Shopping mall managers and owners have a phrase for the totality of what happens in their climate-controlled Edens: The Retail Drama. At some malls The Retail Drama is low comedy or pantomime or a degraded television sitcom. At Dadeland, twelve miles south of downtown Miami, it is high art. From…
When an anonymous reader sent us a photocopy of a Miami Beach Police Offense Incident Report, we treated it with the care and attention we give to all unsolicited submissions. Later on, though, we looked at it, and something about the report struck us as not quite right. By all…
This past summer Elio Rojas had a little problem: two cars and only one driveway. It was possible, of course, to park both cars in the same driveway, but that was an inconvenience, an inconvenience Rojas figured he could do without. So Rojas, president of Miami’s influential Latin Quarter Association,…
On September 23, 1989, Lisette Nogues, a consulting neurologist, and Andres Nogues, an aspiring physician and her husband of thirteen years, were accused by their fifteen-year-old daughter Aimee of child abuse. That same night, caseworkers from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) removed the Nogueses’ seven minor…
The next time you go walking on one of South Florida’s lovely beaches, your shadow shying from the neon-peach of the sunset, the shrills of gulls filling the dusk, twist your toes in the sand and take a deep breath of salt air. Then continue your walk, marveling at the…
In the early years of the 21st Century, Miami’s flourishing arts scene begins to implode. A string of once-lively neighborhood dance companies and playhouses shuts down for want of funding. The city’s giant downtown performance center, open for only a few seasons, strangles in debt. Middle-class aesthetes retreat to televisionland,…
The August 2 sleepover for nine-through-eleven-year-olds was one of the most anticipated events of the Miami Beach Parks and Recreation Department’s eight-week day camp. Campers at the Scott Rakow Youth Center had been promised dancing, a pizza party, swimming, pinatas, the requisite ghost stories, and a complete disregard for regular…
In places like France and Miami, never is heard a discouraging word about Jerry Lewis, his prodigious body of work, and especially his favorite cause, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Naysay Jerry’s Kids? It simply isn’t done. For the past 26 years, Labor Day Weekend has been synonymous with Lewis’s TV…
Under what circumstances does the state have the right to take children away from their parents? To what lengths should the state go to reunify a divided family? In Dade County these questions recently prompted juvenile court officials to form a Family Preservation Committee, with the goal of avoiding “out-of-home”…
In seven years as a detective in the Metro-Dade Police Department’s sexual battery unit, Ellen Christopher has exposed dozens of criminals to the light of justice. But by the time she completed her troubling, seven-month investigation of Andres Nogues, accused by his daughter of sexual abuse, Christopher had no interest…
It sounds, at first, like a faint siren, the shrill announcement of far-off disaster. Only after the fourth or fifth tone do you locate the source, a beeper concealed beneath the clutter on Dr. Lisette Nogues’s nightstand. Two years ago, when Nogues (pronounced no-guess) was earning $300,000 annually as a…
Listed below are the names of Nogues family members, followed by other principal characters mentioned in this article, in alphabetical order. Dr. Lisette Nogues, 41, neurologist. Since November 1989 has been forbidden by the court to see her six youngest children, stemming from allegations against her and her husband, made…
Can’t seem to stop your cross-dressing husband from wearing skirts to the movie theater? In search of a forum to describe how you were stripped, bound, and pleasurably tormented by four naked aerobics instructors? Seek, and ye shall find in the heart of Coral Gables, bastion of strictly regulated lawns,…
Coming as it did from the president’s lips, it was a breathtaking statement, even profound; an alluring, round, ripe, perfect little lie: “No,” George Bush declared at a July 1 news conference, the day he introduced Clarence Thomas to the nation, Thomas’s race was “not a factor” in his nomination…
The wrinkled Puerto Rican men sucking on their Budweiser longnecks stare over from the crumbling stoop, wondering what planet this group dropped in from: a red sports car with two guys who look more West Kendall than Wynwood, two mutts scrambling out of the back seat. The dogs slow, stop,…
Juries are supposed to decide a case on the relevant facts. Is there reasonable doubt with regard to the charge at hand? Has the prosecution proved its arguments? In short, did he or didn’t he? Unfortunately, justice isn’t always blind when it comes to fashion matters. If you show up…
In his fifteen years as a firefighter in Dade County, Dan Corcoran has rescued charred children from a blazing apartment, pulled dead bodies from flaming houses, and saved a baby born in a toilet bowl. But he says a promising career in the job he loves was shot down by…
The tumultuous and contentious internal politics that help define WDNA-FM have moved from the radio station’s warehouse headquarters to the Dade Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court system. On August 19, two groups battling for control of the Bascomb Memorial Foundation, the nonprofit corporation that oversees WDNA, took their arguments before Judge…
Nowhere is the vitriol between Cuban exiles in Miami and supporters of Fidel Castro on the island more palpable than in the Spanish-language media. Radio stations and newspapers here regularly refer to Castro as “El Verdugo,” the executioner. Granma, the official Communist Party daily newspaper, refers to exiles as “the…
Something is horribly amiss. The floor is dry and sparkling clean. The urinals are attached firmly to the wall, which is noticeably void of gaping holes, as is the drop ceiling with the snappy geometric pattern. A huge mirror, uncracked and whole, beckons from above a clean white sink. The…
Maybe the fact that Metro-Dade County buys bottled water for its employees doesn’t surprise anybody. Maybe it should. Granted, there are some legitimate uses for bottled water. Rehabilitative Services, a division of the Human Resources Department, needs distilled water to mix addiction-treatment drugs. The Metro-Dade Transit Agency has mechanical considerations…
Carmen Caldwell didn’t flinch when acting Hialeah Mayor Julio Martinez fired her in January as the city police department’s coordinator for community relations and Citizens Crime Watch. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do the job for free.” But donating up to twelve hours of her time each day apparently made his…
