How much kindness can fit into convicted arms smuggler Sarkis Soghanalian’s 300-pound frame? Just ask his ex-wife, Shirley Soghanalian. “He was always bringing home anyone he could find to feed them,” she reminisced for the court during her husband’s October 23 bail hearing. “He was always giving money away until…
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, it seems, are all the rage at the Dade Public Defender’s Office this year. In the past dozen months, four have been filed by miffed ex-employees, two of whom are black, the other two Cuban. Long-time staffers attribute the claims to the office’s pressure-cooker atmosphere…
Once in a great while, the world of literature is graced with a new birth so promising, so spectacular, that mankind’s faith in the power of expression rekindles. It happens perhaps every eon, or perhaps every epoch. For some, the epiphanic texts are Biblical; others find their souls stirred by…
The South Florida construction industry has been hit hard by the recession, and general contractors like Louis Forti have been happy to take on virtually any work that comes their way. So Forti, president of his own company – Forti Engineering Systems – jumped at the chance to bid on…
In 1969 a young cadet in the Baltimore County Police Department received the kind of progress reports that might have led a less determined man to start thinking about another career. In one evaluation, the trainee was criticized for failing “to support the other squad leaders” and to maintain morale…
In 1989 Normandy Isle homeowners successfully lobbied Miami Beach commissioners for landscaped barricades. But residents find they’re still feeling uneasy about their lower-income neighbors, especially those who have their rent subsidized by the federal government. And when a local civic and business group began questioning subsidized housing distribution on the…
Charles Trahan, co-star of Miami’s popular rap duo Young & Restless, doesn’t belong here. He should be in a recording studio. Or on MTV. Here, at Jackson Memorial Hospital, he’s out of place, amid a tangle of bed linen and intravenous tubes, hurt filling his handsome young face. So many…
Citizens of Florida should be aware of many things. The marine ecosystem, for instance, and the importance of peaceful cultural coexistence. And now, according to Governor Lawton Chiles, they should prick up their ears and widen their eyes for pornography. According to an official state proclamation, signed by Chiles and…
At an age when most of the girls in her Liberty City housing project were treading the slippery path toward teen pregnancy, Carrie Jones was burning rubber down a less-traveled road. It wasn’t that the slim tomboy disliked girls. She just didn’t share their interests: “They was into boys. I…
The next time you find yourself at a movie, any movie, try a little experiment. Instead of watching the film for the plot, or the characters, or even for the director’s vision, watch it for details. And not just any details. Watch for bad language, for blasphemy, for violence, and…
If Armando Valdez had shelled out ten bucks to have his fortune told this summer, he might have planned a vacation for the fall. A long vacation. As it is, Valdez, a mild-mannered senior planner for the City of Miami Beach, has been the unwitting referee in a bizarre cat…
Assuming virtually everyone in Dade County runs red lights virtually all the time — as a recent in-depth study indicates — a good number of people are going to get caught, if only by happenstance. These offenders, as well as other traffic violators, face a grave choice: They can plead…
Maria Hernandez never missed a day of work in ten years until the hot summer morning she was autopsied and released for burial in section eleven, lot 93-A, of Southern Memorial Park cemetery in North Miami Beach. The drowning of the 35-year-old Metro-Dade police dispatcher three months ago in the…
Vehicle traffic facing a steady red signal shall stop…and remain standing until a green indication is given. — Florida state statute 316.075, subsection III They say childhood does not prepare us for adulthood. And as usual, they are wrong. Who, after all, can forget our earliest lesson in vehicular etiquette,…
South Florida taxicab operators sat down to a high-stakes poker game last week, with Dade County providing the table and all the chips. The preliminaries took the form of an informational meeting at the Metro-Dade Transit Agency; the prize, which will be awarded in November, is a contract, worth an…
Danny Faries, a winsome con man with a snaggletooth grin, ran one of the biggest telephone credit card scams in American history from a cramped cell in the Dade County Jail. During four years of incarceration in Miami, the 42-year-old convicted murderer used pilfered credit card numbers to illegally buy…
I shook my head, closed my eyes, and wondered if the blazing tropical sun — that hadn’t changed, anyway — had temporarily fried my brain. Slowly I let my eyelids slide back up. I was still standing in the lobby of Managua’s Inter-Continental Hotel, and for a moment the newsstand…
Betty Sime had Key Biscayne’s first mayoral election so deep in her pocket that several of her closest friends didn’t even bother to vote. “I had people the day of the election calling me up, saying, `Well, we’re not going to be at the election party tonight, but we wanted…
From where Patrick Snay sits, deep within Killian Senior High School’s administration building, he can’t see any of the surrounding campus. Then again Snay, Killian’s assistant principal in charge of administration, doesn’t need to. The black rotary phone on his desk, specially designated for “Rumor Control,” supplies him with enough…
Rare is the adolescent resident of a high-rise who hasn’t converted his balcony into a laboratory for a detailed study of gravity. Young inquiring minds, several stories up, need only the simplest materials to explore important scientific concepts such as the parabolic trajectory and terminal velocity of a soggy toilet-paper…
Oh, how we Floridians love exclusivity: the waterfront mansions, the crystal chandeliers, the caviar-stained revelry of Palm Beach estates and Fisher Island yacht fetes. Most of the time, of course, sniffing this rarefied air means paying through the schnozz. And here in the land of bonehead public policy, even breathing…
There are days when Ellis Rubin’s law office is the center of the universe for everything that is weird about South Florida. At any given time you might bump into Johnny Carson’s black granddaughter, the bald-headed man with the cure for AIDS, the girl who killed her father, the boy…
