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…
Omar Corzo admits the allegations in his federal civil rights lawsuit are incredible, even by Hialeah standards. He and his wife Carmen, residents of Dade County’s second-largest municipality, accuse a Hialeah city councilwoman and the town’s police chief of using their political might to orchestrate a five-year campaign of harassment…
The two young moguls perched over mozzarella cheese sticks and iced teas at a Hallandale Denny’s are trying to explain why their business idea is going to sell to South Florida, perhaps the entire state, maybe even beyond. Their product: beer. By definition a festive beverage. On the other side…
Send a professional photojournalist into the streets to capture images of the homeless and you’ll likely end up with portraits of a cliche. The rough, craggy face of a battered soul, perhaps lighted from the side to elicit pity. A broken man — or woman — framed by squalor. A…
Never a body to shy away from imposing its moral will on the citizenry, the Coral Gables City Commission has tentatively approved regulations that prohibit more than two unrelated people from living together under the same roof. Were they to call the City Beautiful home, the Golden Girls of TV…
Don’t expect cake, party hats, or revelers dancing in the hallways of Dupont Plaza, but today marks the one-year anniversary of a watershed event in the Miami City Attorney’s Office. On May 25, 1994, City Attorney A. Quinn Jones III distributed a memo announcing that none of his 21 assistant…
Winners of the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) inaugural Sunshine State Awards were announced this past Saturday at a banquet in Boca Raton. In the competition, judged by SPJ chapters from out of state and open to dailies and weeklies in twelve south and southwest Florida counties, New Times staffers…
Rush-hour traffic rumbles down the 1100 block of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho at 8:00 a.m. on a humid Thursday morning. Young men wearing work clothes and boots, as well as older men in guayaberas, huddle over coffee at the window counter of La Reina Restaurant. A similar group has settled…
For the past five months state investigators have been trying to determine whether Susanna Timor, a paralegal at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, committed insurance fraud by submitting bogus receipts for repairs to her Coral Gables home after Hurricane Andrew. Though the dollar value of the alleged fraud is…
Former Metro-Dade police officer Pat Yodice and her housemate Mary Butt had just finished dishing out slices of a birthday cake when some uninvited guests showed up at their Sunday afternoon backyard barbecue. A swarm of law enforcement types — members of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s vice squad, agents…
It takes about an hour to walk to Carmen’s apartment from Havana’s Vedado neighborhood, where I’d been searching for secondhand books about the idealized, revolutionary Cuba. As usual I had lingered longer than anticipated and would probably be late for dinner. The darkness began to catch up to me somewhere…
More than four months have passed since the Dade State Attorney’s Office began an investigation to determine whether certain county commissioners violated Florida’s Sunshine Law by meeting secretly to discuss — and presumably to influence — the selection of a new county manager last December. Violation of the law, one…
With the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City, public-service employees everywhere have become a bit jittery at the mention of bombs. So when a suspicious-looking box was left outside the Metro-Dade Justice Building one morning last month, a predictable chain reaction of confusion was unleashed. Anxious occupants (including…
It’s boom time for Brickell Avenue condos. After several lean years, occupancy is up. The volatile population of foreign owners that ebbed and flowed with the South American economy is being replaced by a stable corps of young Miami families who like to live in a secure luxury home close…
When you’re standing on the South Beach sand amid the sounds of the tumbling surf and frolicking tourists and the cacophonous blend of music wafting from the bars along Ocean Drive, it’s easy to forget that two and a half years ago a not-so-little storm blew into Dade County and…
In the world of UFOs, there’s no such thing as a claim so wild or crazy that no one believes it. Because mainstream science has — at least for public consumption — rejected the notion that flying saucers abduct people for experiments or that we’ve been visited by UFOs, the…
“You’re a genius!” the voice boomed over John Callahan’s telephone as soon as the Portland, Oregon, cartoonist answered it. “And you’ve just been hired by the Miami Herald!” That was six years ago, when then-Tropic editor Gene Weingarten was calling with the news that Callahan would begin running each week…
In a rare second chance, the judge who defined the rights of Miami’s homeless community was given an opportunity to do it again. So he did. Last month U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins reaffirmed Pottinger, his landmark 1992 ruling that prevented City of Miami police officers from arresting homeless…
Surfside police officers who say they were told to downplay criminal activity in the seaside town appear to be backed up by at least two incidents. The allegations, which were made anonymously by the patrolmen, were outlined in last week’s New Times in a story entitled “Wipeout!” Among them were…
B.B. was fourteen and Tito nineteen when they were shot on the road west of the Bargain Town flea market just outside Homestead. The youths were part of a group that confronted two young men, their wives, and their children leaving the bazaar on a sunny December afternoon in 1993…
They are all adherents here in this small park in Kendall, getting ready for the spaceships that may arrive soon. There are seven people, mostly middle-age Hispanic women, standing in a semicircle under a tree, eyes closed and holding hands, listening to Estela Ardila, a short, dark-haired woman who claims…
A group of Surfside police officers say they have been ordered to alter police reports, destroy evidence, downplay violent incidents, and, in some cases, to overlook criminal activity — all in an effort to maintain the town’s image as a peaceful hamlet by the sea. “They don’t want a police…
