A 50-year-old Colombian drug kingpin was fined $1 million and sentenced to 22 years in prison Wednesday by a federal judge in Miami. And that was the plea deal.Edgar Vellejo-Guarin was indicted in 2001 after Coast Guard officers discovered 4,000 kilograms of cocaine on a freighter in the Caribbean and…
Miami-Dade police officers shot and killed four suspects Thursday while investigating criminal activity near the Redland. Officers had been called to a home near Southwest 216th Street and 189th Avenue when they were confronted by four men in ski masks armed with firearms. Very little information seems to be available…
They’re listening. Really hard.Wiretaps in Florida authorized by district courts and the state attorney general rose from 78 in 2009 to 143 in 2010, according to a report released Thursday by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. Florida’s 83.3-percent jump is the second-largest in the country…
The arrest of former Miami Dolphin Daryl Gardener has it all: cougars, accusations of cheating, sorority houses, cologne bottles, and a club called Fubar.The 38-year-old former defensive tackle was arrested early Tuesday morning in front of the University of Central Florida’s Zeta Tau Alpha house in Orlando along with his…
You might not call your grandparents nearly enough, but Robert Attias, a Canadian citizen whose last known address was in Miami, might have. Attias is charged with ripping off seniors in Minnesota and pretending to be their grandson asking for money. He’s believed to have swindled more than $15,525…
When Miami-Dade cops arrested Sarah Myles on October 9, 2009, they described her as the Warren Sapp of Little Haiti housewives. They claimed the supposedly six-foot, 250-pound Myles “jumped” on a sergeant’s back during a traffic stop and had to be piledriven off.But Myles, who two weeks ago was acquitted…
Three Miami men were arrested after their van was pulled over in the Keys and police found the vehicle stuffed with tons of cocks and nuts. Not only had the men stolen about 4,000 coconuts, they also had two roosters that appeared to be used for cockfighting locked in crates…
Hazel Mays is 85-years-old, frail and hard of hearing. But according to one Miami police officer, the elderly Coconut Grove woman was strong enough to push him around and try steal his gun.Mays, though, tells a local TV station that the police used excessive force after she simply couldn’t hear…
The gunman squeezes the trigger on his Glock. His victim slumps to the ground. And without a cop in sight, the murderer thinks he’s in the clear. But the light poles are listening. In seconds, small sensors determine the location of the sound and send it to police headquarters. Microphones…
When employees showed up to the Casablanca Fish Market yesterday, they noticed that the building’s normally fishy smell had turned rancid. Inside, they found a broken cash register missing at least $2,000 in cash and a trail of shrimp and crab meat.They followed the smell to the roof, where they…
Singer Paulina Rubio has continued her string of alleged odd behavior. The Mexican singer was involved in a car accident this weekend in Little Havana, which lead to an arrest after a hysterical confrontation with police. However, she was let go in order to go home and breastfeed her young…
UPDATE, 4:36 p.m.: NBC Miami is reporting that the argument between the neighbors was over a $5 loan, and that 100 people were displaced by the fire. In a massive step backwards for Grand Avenue neighbor relations, a Coconut Grove man is accusing his neighbor of breaking his bedroom window…
Cecilia Stafford stood in a Miami-Dade courtroom this afternoon and stared at Merrit Sims, the man who twenty years ago shot and killed her husband, Miami Springs officer Charles Stafford. “On behalf of my family, my children and myself, may you rot in hell,” Stafford said.Sims listened stoically and then…
Every week for nine years, Robert Teichert called his friend Rich in Florida. The two had met while working at the Champions Golf Club in Stuart and become buddies over hours spent drinking beer and fishing. They stayed in touch when Robert moved away.But this spring, Rich stopped answering his…
On June 6, 21-year-old Luis Fumero pulled over a woman with a fake police badge and tricked her into having sex with him in order to avoid arrest. Now, Fumero is the one facing very real criminal charges…
Retired Gen. Rene Sanabria, who once ran Bolivia’s national anti-narcotics police unit, has pleaded guilty in a Miami court to smuggling cocaine. Sanabria and his co-conspirators were arrested in March and charged with trying to sneak about 315 pounds of cocaine into the Port of Miami…
Reggae superstar Buju Banton will spend the next decade in federal lockup, a judge in Tampa ruled this morning. The sentence comes after Banton — who played to a packed crowd at Bayfront in January and won a Grammy this year — was convicted of trying to engineer a cocaine…
A 6-foot, 250-pound woman who allegedly jumped on a cop’s back was acquitted of battery on the Miami Police officer. The jury took only 28 minutes last Friday to find Sarah Myles not guilty after all three sergeants who were at the scene told different accounts of what happened.Police made…
It’s almost too crass to state, but it remains obvious that nothing mixes worse than kids and guns. Forget oil and water.A 4-year-old boy in Little Havana was accidentally shot in the groin after his 17-year-old half-brother found and then began playing with a rifle…
Walter Chesnut just wanted to feed his family. So, since about February, he’s been on a unique stealing spree: he’s been taking manhole covers from the Wynwood neighborhood and selling them for about $25 each…
Police went looking for a burglary suspect on SW 69th Avenue yesterday afternoon and thought they saw him run into a home. They believed him to be armed and barricaded inside, according to WSVN. The “standoff” began around 2 p.m., and at 6, the SWAT team stormed the house.Nobody home…
If you’re a fan of firsthand accounts, Michael O. Munday is something of a local treasure. Almost every one of his colleagues is dead, in prison, or underground. But 65-year-old Mickey Munday — as the served-his-time cocaine megasmuggler is known — just won’t shut up. Now the gregarious native Miamian…
