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…
Healthy Males Needed For Research Study,” beckons the tiny announcement in the Miami Herald classifieds. “Ages 18-45; 5 days confinement; 18 clinic visits.” Then, in slightly larger type: “We Pay You $1100.” A call to the listed phone number yields a curt female receptionist and an address on NW 22nd…
A paved two-lane street called Arthur Lamb Jr. Road snakes through the 1000-acre island known as Virginia Key, veering here and there as it nears the public beach area at its farthest eastern coordinate from Rickenbacker Causeway. At one point, the road empties into a small parking lot. Nearby a…
To hear Newall Daughtrey tell it, the winds of change have finally breezed across Opa-locka. Gone are the fat cats who once ran Dade’s poorest city, who sopped up budgetary gravy with exorbitant salaries and pensions, then stuck taxpayers with the bill. Daughtrey should know. Opa-locka’s city manager from 1979…
Ever since the camera was invented, it has been used to capture images of despair and destitution, evocative glimpses into the eyes of the less fortunate. Now one advocate for Miami’s homeless has devised a way to focus the lens a little differently. “The idea is to get the homeless…
There’s a whole lot of back-slapping going on among hurricane-recovery officials these days. On February 24, two and a half years after Hurricane Andrew displaced about 250,000 South Floridians, the last residents of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mobile homes moved out of the Coral Roc Mobile Home Park…
Biscayne Boulevard motel owners operate under conflicting pressures A from the police and community to refuse to rent to criminals, and from the economy to rent to anyone who can come up with the roughly $25-per-night charge. Motel managers, unless they are members of the owner’s family, almost always are…
Life has been more complicated than usual lately for Miami Police Department Confidential Informant Number Eleven, ever since her identity became known to just about all of Biscayne Boulevard. She doesn’t own a gun or any other deadly weapon, so when she goes out she stashes the next best thing…
The dead manatee lay on Watson Island. At dawn its carcass would be retrieved by a state biologist and shipped to St. Petersburg for a necropsy to determine the cause of death. Such is the destiny that the state government has mandated for deceased sea cows in an effort to…
A strange, disturbing ailment is, by some accounts, rampant in South Florida and across the country, ruining lives, destroying relationships, even bringing people to the brink of suicide. This menace is an equal-opportunity destroyer, afflicting both gays and straights, men and women, young and old. AIDS? Hepatitis B? Alcoholism? No,…
There were a number of odd things about the anonymous tip that was called into the Florida Marine Patrol on the afternoon of May 19, 1994. The patrol’s Lt. Angel Vega discovered odd thing number one when he arrived at Key Biscayne’s Crandon Marina and found Dr. Eric Prince, a…
A few months ago members of the Dade County Attorney’s Office were given a tour of several large hangars at Miami International Airport. Their guide, Buddy Klein, is a veteran contractor whose firm is a well-respected asbestos-removal company that does millions of dollars’ worth of work each year from Miami…
A white custom Cadillac sits on the bleached lawn at the side entrance of the Conni Gordon School of Art, whose screen door has been posted with a note instructing visitors to “ring bell or yell.” The long, low, white building, formerly Bill Jordan’s Bar of Music, an old Miami…
The scene was, as Mike Wallace would later recall, “most bizarre.” The legendary newsman had come to Miami Beach this past June to work on a 60 Minutes segment about David Acer, the Jensen Beach dentist widely believed to have infected six of his patients with HIV before he died…
Lionel Resnick’s appearance on 60 Minutes this past June was a high point in his career. The piece, narrated by Mike Wallace, examined the case of Dr. David Acer, the dentist thought to have transmitted the HIV virus to six of his patients in Jensen Beach. In his interview with…
Arcs of water crash over the sea wall protecting the Cuban coast and splash onto the asphalt roadway, endangering cyclists and the stray Soviet-built Lada. On any other Thursday night, the nocturnal denizens of Havana’s Malec centsn would have already staked their claims. Lovers, hustlers, adolescent rockers, hippies, penniless professionals,…
The massive tattooed wrists tighten around the New Times correspondent’s neck, constricting both his windpipe and the flow of blood to his brain as effectively as giant human pliers. The reporter begins to second-guess his decision to make journalism his career, and, more specifically, the folly of sitting in on…
The residents of the Venetian Gardens public housing project face a bigger enemy than Newt Gingrich and his anti-welfare schemes. It is a mysterious force that has put them into debt, threatened them with eviction, and forced them into battle against Metro-Dade’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Now…
JoJo hasn’t seen another bear since he was separated from his mother as a cub. Never having hunted or fished, he subsists instead on dog food, fruit, and table scraps. When he’s not swinging on the tire that hangs from a chain attached to the ceiling of his 12-by-25-foot cage,…
As silently as lead seeps into drinking water, warning signs have appeared all over Miami International Airport in recent weeks. Their caution: Don’t drink the water. Lead contamination. Posted above each of the airport’s water fountains is a notice that reads, in part: “SOME BUILDINGS IN THIS COMMUNITY HAVE ELEVATED…
Mimosa: $30,620 –Mad Max: $26,554 –The Spot: $19,975 –Mickey’s: $12,236 Charles Hotel: $8291 –Cassis: $6000 –La Madrague: $3512 Sushi Hana: $3171 The Palace: $3000 Fellini: $2324 –Pancho’s Mexican Restaurant: $2092 –Broadway Pizza: $2000 –Paranoia Cafe & Bar: $2000 –Fratello: $1500 On the Rocks Sports Bar: $1500 Society Hill Cafe: $1500…
Touted as a national model, Dade County’s ambitious $15-million-per-year plan to combat homelessness has come under the hardest public scrutiny since its inception in 1993. During hearings last month before U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins, old antagonists argued the effectiveness of the plan and its implementation. The debate arose…
