I want to be very wealthy, and I’ll be glad to tell you when I’ve accomplished that goal. John Ellis Bush, son of the president The photograph is unexceptional, according to those who have inspected it, similar to pictures seen in the homes and offices of self-important people everywhere. An…
“We nuked it, is what happened,” says Capt. Jim Ratican, gesturing from the wood-paneled pilothouse of the Miami River tug Big Al toward the SW Second Avenue bridge. The battered southern span of the bridge, out of commission since December, when it was struck by the Panamanian freighter Rio Miami…
Three hours before the first U.S. fighter jets left central Saudi Arabia for Baghdad, Kiren Chaudhry sighed and told the 99th reporter of the week what she had just told me: that the sanctions against Iraq were working. She’d been in Iraq a week and a half before, tagging along…
Unless the three-week-old Gulf war becomes bloody beyond precedent, one segment of Greater Miami’s population may be safer manning the front lines of battle than at home on the streets of its own neighborhoods. Throughout the county, a young black man now stands a better chance of being killed between…
While starting an overnighting business is now relatively simple – a car, a camera, a map of the city, and any FM radio scanner – technology may soon be complicating the process. Many municipalities, including the cities of Miami and Miami Beach, have switched their police and fire transmissions to…
This one is a 3:00 a.m. car wreck, DUI probably, a silver Camaro that screamed into an alley just south of the Marina 8 theaters and couldn’t dodge a parked flat-bed stacked high with baling wire. The driver of the car survived, leaving behind a forehead-shaped crimson stain on the…
TITO HERNANDEZ: This is Tito Hernandez speaking. These are the headlines of today’s most important news, which we offer you in this edition of El Noticiero La Mogolla, the hottest radio news program in Miami, the capital of el exilio. ORLANDO RAMOS: The public is astonished by the scandal of…
As any political satirist knows, an impressive array of enemies is at least as important for success as legions of supporters. Alberto Gonzalez revels in his enemies’ list. Not everyone in his hall of shame is a politician, even though Gonzalez asserts, “With very few exceptions, all the politicians I…
If Miami Beach politics is a joke, Abe Hirschfeld is the punch line. Even in a city hall where the mayor is under investigation by the Feds; where some commissioners view their offices as extensions of their private businesses; where proclamations are issued in honor of politically connected, world-class drug…
We were just standing around in somebody’s yard, as I recall. I didn’t know the guy but I was eating his food and drinking his beer. I was talking to my friend Dan, a furniture refinisher, artist, and skull collector, and he said, “We’re going to Haiti.” I didn’t know…
Nearly five years ago, on February 7, 1986, after President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country, I found myself wandering through the crumbling streets of Port-au-Prince, gazing at thousands of Haitians who, for the first time in a generation, appeared to be genuinely happy. They seemed as though they would explode…
Mack Bennett poured his fifth cup of coffee and lit another Marlboro Light. The window shades were up, but no shadows were cast; it was high noon. Time to get to work, Mack Bennett thought to himself. He was alone in the cramped office, and he held at arm’s length…
The chairman of CBS was not happy. Delegates to the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach were preparing to name Richard Nixon their candidate for president, and William Paley, relaxing in the Bahamas, wanted news. From his vacation home, Paley could pick up CBS affiliate WTVJ, Channel 4 in…
“They dragged them out of a little house there and chained ’em to a light pole on the dock. There was two of them. Everyone was running around grabbing tires, kids and women rolling tires up the dock and dumping ’em around the pole. Me and Monkey Betts was coming…
The Reagan Administration engaged in a massive effort to supply arms and military supplies to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, a three-month investigation has revealed. Some of those efforts appear not only to have violated federal law but also the terms of a U.S. government…
If Carl Raschke is right, America is going straight to Hell. And Raschke’s right. Just ask him. He has no doubt that the creeping terror of Satanism is a threat to this country, and he’s equally certain that critics of his research are wrong. Dead wrong. As proof, Raschke offers…
Sexual harassment is not the normal healthy interactions which have been taking place between men and women for as long as there have been men and women. Introduction to Dade County Affirmative Action’s sexual harassment training handbook Sexual harassment legislation, long a murky area in the law, has begun to…
It is a scene Carmen Dieguez has witnessed again and again, always the same circumstance, the man and the woman standing next to the Xerox machine, casually eyeing one another, waiting for copies. Each time as Dieguez watches, the man asks the woman to join him for lunch. Each time,…
Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him…. The fish is red. Radio Swan, a clandestine CIA radio station, broadcasting to Cuba on April 17, 1961, the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion Doctor Diego Medina knew…
Often confused with “pirate” radio stations, which are usually music oriented, clandestine broadcasts differ considerably, both in content and purpose. In Clandestine Radio Broadcasting, published in 1987 and considered by students and hobbyists to be the Bible of the business, authors Lawrence Soley and John Nichols define clandestine radio as…
“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’…
