With two fox terriers already yapping away at home, Gisela McClelland wasn’t looking to adopt a third when she visited Dade County Animal Services Division headquarters two weeks ago. On the contrary, the South Miami dog lover was there to drop off a stray German shepherd found roaming her neighborhood…
To those milling in front of the Miami Arena an hour before game time on March 18, Steven Friedman’s pitch sounded too good to be true. The attorney was offering to sell thirteen $29 tickets to that night’s Heat match-up against the Indiana Pacers at face value or below -…
As you head over the apex of the Intracoastal Waterway bridge on the MacArthur Causeway and swoop down across Watson Island in your rented Chrysler LeBaron convertible, top down and gleaming white, it no longer matters that you haven’t slept a wink since leaving home in Birmingham, England, 21 hours…
One night in September, after a jumping set with his band at Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti, sweat-soaked singer-guitarist Hank Milne stood on the sidewalk out front, pressing flesh and fielding compliments. Everyone, it seemed, had something nice to say about the Volunteers’ debut concert. Except one attendee, who passed…
Luis Bermudez hardly expected the experience of a lifetime when he visited the newly opened Wal-Mart in West Kendall on February 20. A long-time collector of exotic fruit trees, Bermudez made a beeline for the garden shop while a friend went hunting for a flashlight. “I’m always looking for new…
Pierre Leach comes from a small town in Michigan called LeRoy, population 275. Five churches, no place to buy beer, everybody knows everything about everybody else. A community. Thirty years later, he was seeking a similar close-knit sense in his Hialeah neighborhood, Mango Hill, a crowded area that covers about…
America’s shortest and busiest commercial river always has a tale to tell. In the earliest years of the Twentieth Century, the talk centered on the Tatums, a pair of rough-and-tumble brothers who were busy enraging Miami’s populace. The Tatum boys built the first bridge across the Miami River at Flagler…
With all the disinformation swirling about his good name, Basil Wainwright often found it helpful to provide acquaintances, and potential backers, with a more objective account of his achievements. Below are excerpts from “The True Story of Basil Wainwright: Humanist, Physicist and Award Winning Inventor,” by “historian” Richard Johnson. “Basil…
Martin Van Wyngen had his doubts about Lucas Boeve from the start. A mild-mannered translator from Ottawa, Van Wyngen was lured down to Boeve’s Hollywood clinic in late 1990 with promises that intravenous injections of ozone would cure the HIV virus he contracted five years ago. Boeve requested $2000 in…
A miracle cure was about the last thing Dr. Robert Mayer expected to find when the U.S. Army stationed him on Ellis Island in 1942. Fresh from setting up a new medical practice in Miami Beach, the young pediatrician had volunteered to treat ill Coast Guardsmen. But one day Mayer…
Hagridden by rain squalls, queasy in seven-foot seas, kayaker Randy Fine gave up his final bid to break the world speed record for a human-powered Gulf Stream crossing. His defeat at the hands of a rather bitchy Mother Nature occurred on Friday the 13th last month, roughly midway between Miami…
The conversion from kick-boxer to one-man buffing crew probably won’t qualify among the world’s more common career moves. But then, Peter Vincent Ignatious Chin-Tai doesn’t boast one of the world’s more common resumes. The son of a Cantonese herbalist who fled China before World War II, Chin-Tai grew up in…
Basil Earle Wainwright slumps forward, stubby fingers pressed at the temples, head drooped to reveal strands of hair combed across bare scalp. A bottomless sigh whooshes through his lips, completing the pose he has carefully crafted to suggest a withering martyr: Jesus, perhaps, spared the cross and sent into the…
One night in September, after a jumping set with his band at Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti, sweat-soaked singer-guitarist Hank Milne could be found on the sidewalk out front, pressing flesh and nodding off compliments. Everyone, it seemed, had something nice to say about the Volunteers’ debut concert. Except one…
On the day before her husband was anointed, once and for all, as the democratic frontrunner for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton was at a synagogue in North Miami Beach, knocking 300 old Jews on their collective tush. Rapping at a podium conspicuously free of cue cards, the comely Clinton invoked…
Three weeks shy of his 50th birthday, Jim Chambers could still move pretty quickly. As he set out across the field, the knees that had forced him to stop playing football two decades earlier were holding up well. He was charging hard, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping. He didn’t seem to…
Edward Margolis was raised on the AM radio wars of the 1960s. Back when Margolis was knee-high to a soundboard, his father Allan bought WMBM-AM (1490), a nearly bankrupt radio station on Miami Beach. The senior Margolis, a Wall Street dropout with a passion for rhythm and blues, leaped into…
It’s early afternoon, only hours before the opening bash at the newly restored Marlin Hotel on Miami Beach, and the place is alive. The traffic outside on Twelfth Street backs up behind semi-trucks unloading sound and stage equipment, and young, suave workers from Jamaica, Britain, New York, and Miami bustle…
Like the village that surrounds it, the Coconut Grove Playhouse has lived to middle age in more-or-less constant tension, its stage the locus of a long tug of war between art and commerce, spiritual ideals, and materialistic forces. For entire decades, as in the Thirties and Forties, the Spanish rococo…
Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta didn’t climb to the highest echelons of the drug world by sitting on their duffs and letting life pass them by. They were go-getters who turned adversity into opportunity. And in the process, federal prosecutors say, the partners built an empire. So it should come…
Pity the poor gallery owner. Face it, most people see art as a luxury, not something that’s required in order to make it through the day. When the economy turns sour, sales shrivel. But that hasn’t dissuaded Gables art dealers from hustling, forging ahead, looking for ways to keep business…
When Dexter Lehtinen resigned suddenly this past January 13 from his post as South Florida’s U.S. Attorney, prosecutors past and present joined together to celebrate. Gathering the night of the announcement, the group hoisted beers and breathed a collective sigh of relief amid strains of James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”…
