A panel of three appeals court judges has upheld an order requiring the City of Coral Gables to pay New Times $35,210 in attorney’s fees. Last Tuesday’s decision by Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal brings to $132,152 the amount of taxpayers’ money Coral Gables has spent so far trying…
Legend has it that years ago the engineer who designed I-95’s Golden Glades interchange was hunted down at his modest apartment late at night by a horde of angry citizens carrying torches and sawed-off tailpipes. Roused from his sleep, the man was strapped behind the wheel of a failing VW…
Monday, November 9 was the first day of an unprecedented practice in the 50-year history of Voice of America (VOA), the government agency born of the Cold War to broadcast U.S. news and culture to countries with limited freedom of expression. Between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. on that Monday last…
The autumn sun filtered through the hurricane-battered branches of Fairchild Tropical Garden, illuminating a scene of ecological and communal merriment below. Thousands of people had turned out for the Ramble, the garden’s annual horticultural festival on December 5 and 6, to celebrate the damaged Eden’s gradual recovery post-Andrew. They bought…
Pictured in this month’s newsletter of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association is a tightlipped police officer bound in handcuffs, a blindfold, and a ball and chain. He is superimposed over a backdrop of the U.S. flag, and beneath him is the caption: “NOW! GO OUT AND DO A GOOD…
While exploring an underwater cave system north of Lake Okeechobee, government hydrologist Clay Benson stumbles upon a mammoth fresh water spring, one huge enough to supply pure drinking water to thirsty South Florida for decades to come. But soon after reporting this coup to his boss, funny things start to…
Given the lurid particulars, it’s not surprising that no one wants to talk about the charges filed against Ignacio A. Perea, Jr. The son of a successful Hialeah business owner, 31-year-old Perea stands accused of raping three young boys last fall. “To hear these kids’ stories,” reports one source at…
What first caught Roberto Sobrado’s attention was the Mercedes — that now-legendary blue sedan. But quickly Sobrado’s eyes fell to the driver, a plump man with a round face. “I took a look and I realized it was him,” Sobrado recalls. “I’ve seen his picture in the paper.” County Commissioner…
Just a few short hours after Miami’s late-night watering holes dry up, another kind of cantina ushers in the day. From Cutler Ridge to Bal Harbour, knowledgeable boozers have been drinking free for years at Dade’s upscale jewelry stores. “The best jewelry stores all serve drinks,” explains a veteran downtown…
“Miami’s WSCV-Channel 51 is riding high these days, with the biggest scoop in the Spanish-language station’s seven-year history being picked up by the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Associated Press, and the major TV networks.” So began a November 12 Miami Herald article about the bizarre saga of…
Sixty-year-old Louise Blair has heart trouble, asthma, and ulcers, and she hasn’t got a single tooth left in her head. Her 64-year-old husband Frank isn’t doing any better. He’s diabetic, choked with emphysema, fragile after two heart attacks, and he doesn’t trust his numb legs to take him beyond the…
Click. Hey, isn’t that Walter Shaw on Sally Jessy Raphael’s show? Click. And there he is with Montel Williams. Click. And Maury Povich click and Jerry Springer click and Jenny Jones. Click. My God, what is Walter doing with Whoopi? Walter Shaw, the long-time South Florida burglar who may have…
Annette Beauplan picked up the phone, and for a few seconds she lost her bearings. She knew the voice on the line was her brother, Maxau Pierre. But she couldn’t figure out where in God’s name he was calling from. “He was flying back from Haiti that day and I…
Fourteen months after federal regulators seized Miami’s Southeast Bank, one of the nation’s oldest and largest corporate art collections still sits under wraps in a downtown warehouse. But now a new bankruptcy trustee says he wants to liquidate the 4000-piece collection using a novel strategy. Rather than sell the Southeast…
A few days before Hurricane Andrew stomped across Dade County, a gang of roustabouts went to work on Spoil Island #15 in northern Biscayne Bay. Using chain saws, draglines, barges, and bulldozers, they removed nearly all the vegetation from the fifteen-acre sandbar and fed it into mulching machines, then ringed…
Musician Mitch Mestel loves his custom-made electric bass. Built eleven years ago, it has a uniquely curved neck and an unvarnished plainness. “It’s brown, mostly due to sweat,” says the 36-year-old New Jersey transplant. On Halloween night Mestel was playing at Cactus Cantina, 630 Sixth Street on South Beach, with…
In the clubs and restaurants of Miami’s Jamaican community, they still tell stories about the Mighty Viking. Stories, mostly, about his death: “He’d just been with a lady, you know, and he went to take a shower. That’s where they got him.” “The Mighty Viking — that was something the…
If there was one single issue all the candidates for the North Bay Village Commission agreed on, it was that the way to a person’s vote was through his stomach. As highlighted two weeks ago in the New Times story “Village People,” the 1992 race for votes in North Bay…
For those brave and unfortunate drivers who still suffer the MacArthur Causeway, the Florida Department of Transportation has some good news and some bad news. The good news: The department has finally selected an architect to design the causeway’s landscaping. The bad news: You won’t see a tree until the…
Of all the images that capture the horrors of Hurricane Andrew, there may be few more enduring than those that depict the heaps of mangled metal and trash where mobile home parks once stood. But even in the days just following the storm, as residents scrambled through the wreckage of…
From the outset, this was not a routine Immigration and Naturalization Service raid. For one thing, the timing was all wrong. The three INS agents arrived at Gula Gula more than an hour before the restaurant opened. The setting made no sense, either. Rather than bursting into the kitchen to…
The street can be a risky place; movement is the only constant. So Marcia Gelbart Walkenstein took it in stride when, two weeks ago, a work crew finally scraped off the mosaic of hundreds of photographs she’d pasted on the side of a building at Washington Avenue and Fifth Street…
