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I must have the Freedom Tower!” Don Gilbert is standing next to his dining-room table, which is piled high with the leaflets, photographs, and postcards that give voice to his dream of a campaign to promote peace and freedom. “If I get that tower, then I’ll be somebody, and people…

In August of last year, four Coconut Grove residents sued the City of Miami because they were unable to afford the “affordable” homes in the Grove’s new St. Hugh Oaks housing project. Last month they lost a crucial round in their fight, exposing them to a different sort of financial…

“Good morning, thanks for calling X-isle surf report for Friday morning. Come by the shop, we’re open today, we’re getting lots of new things in, getting ready for the holidays. So don’t forget, make X-isle your place for Christmas shopping. As for the wind and waves, not much is happening…

The wiggy, wiggy world of Sixties surfer celluloid Not long into American International Pictures’ (AIP) 1965 Beach Blanket Bingo, aging silent-film comedian Buster Keaton and an ultrabuxom, bikini-clad beach babe take turns chasing each other back and forth over the sand, Keystone Kops-style, prompting a tanned, blandly handsome surfer boy…

Like a growing number of other young men in the Miami area, Capems Franaois has a taste for jet skis. In fact, police say, he liked one particular jet ski so much he stole it twice. By the time the cops chased him down, his alleged victims and pursuers were…

Aggro: uptight, aggressive Betty: girl Charger: fearless surfer who goes for big waves Epic: great, huge (epic waves) Grommet/gremmie: young or beginning surfer Kook: reckless beginner with wanton disregard for safety of other surfers Ripper/shredder: good surfer Snake: verb — to catch a wave when another person already is riding…

“Third Stone From the Sun,” the mostly instrumental, effects-laden, just-under-seven-minute meditation-from-the-outer-limits miniepic that appears on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s brilliant 1967 debut, Are You Experienced? Jimi comes up for air after some swirly cosmic fuzz-box tripping to deliver a brief monologue in the voice of a merely-visiting-your-planet alien, capping it…

There’s so little time to stock up on champagne and caviar for New Year’s Eve and so few places in South Florida to purchase the requisite provisions. You can go try your luck at a gourmet emporium like Epicure or Gardner’s, or maybe scoot up to Macy’s in Aventura. Or,…

Perhaps more than any other Metro politician, County Commissioner James Burke could probably use the new year’s restorative psychological boost. True, he won re-election this past fall after running unopposed, but that victory was overcast by the gloom of political and personal miseries. During the summer, a New Times investigation…

The last squatter at 841 Collins Ave. in Miami Beach walks out of the dimness of the once bright and cheery Art Deco building to confront the two men he believes own the property. Ricardo is on his way to work as a cook at a local restaurant, and he…

In some segments of Dade County society, Roxanne Falco is a famous person. Stories are told about her, news of her whereabouts exchanged. But the talk is not complimentary, unless you consider sheer notoriety flattering. Roxanne Falco is a prostitute, and she is generally unwelcome in the part of town…

Police officers patting down black teenagers in Overtown and Liberty City hardly makes for headline material. That’s what bothers John de Leon. The Dade County assistant public defender says he inadvertently discovered a City of Miami Police Department search policy — which involves ordering youths to remove their shoes –…

Midday talk grouch Neil Rogers referred to him on the air as “Boy Gary.” In print, Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel critic Tom Jicha blamed him for a “ratings hemorrhage.” WIOD-AM (610), the radio station where he and Rogers worked, fired him. So Gary Bruce has done what any red-blooded American…

In 1814 Andrew Jackson — a freshly minted general on his way to an undistinguished presidency — chased the Seminole Indians into Florida. For most of the next century, federal troops continued to hunt Native Americans, pushing them farther and farther south, into the swampy fringe of the continent. Most…

This is Tence Wolfe’s story in its most succinct form: A trusted employee of the Dade County Clerk’s Office since 1989, Wolfe worked on the seventh floor of the Metro-Dade Justice Building, in the criminal courts division. Her job was fairly straightforward — when attorneys filed documents in a criminal…

Spatter: The process of the forceful projection of blood. Had this been a convention of insurance salesmen, or podiatrists, or even Shriners, the scene that unfolded in the Atlantis Room might have been avoided. But this being the annual conclave of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, the unpleasantness…

It’s been fourteen years, but Dade County’s official archaeologist still remembers the dream. Bob Carr was standing in a place he had known since childhood — on Brickell Point at the mouth of the Miami River. Just in front of him a ledge of exposed limestone projected from the bluff…

At water’s edge in Miami Beach, early in the morning, a large black man with a shaved head begins to dance. As his sleek head moves from side to side, his belly — about the size of a medium Butterball turkey — rolls in perfect counterpoint. Facing the rising sun,…