This past Wednesday, as the devastating Oklahoma City bomb blast sent the nation’s news media into a tizzy, the Miami Herald’s management was frantically conferring about a calamity far closer to home. Hands were wrung, teeth were gnashed. Fingers were pointed. It was an event that Tom Shroder, executive editor…
He’s tried that several times before, of course, and it hasn’t stuck. Tonight, though, will be different. Tonight will be the end of the bad and the beginning of the good. “Your last memory must be your most beautiful,” he murmurs, his decorum flawless despite the tortured symptoms of withdrawal…
Reporters love stories about bad cops. Cops on the take. Cops on the make. Cops who beat up civilians and then lie about it. Because cops are supposed to protect us from evil, not succumb to it, a bad cop story packs a heavy payload of irony. And because reporters…
Meet Roy Young, the patron saint of anyone who has ever turned down a job and lived to regret it. “Every night before I go to bed, I go into my bathroom and hit my head against the wall ten times,” sighs the congenial midfiftyish Englishman with the sand-colored beard…
Steve Clark never really wanted to stop being mayor of Dade County. Though the post was largely ceremonial, Clark relished the kingly role, whether it was a photo op with retiring employees, or a ribbon cutting for a new community center, or a closed-door meeting with Dade’s most influential power…
Rock stars do the darnedest things After nearly four decades in the music business, much of it at the upper levels of the rock and roll stratosphere, Roy Young has met, toured, recorded, or partied with just about every British rock star of consequence, and quite a few important American…
Scant empirical documentation remains of the February 27 brawl between police and students at Coral Gables High School. The blood that spilled on the ground from the forehead of Ofcr. Peter Cuervo has since dried and washed away. Cuervo’s injury, which required eight stitches, has nearly healed, as have the…
A local physician who stands accused of molesting patients under his care has agreed to voluntarily relinquish his license to practice medicine in Florida. Allegations against Dr. Homer L. Kirkpatrick, Jr., first surfaced this past July in the form of an open letter that appeared in a newsletter published by…
Doubtless, Miami Beach Assistant City Manager Myra Diaz-Buttacavoli has seen her share of irate citizens over the years, but rarely has anyone devoted as much energy to criticizing her and her family as Miami resident Scott Curry. Since last August, infuriated about what he says was the vicious beating of…
If Dade County Commissioners hope for VIP treatment in the air, they virtually demand it on the ground at Miami International Airport. In fact, a fully staffed office is dedicated to ensuring that commissioners and senior county bureaucrats feel good about themselves. It’s called “protocol.” The aviation department’s protocol office…
It had been a long, hard-fought political campaign, and for months Katy Sorenson had been promising her family that when it was finally over, they would take a much needed vacation. And so this past November, during the week of Thanksgiving, Dade County’s newest commissioner flew off to Hawaii with…
The U.S.S. Wilkes-Barre lies deep. The ocean’s surface offers no hint of her presence, only the clear blue waters of the Gulf Stream a dozen miles off Key West, like a vastly thick, indigo-tinted window with nothing on the other side. But there is something on the other side of…
It started innocently enough. On the evening of November 29, 1993, Robin Ables, a Metro-Dade police officer, reported to the Team Police Station off NW 22nd Avenue in Liberty City, at the request of her commanding officer, Dante Starks. Starks, who had been promoted to sergeant two months earlier, initially…
When the City of Miami’s Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) advisory board designated the recipients of millions of dollars in federal AIDS funding earlier this past month, it should have prompted a sigh of relief among AIDS activists countywide. After all, internecine bickering had delayed this crucial step…
A small man with close-cropped hair sits behind a conference table at Mercy Hospital, clenching a pen and glowering. The room, located on the sixth floor and overlooking a glistening expanse of Biscayne Bay, is sprinkled with about twenty people, most of them infected with HIV, the virus that causes…
On the evening of February 23, some twenty law school students from Nova and St. Thomas universities convened at Dino’s Upper Deck, the bar atop Dino to Sushiya, a year-old restaurant at 11220 Biscayne Blvd. It was supposed to be a casual get-together. A little beer. A little billiards. And…
An ageless philosophical question: If a tree falls in a deserted forest, does it make a noise? How about a brain teaser with a local angle: If Miami’s only daily newspaper invites a Cuban official to town and doesn’t report the visit, is it still news? Barbara Gutierrez, editor of…
Turning west off of Krome Avenue onto the Tamiami Trail, 32-year-old repo man William Negron began the eighteen-mile trek to the Miccosukee Indian reservation and what he hoped would be an easy automobile repossession. Riding with him in his customized tow truck was Dinavon Bythwood, a private investigator hired by…
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. — Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal It’s not the money,” scoffs John Spadavecchia. Not many men could brush off a million dollar payday as convincingly as…
Deep in the heart of Texas hold ’em Texas hold ’em, the poker permutation favored by the pros and the game played in the annual World Championship of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, is a particularly treacherous variant of seven-card stud. The basics can be learned in…
The League Against AIDS is in such financial disrepair that last weekend most of its eighteen employees were dispatched to the streets of Little Havana, donation cans in hand, to solicit change from passersby. The Dade-based nonprofit, known to its clients (the majority of whom are Hispanic) as La Liga…
When Joaquin Avino announced last October that he would be resigning as county manager at the end of the year to take a new post in the private sector, no one on the Dade County Commission publicly asked him what he intended to do after he stepped down from his…
