“You can’t put this in your story,” says Ed Davidson, hunched over a tiny sewing machine in his shop at Biscayne National Park, repairing a piece of diving gear. “Wouldn’t fit the image.” The image that presents itself, in odd counterpoint to the sewing session, is this: a diminutive Hemingway…
Military Bright Ideas have a way of ending disastrously and have been doing so at least since the Great War. Paul Fussell, Wartime (1988) “Them ops was clusterfucks, more screwed up than a whore’s dream. And all the medals in the Pentagon ain’t gonna change that. Ain’t gonna change nothin’…
Before you know it, the holiday season will shift into high hype, and booze makers, the free-spending advertisers they generally are, willing to pitch big bucks at whoever is willing to catch them, will supplement the editorial sections of publications of all types with eggnog recipes, careful-consumption caveats, and other…
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo came back to Miami last year in a plain, gray casket with a crucifix on the lid. When he arrived, his 179-pound body underwent an autopsy – its second – during which Dade County medical examiners noted the sixteen bullet holes in the head, face, and…
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities On the red-brick sidewalks of Flagler Street, that downtown paradise of low-cost plunder, shoppers -…
The county commissioner’s corruption was petty, stupid, and – as far as the state attorney’s office was concerned – perfectly legal: Charging the county $176.35 for two nights in a hotel room he never used: legal. Charging the county $310 for round-trip airfare to a destination he used only as…
The first South African head of state to set foot in the White House in 45 years, F. W. de Klerk has made enough network TV appearances recently to rival recovery addict Kitty “Stop me before I swill Drano” Dukakis. President de Klerk has been hailed by many as a…
All summer long the ghost of South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela has haunted Miami as surely as a bearded wraith named Fidel Castro has deviled the city for three decades. Like Cuban Miami’s absentee archvillain, black Miami’s imported superhero is now a touchstone and tuning fork for local reality,…
Now I’m back to let you knowI can really shake ’em downDo you love meNow that I can dance? the Contours, 1962 The second show inside the main building at the sprawling Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop is about to begin and the place is packed. A scintillating, electrical energy hums…
There’s a ghost in the machine, says engineer Ali AbuTaha, a fatal flaw in the design and the launch procedure of the space shuttle. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) thinks it has exorcised the demon, putting ten successful shuttle missions under its belt since the Challenger disaster of…
Editor’s note: Several months ago we published a letter from a reader who was annoyed about an item that appeared in our March 27 “Best of Miami” special issue. “You said that Channel 7’s Rick Sanchez should go to Channel 4 to learn some things,” wrote C. Fernandez of Hialeah…
Monday, May 13 was the day Bill Carpenter made several choices that would affect him, and those closest to him, for the rest of his life – and then some. That was the day Carpenter drove from his home in southwest Dade to a particular location in Coral Gables. And…
The socially acceptable hour of midnight had passed at the farewell party for Club Nu, the exalted mega-disco on Miami Beach, and the marvelous ones had come to pay their respects and be part of nightlife history. Andrew Delaplaine, former owner of Scratch and current publisher of Wire, parked himself…
How lean are the bean counters at Dade County’s auditing central? Let’s put it this way: junk mail of the future may arrive with address labels spit out by a county printer. That’s just one option under Dade’s bold, new campaign to hawk access to computerized public records. The plan,…
Q: Tell us, in your opinion, what the American dream is? A: There is no dream left. The world’s ending. There’s nothing more, no new ideas. Everything is getting old, nothing left. Back in the Fifties, my dad owned two houses before he was 22, and nowadays you can’t even…
On May 9, 1989, Richard Griffin, better known as Professor Griff, met with a writer from the Washington Times for the purpose of an interview. The article resulting from that tape-recorded session, published two weeks later, quoted Griff as saying, among other things, that “Jews have a grip on America”…
The thirtyish black man who stands outside the door of the Cash Dome purses his lips distractedly, idly rubbing the videocassette recorder he holds under one arm. Beside him, his wife clasps and unclasps her hands. Inside the Cutler Ridge pawnshop – a lurid pink double-hemisphere that looks like a…
On February 6 the body of 22-year-old Bridgette Gibbs, sister of City of Miami Police Maj. Arnold Gibbs, was found bobbing in Biscayne Bay, just off NE 22nd Terrace. Nude from the waist down, the woman’s hands were tied behind her back, her face wrapped tightly with duct tape. That…
Blue-black clouds rumbled overhead as Leonardo Selis and Ricardo de Jongh sifted through the tattered sheets of canvas, torn burlap sacks, half-filled inner tubes, and rusted iron pipe strewn about the front yard of a house in a working-class West Dade neighborhood. Against the side of the small house, three…
