Info: They Owe It All to Odio Miami's infamous ex-city manager hired more than 100 staffers entirely at his own discretion. Guess who's paying them. By Robert Andrew Powell Ramon Conte prides himself on his toughness. The Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran endured 25 years in Fidel Castro's...
"Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!" That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year -- watching his silent extravaganza, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by...
Squat and hefty, at first glance Miami lawyer and civic activist Dan Paul doesn't look like a man who would take on the combined forces of the Miami Heat, the Dade County Commission, and the chairman of Knight-Ridder. But think bull terrier. When Dan Paul sinks his teeth into the...
Molson Ice at twelve o'clock. The sky is bright, the breeze onshore. A charter fisherman -- white shorts, turquoise shirt, gold chain -- kicks off his Topsiders and swigs from the perspiring bottle. "Fishin's slow today," he sighs, extending his arms like outriggers over the back of a bench. The...
This article was not conceived as a thorough computer-assisted analysis of South Florida wine lists. Thus, while an index of the wine lists compiled appears below, the tables that accompany this story do not single out restaurants by name. Their purpose is merely to illustrate the vast variation one is...
In keeping with the absurdist temor of U.S.-Cuban relations over the past 35 years, at the very moment President Clinton was approving harsh trade sanctions against the island last week, Cuban technicians were putting the final touches on the national website of the Republic of Cuba. Their handiwork can now...
Seconds after the anchor chain tumbles into Biscayne Bay, two women on the sun deck strip down to thong bikinis and start lubing their bare breasts with coconut oil. A surfer dude in laser-green swim trunks cuts the air with a rebel yell and somersaults from the top of the...
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...
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...
There was a time when almost any hip person could discuss, in impressively minute detail, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy and the dense tangle of conspiracy theory that has sprouted around it. As the decades roll on, and more people grow up who don't remember where they were...
In five months as a criminal court judge in Dade County, Henry Ferro has come to expect days filled with mayhem. His overcrowded docket reads like a True Crime index: assaults, drug deals, sex battery, and all varieties of theft. But nothing could prepare the jurist for the sight that...
So maybe you're sick of the snowbound Canadian winters. Maybe it's time to swoop south, like the geese. And maybe, just maybe, that Cuban Ministry of Tourism brochure A the one with blue sea lapping at unspoiled beaches and the lights of Old Havana twinkling A is beginning to look...
Miami, fashionable and fickle, a game of chance and improbability, a whimsical yet deadly postmodern landscape, kind of disgusting but kind of fun, too. You're up, you're down, you don't know where the hell you are. Ocean Drive magazine throwing a party at The Forge with Jacques and Pascal, the...
Life with Mikey is one of those execrable exercises in sitcom sentimentality that leaves even the uncritical viewer with one question: What were they thinking? Let's be charitable. Maybe the filmmakers were inspired by Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose, but the only way they could obtain financing was to cast...
At first people just stare. Then come the whispers. Then, invariably, they ask Gemma Stafford the question: "Are those real?" What they mean is: "Could those huge, curved monstrosities truly be your own?" If Stafford hears it once a day, she hears it a dozen times. "Yes, these are my...
On the other side of the world water swirls counterclockwise down the drain, animals carry their offspring in pouches, and a left-handed slide guitarist plays a right-handed guitar from over top of the neck using his index finger. "The first guitar I was given," says southpaw strummer Dave Hole in...
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...
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...
Good morning, class. Today we'll be studying the laws of probability. Let's begin our lesson with a word problem that will help you understand the basic concept. Pretend we're making a movie. We want to calculate the likelihood that our movie will be a dog. Here's our picture's premise: A...
In May 1993, on her last day of work at the Miami Herald, Tracie Cone's colleagues gathered to bid her farewell. During her six years at the Herald, Cone had become one of the paper's rising stars, her talents having led her to a coveted position as a feature writer...
