I knew it was going to be a good day when I arrived at 7:30 in the morning to find several hundred people already waiting in line, and the doors weren’t scheduled to open until 10:00,” says Russell Galbut, managing director of South Florida’s most prolific condo company. “It was…
Keith Wilson knows the importance of paper. In 1989, two years after he left the Miami police force to work for his father’s church, Wilson was falsely arrested and thrown in jail. His written complaint about the arrest led the county’s Independent Review Panel (IRP) to conclude that Metro-Dade police…
Earlier this month the Society of Newspaper Design announced the winners of its fifteenth annual Best of Newspaper Design competition. New Times art director Brian Stauffer garnered honors in two categories. For his portfolio of feature story layouts, Stauffer won a silver medal. A layout that accompanied a feature story…
Once hailed as the “magic mineral,” asbestos was widely used in the United States throughout much of the Twentieth Century. It was placed in ceiling tiles because of its superior acoustical qualities; it was sprayed onto beams and girders to provide greater strength and support; and it was piled into…
This past January county commissioners voted to accept the findings of a study showing that companies owned by Hispanics and women have long suffered discrimination in their dealings with Dade County. It was the first step in what some commissioners believe will lead to a series of laws that will…
In the spring of 1981 Leonid Brezhnev was president of the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan was a newly installed fixture in the White House, and a particularly frigid phase of the Cold War was getting under way A just off Biscayne Boulevard in the quiet residential neighborhood of Morningside. Nearly…
Bob Knight is apologizing for getting all worked up, which for him means talking even faster than usual and raising his voice a little, but not in a way that would suggest he was mad. “Sorry for getting carried away,” says the botanist, leaning earnestly over the steering wheel of…
When Hurricane Andrew battered Metrozoo with some of the highest sustained winds registered in all of South Florida, the devastation was extensive and highly publicized. The storm wrought $15 million in structural damage, including the destruction of the perimeter fencing. Five mammals died, countless birds were lost. For several months…
The Hard Rock Cafe, four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in late February. The occasion is a press conference for the upcoming Bob Marley birthday concert in Bayfront Park. Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker (a singer herself, known to her friends and admirers as Mother B), is here, as are several…
Michael H. Metzger, the controversial California defense lawyer who mounted a nationwide campaign to discredit the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, shot himself in the head with his .357 Magnum at his home in rural Napa County on March 1. His death was the most recent bizarre twist to the…
Had Joe Gersten himself been here to orchestrate events minute by minute, it’s unlikely the Great Subpoena Caper could have unfolded more bizarrely. It seems clear, though, that Dade County’s favorite former-commissioner-in-exile hoped for some sort of incident, some type of media mayhem that would spring from his most recent…
Rodolfo Ulises Castrell is capable of evincing a wide range of emotions, from levity to rage, with only a slight change of expression. His eyes will narrow or widen almost imperceptibly. The lines of his mouth turn upward or downward into mirror versions of a gradual arc. But for all…
It’s about nine o’clock Saturday morning and the rain pounds down. Keith Schantz, manager of the Miami-based rock band Natural Causes, negotiates the cluttered alley behind the Stephen Talkhouse, parking in front of a half-dozen tattered derelicts huddled in a Dumpster shed. Schantz tries to get in the back door…
On this windy Tuesday, as Hugh Rodham has been traveling, first to Tallahassee, then to Tampa, to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate, clouds have gathered back in Miami, and not just in the sky. For a good part of the afternoon an answering machine has been taking…
Human rights? Ha! Due process? Bite your tongue! When it comes to dealing with youthful offenders, Edna Buchanan doesn’t waste time with the little things. Juvenile crime. Everyone is talking about it. Or shouting about it. Everyone has an opinion about its causes. Everyone has ideas about how to prevent…
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…
The image everybody saw — the one everybody was supposed to see – was this: Lewis Schaffel standing before a pack of reporters on the last Tuesday in February, assuring the good citizens of Dade County that he was going to do everything possible to ensure that the Miami Heat…
The shadowy bulk of two pool tables dominates this space, illuminated by a single dim bulb near the door. Beneath the light stands Frankie Man, bit player in Bob Fosse movies, friend to Lenny Bruce, survivor of three decades of standup along a comedy trail that stretches from L.A. to…
A man of his age and girth probably shouldn’t be doing this, but Irv Liss has something to prove. All 66 years and 250-plus pounds of him. He’s standing in the playground of Beacon Hill, a private elementary school in North Dade, holding on to a steel, cactus-shaped climbing structure,…
A quick quiz: Of the following prospective tenants, which might a landlord be most likely to select? 1. A gang of unemployed teenage crack addicts 2. A cadre of Maoist rebels 3. A team of alert environmental regulators If you’re William I. Donner, the answer might not be at all…
On January 27, 1994, New Times published a feature story entitled “I Am Not a Meddler,” by staff writer Kirk Semple. That fact might shed some light on the attached memorandum, signed by two of the article’s protagonists…
His wardrobe runs to flannel shirts and weathered jeans, and his threadbare Chuck Taylor high-tops are so far gone that his wife Adris is only half-kidding when she says she likes them because she can nibble on her husband’s toes without taking his shoes off. No, Bill Orcutt does not…
