For more than two decades, John Rivera was the ideal of what most cops think a police union president should be: He lied constantly, threw tantrums at even the slightest personal insult, and had zero qualms about blaming black kids for getting themselves shot by the officers he represented.
In the wake of Hurricane Irma, power outages shut down almost 70 percent of traffic lights in Miami-Dade County. The result proved what most of us already instinctively knew: Literally no one in South Florida knows how to use a four-way stop.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 24,000 Haitian nationals live between Miami and Palm Beach under temporary protected status (TPS), which is given to immigrants from nations devastated by political turmoil or natural disasters. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, has been struck by both, including the infamous 2010 earthquake that leveled the island…
The last time Joe Carollo sat on Miami’s city commission, the police chief accused him of — no joke — trying to obtain an illegal concealed-weapons permit for a visiting sheikh tied to the Saudi royal family; telling the police he was being stalked and calling them into “secret” meetings that he would then refuse to show up for…
They don’t call this place the Magic City for nothing,” Louis Aguirre says with a chuckle. “Coming back to Miami is my full-circle moment.” You know Aguirre. He spent years on local TV before heading to the West Coast to become cohost of CBS’s Entertainment Tonight spinoff, The Insider. But…
Police blocked off the streets and locked the doors to Miami-Dade County Hall as a group of infuriated protesters gathered outside. It was January 27, the day after Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced he would cooperate with Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, and emotions were running high. The idea that residents…
It’s easy to mistake Steve Leifman for a psychiatrist. He’ll happily rattle off statistics about the incidence of schizophrenia in Miami-Dade County, quote a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article, or digress at length about the effects of childhood emotional trauma. Leifman is actually a criminal court judge…
As the public spat unfolded in Tallahassee this past April, it felt like the perfect metaphor for the raging culture wars in Trump’s America. Rep. Kionne McGhee, a black Democrat from Miami, was fighting for a monument to the innumerable slaves who worked and died in Florida before the Civil…
Stephanie Myers was onstage at a Democratic unity rally at the Knight Center, giving a speech about answering the call to get involved, when a voice rang out from the crowd. “Run for office!” a woman yelled. Myers, a lead organizer of the filled-to-capacity Women’s Rally of South Florida, laughed…
When 14-year-old Martin Lee Anderson was murdered by police in Panama City in 2006, Jasmen Rogers was just starting college at Florida State. Then only 17, she remembers it as the first time she understood “wow, the world isn’t fair for black people.” Eleven years later, Rogers is one of…
When a tipster told Miami Waterkeeper that a leaky sewage pipe was spewing human waste right into Biscayne Bay, the environmental organization wasted no time sending a diver to investigate. Sure enough, they discovered the pipe was blasting the bay with thousands of gallons of harmful waste. But the worst…
Megachurches are often scams. Their owners and preachers become obscenely wealthy and don’t have to pay taxes. And a remarkably huge percentage of megachurch leaders become ensnared in ethically dubious (at best) conduct: Ultra-rich Houston pastor Joel Osteen infamously neglected to open his megachurch to Hurricane Harvey victims for days…
Last week, the FBI released its yearly log of hate crimes reported across the nation. In Florida, the data appears to show that hate-crime reports jumped 33 percent between 2015 and 2016. But that wasn’t the entire story: Many of both the Sunshine State’s and the nation’s largest police departments appear to be neglecting to report hate crimes to the FBI.
Wynwood brewery J. Wakefield Brewing is working on rushing out its new Turnover IPA in the hopes it will be ready to hit Canes fans’ lips in time for their team’s bowl game. The beer is named for the chunky gold necklace that Canes coaches award players on the sideline after they record turnovers.
In 2010, the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, a state body that loans money to build affordable housing, flunked an Atlanta developer called the American Opportunity Foundation (AOF) “due to past defaults, assignments, bankruptcies, or foreclosures” issued against the company’s properties in years past. As of 2010, state regulators warned that 22 of the 80 loans listed on the foundation’s report at the time were in default, so “AOF is not considered an acceptable general partner.”
A Miami ordinance allows for up to 100 pedicabs to operate within city limits, but unnecessary obstacles in permitting have stifled pedicab companies from breaking in. Consequently, Miami is one of few major cities without pedicabs as part of its public transportation system.
Shortly after earning a medical degree from the University of Miami in 1958, Ybor City native Fernando “Ferdie” Pacheco set up a family practice in Overtown, Miami’s historic black neighborhood. Much like it is today, the area was mired in poverty.
When Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at a small bungalow on a sandy Key Largo side street in October 2015, they found the worse murder scene the Keys had seen in more than two decades: a young couple, Tara Rosado and Carlos Ortiz, brutally executed in their bedroom just a few feet from Rosado’s three young children.
Every time Miami Beach’s Animal Recovery Mission (ARM), the undercover animal-abuse investigative group led by former military contractor Richard Couto, releases a video, it gets that much harder to eat meat or drink milk from South Florida cows. This month has been a doozy for Couto. First, ARM last week released film of animal handlers at one Okeechobee farm kicking cows.
As New Times revealed in an investigation published Tuesday, former Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale Pastor Bob Coy — who once led the largest megachurch in Florida — was accused in 2015 of molesting a girl for more than a decade, beginning when she was 4 years old. Coy was never charged in the case and had already resigned from Calvary over an admitted string of extramarital affairs.
In March 2014, David Velasquez called police to report the theft of his work tools. But when Broward Sheriff’s deputies arrived, he says, the cops were more concerned about his immigration status than the crime. They ended up placing him under arrest, Velasquez says — and breaking his leg while taking him into custody.
A few months ago, a Coral Gables homeowner made national headlines when he put his $6.4 million mansion on the market and said he’d accept payment in Bitcoin. So when a seller approached luxury real-estate agent Eric Fernandez with a similar proposition, he was ready for the challenge.
