Two years ago on the day after Easter, Anne Lanzetta, once the mother of six children, now the mother of none, decided to end her life. She was watching soap operas at the time, drunk on vodka. A pack of single-edge razors, purchased from the drugstore down the street, sat...
An ever-growing beast lurks deep within the Miami-Dade Public Library's main branch downtown. Hatched there in 1986, it has been pulsing with life ever since. But while the creature dwells within the walls of the library, it is not of the library. The creature has a name. It is the...
Rene Rodriguez is a punk. Not the scowling, pierced, and tattoed kind; the Herald staff writer and film reviewer looks more like Opie Taylor than Sid Vicious. No, Rodriguez's punkdom slashes deeper than nipple rings, jackboots, and the other affectations of the fashionably disaffected. Rather, he's one of the far...
Far be it from me to whine about how tough my job is. I learned long ago that there aren't many folks sympathetic to complaints from a guy who sits around all day watching movies and getting paid for it. Suffice it to say if it was that easy, everyone...
Carlos Herrera stands in the family room of his Kendall home, encircled by the hauntingly vacant stares of more than two dozen dead animals. Herrera killed each of them -- deer, elk, caribou, moose, impala, buffalo. Twenty-eight animals in all, their heads cut off and stuffed, their eyes replaced with...
It's a sunny afternoon. You're out strolling along Washington Avenue, dodging the tanned in-line skaters as they dart among knots of oblivious models, model wanna-be's, and shirtless muscle boys in Daisy Dukes and combat boots. As you approach the South Beach Pub near Seventh Street, you look up and notice...
Jose Milton became nearly a half-million dollars richer on June 20. The well-heeled Coral Gables contractor didn't win the lottery, cash in an exceptionally prescient stock investment, cut a lucrative real estate deal, or come into a windfall inheritance. Like thousands of his fellow Dade Countians, Milton simply appealed the...
In the late Thirties, William "Tallahassee" Dranes, an obscure Panhandle blues singer, sat awake in a shotgun shack and mused about the weather. It was so hot that summer that birds fell out of the sky completely cooked. So hot that parking lots melted and poured down streets, carrying children...
Late evening was bleeding into early night when we passed 140th Street and pulled off Biscayne Boulevard into the semicircular driveway of the Miami Moon Motel ("efficiencies, color TV, air conditioning") in scenic North Miami Beach. A hand-written sign on the front door of the office instructed visitors to knock...
In 1992, the Year of the Woman, Madonna was hailed as a shrewd businesswoman (which she is, despite what you may think of her). Barbra Streisand was acknowledged to be a powerful political ally. And Cindy Crawford broke the bonds of silent beauty to become what she believes is a...
Tomas Garcia Fuste is not running for office, and he's no pop star. Still, when he goes to lunch at Victor's Cafe, it takes him about twenty minutes to make the journey from valet parking to his table. So many people, so much homage. Fuste, ¨c centsmo andas? Oye, Fuste,...
This is Tence Wolfe's story in its most succinct form: A trusted employee of the Dade County Clerk's Office since 1989, Wolfe worked on the seventh floor of the Metro-Dade Justice Building, in the criminal courts division. Her job was fairly straightforward -- when attorneys filed documents in a criminal...
