Last Thursday, Monroe County officially shut down the Card Sound Bridge toll booth in favor of an automated SunPass system. As the remaining five toll workers packed up for their last day, New Times visited the station to ask for some of their craziest stories of manning one of Florida’s last human-staffed toll booths.
At a dilapidated Knights Inn in Homestead, Almlak Benitez stood in front of a camera with a black mask covering his hazel eyes and a long robe obscuring his tattooed biceps. Cockroach carcasses lined the worn-out carpet of the $69 room, which he and his friend Mohammad Skaik had pooled…
Officer Kenia Fallat, a spokesperson for the Miami Police Department, was driving an unmarked cop car yesterday when she hit 19-year-old Jimmy John’s sandwich-delivery bicyclist Mason Morales. Yet somehow it was Morales who eventually ended up in jail on criminal mischief charges.
Yuri Star was working as an Uber driver when he met Morgan O’Connor, a dreadlocked former Ralph Lauren Polo model and reportedly one-third of a love triangle with Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus. Soon after carting the aspiring musician around West Palm Beach for a night, Star became his full-time caretaker.
After Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Grieco dropped his bid for mayor following a scathing Miami Herald report on his sketchy campaign finances, Beach residents were left with just four candidates to choose from. Two of them haven’t raised any money, while former federal prosecutor Dan Gelber has pulled in close to a half-million bucks.
There is simply no reason to repeal the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program unless brown people bother you. DACA prevents children brought here by their parents from being deported. It’s a program that helps kids who did not choose to grow up in America but did anyway. Even if you think, incorrectly, that immigrants are predisposed to crime, you can’t even apply for DACA if you have a criminal record.
Miami-Dade County Police officers pulled over 27-year-old Anthony Ford last night in Liberty City. According to a departmental news release, Ford and another man fled from their red Nissan, and then “confrontation ensued and shots were fired.” Ford died last night. Investigators have reportedly learned he was unarmed.
From giant African snails to tegus to peacocks, Florida is crawling with all kinds of things that aren’t supposed to be here. Probably none inspires as much fear as the Burmese python, which for years has been ravaging the Everglades and pretty much everything that lives there.
There are two types of people who get food delivered: those who want it immediately and don’t feel like going out, and those who basically don’t have another option for eating.
Another year in Florida means another wave of clearly unconstitutional attempts to crack down on brown people. State legislators this month began filing their first bills of the 2018 session, and North Florida state Sen. Greg Steube, a man who simply cannot stop himself from filing insane laws designed to hurt people, has already begun flinging anti-immigrant crackdowns at the wall to see what sticks.
Hollywood commissioners will vote today on whether to rename three streets that honor Confederate generals — John Hood, Robert E. Lee, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. In the leadup to today’s vote, local civil rights activists said they feared that in a post-Charlottesville world, white supremacists might harass or try to hurt the people protesting for equality.
Corruption and bribery are as central to Miami Beach’s history as art deco hotels and poolside mojitos. This is a town where a former mayor was convicted on 41 counts of bribery and where hotels and restaurants have always known that the solution to bureaucratic red tape is an envelop stuffed with cash.
Earlier this year, Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran was one of only two state-level politicians who attended the infamous Koch brothers-hosted summit in Colorado. Corcoran promptly flew home and announced a plan to kill Florida’s public-election-financing laws, which help elect candidates who don’t want donations from the corporations, utility companies, real-estate magnates, and billionaires who effectively control state politics.
Poor, poor Philip Levine. The Miami Beach mayor has long been suspected of running a massive social-media-blocking campaign — over the past few years, he’s cut off critics, local activists, and even the main Miami New Times twitter account from reading his tweets. Multiple courts have ruled that politicians are not allowed to block people from viewing their social media accounts because those pages disseminate vital public information.
James Eric McDonough, a South Miami-Dade activist with a doctorate in organic thermochemistry, has received little but trouble since reporting a Homestead Police officer for speeding in 2012. He’s been thrown out of public meetings, harassed, and even had to sue Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle for threatening to arrest him for recording a conversation with Homestead Police Chief Al Rolle.
As Donald Trump has repeatedly praised neo-Nazi and KKK rallies as being full of “fine people” and minimized the deadly domestic terror attack on peaceful counterprotesters in Charlottesville, everyone from Sen. John McCain to Trump’s own economic advisor, Gary Cohn, have spoken out against the president. One voice that has been notably silent, however, is Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, who until recently was dean of Florida International University’s law school.
A pudgy man in a white lab coat, protective goggles, and a white hardhat ambles down several long rows of potted marijuana plants. An industrial A/C unit cranks frigid air into the capacious grow room, located inside a 300,000-square-foot warehouse just outside Tallahassee, while an array of high-pressure sodium lights…
It should surprise exactly zero people that President Donald Trump’s associates were dumb enough to basically write “let’s all collude with Russia” in emails to one another and that this collection of morons with brain lesions is also deeply tied to South Florida.
Here’s how to help, Miami.
Despite every headline-grabbing attempt to fuel the tech sector or the finance market, at its condo-flipping heart Miami is still a company town, and the only industry that keeps the lights on is real estate. So any national survey that ranks the Magic City nearly dead last for its property-selling prospects is very bad news for anyone in South Florida.
Carissa Kent was working at the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in 2006 when she heard the news: While building a new outlet in Lake Park, Walmart had destroyed the homes of dozens of gopher tortoises, a threatened species that lives in burrows deep underground. Worst of all, the megacompany had done so legally. The State of Florida simply required Walmart to pay only $11,409 in extra costs to level the animals’ habitat.
Miami and corruption have always gone together like cafecitos and pastelitos. In a state that routinely ranks in the top three in the nation for official financial shenanigans, Miami is the crown jewel of pilfering the taxpayer treasure chest. But even in a town famed for its unscrupulous public servants,…
