August 20 was a typically steamy Thursday in Miami, before anyone was paying much attention to a tropical storm called Andrew gathering in the Caribbean. Right on time, at 6:03 p.m., Lufthansa Airlines Flight 462 from Frankfurt, Germany, carrying 282 passengers, taxied up to gate E-23 at Miami International Airport…
When Hurricane Andrew roared through South Florida, it forever changed the way we think about natural disasters and how we expect officials to deal with them. More than six weeks after the storm, those winds of change are threatening to tear apart the Metro-Dade Fire and Rescue department with allegations…
Anywhere else in Miami Beach, the black-and-orange poster advertising roasted duck would be just another brash entreaty to passers-by with a penchant for poultry. But on the front of the World Famous Chicken Factory on 41st Street, the sign is evidence of a territorial war. Another sign is plastered less…
There are only two places where eight-year-old Keaudra Weatherington feels safe: behind the locked door of her apartment in a rundown and barren Liberty City public housing project, and among the flora and fauna of an abundant tropical ecosystem she helped build in the courtyard of Charles R. Drew Elementary…
There is something cruel, and yet almost comical, about the case of Tommie Sikes, an ex-stunt man and cocaine deal maker. From his prison cell, Sikes is suing his former attorney, Alvin Entin, alleging that through a “typographical error,” Entin failed to secure for his client a comprehensive immunity agreement…
After Hurricane Andrew paid its battering visit, a few vendors managed to straggle back to the Coconut Grove Farmers Market. The Thai family returned to sell their tofu and shrimp fritters. The masseur came, too. Likewise the incense seller, the Zen baker, and the tie-dyer. Hunkered beneath makeshift tents and…
There he is — the guy with the strawberry-blond mustache who tried to electrocute his own mother in the bathtub. And the nurse, now dead, who always wore a flower in her hair. The cowboy with a twisted smirk who invited preteens to his room. The sweet-faced woman whose husband…
On July 20, State Attorney Janet Reno sent a four-page letter to circuit court Chief Judge Leonard Rivkind proposing the formation of a new Youthful Offender Court. Such a court, Reno explained, would allow a judge to draw upon “a full range of adult and juvenile sanctions” in sentencing young…
Joan Green’s story of woe in the wake of Hurricane Andrew is, in many ways, sadly typical of many thousands of South Dade residents and business people. Her tropical fruit groves southwest of Florida City were ravaged. Looters then tried to steal what was left. A few miles away, the…
Hurricane Andrew’s assault on Dade left the county’s nature lovers with a monumental grievance to lay at the feet of Mother Nature, in the form of a million or so scattered trees and acres of wind-blasted real estate. But the storm not only laid waste to Miami’s landscape, it may…
A discreet warmth now fills the heart of every carpenter, electrician, and auto-body repairman in South Florida. Hardware merchants, lumber barons, and yacht salvagers are wearing secret smiles. But of all the economic winners Hurricane Andrew left behind, few know the pleasures of the catbird seat like Jolan Gamblin, South…
In their more candid moments, they refer to themselves as “the underground” — always in hushed tones, and often with the trace of paranoia that haunts the sleep-deprived. Their base of operations: the shadowy regions of Red Cross headquarters, at 1657 NW Seventeenth Ave. Their mission: to bypass an insensitive…
Traffic signage, in case you hadn’t noticed, tends toward the functional: Stop. Merge. Yield. The strictures of rush-hour attention spans, not to mention space, preclude anything approaching flamboyance. Were poetry their medium, the nation’s traffic sign specialists would no doubt produce haiku of the driest variety. How, then, to explain…
Since his arrival in May 1990, Miami Beach Police Chief Phillip Huber has taken a number of steps to erase public perception that his department is rife with gay-bashing bruisers. The boldest measure, one widely praised by gay activists, was the introduction in spring 1991 of sensitivity classes designed to…
The shadows, those skewed flat forms that first began to appear on Miami sidewalks and walls about a year ago, have begun to catch up with Vincent Luca. He’s the earnest artist in horn-rim glasses and holey cut-offs who has loosed the shadows on South Beach and downtown Miami: images…
In most respects, James Eloissaint is like any five-month-old child. He squirms and bounces on his mother’s knee, tugging at a tiny T-shirt, sucking on a finger, smiling and gurgling all the while. But unlike most toddlers in this country, James doesn’t have a birth certificate. Born to Haitian-refugee parents…
The calls first started coming in about a year ago, taking a confused Dayle Jacobs by surprise. “People would call us and say, `I’d like to make a comment,'” says Jacobs, a manager at Miami’s Sylvan Nursery Farms. “And I’d say, `Go ahead,’ figuring they were calling about our business…
Title 26 of the United States Code has proven to be a powerful weapon for federal agents combating the proliferation of machine guns, preferred tools of the drug-trafficking trade. The law makes it a crime to possess or sell unregistered machine guns and calls for penalties of up to ten…
“Every cabbage,” Frenchman Jean Giraudoux once wrote, “has its pimp.” Given the absurd mutterings Giraudoux inflicted upon his characters, the line passed as little more than fanciful. Surely the playwright could never have anticipated the true-life biker corollary to his queer pronouncement: Every hog must have its trademark attorney. At…
Dorothy Richardson has never thought much of police officers. “Got no use for them,” snaps the 60-year-old retiree, whose night table is stacked with medications for arthritis and other assorted ailments. “Survived so far without them and I’ll survive the rest. Shoot, I don’t even call the police when trouble…
He was a down-on-his-luck youngster facing a bleak future when the scouts found him in eastern Iowa, running with the wrong crowd. Beneath his rough exterior, they detected a courage and dignity that couldn’t be taught, the instinct and poise of a born champion. So they decided to give him…
Bjorn DiMaio is sixteen years old, Anthony Vincent is seventeen. Next Monday, in accordance with Florida law, the two boys will begin serving second-degree murder sentences for the killing of their best friend, Andrew Morello. According to the official version of events, the sixteen-year-old Morello was shot and killed on…
