glass window behind which she generally sat, protected from the world, was flung open…
If buildings were cats, the Priscilla Apartments in downtown Miami surely would be an abused stray. Hunched at the corner of Nineteenth Street and Biscayne Boulevard, the mangy three-story structure is pocked with holes. Its windows are broken out, the entranceways boarded up. The walls are plastered with tattered promotional…
