Don Francisco had promised his television audience a once-in-a-lifetime story of love and adventure during this July 1991 taping of his show, Noche de gigantes. Two years earlier, a pair of Miami sailors, Bill and Simonne Butler, had been rescued off the coast of Costa Rica, having survived 66 days…
You know how the saying goes: A big man needs a big…swimming pool. Not that construction company magnate Sam LoBue’s new creation is particularly large A about 50 by 17 feet, a maximum of 7 feet deep A for a cement pond. But for a penis, wow sir! LoBue concedes…
Saundra Keyes, newly appointed managing editor of the Miami Herald, was introduced to the public last week. In an article prominently displayed on page A-3 of her new paper, Herald staff writer Tom Dubocq hailed the 47-year-old Keyes’s accomplishments during her two years as executive editor of the Long Beach…
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…
Laura Coburn, 23 years old and thoroughly freaked out, sat staring at six grim mugshots. She was being asked by two jumpy cops if any of the photos resembled the man who two months earlier had raped and viciously beaten her A the man who would come to be called…
A defining moment in the education of Sharon Feldman occurred during an autumn afternoon in 1987 in the Montparnasse district of Paris. Less than a year out of the New England Culinary Institute and eager to cut her chops on the famous kitchen lines of Paris, the 21-year-old novice chef…
If you can’t stand the heat… “Okay guys, I’m dying!” croaks Jeffrey Applebaum as he shuffles back and forth in front of a long, stainless steel counter under the bright lights of his kitchen. “Come on, we’re half an hour on this ticket! Let’s get this food up! It’s too…
Morning on Watson Island. Commuters cruise along the MacArthur Causeway, just across the Intracoastal from downtown Miami. The turquoise water of Biscayne Bay ripples up on a narrow, rocky strip of sand on the north side of the island. Cleared of clouds by a brisk wind, the sky is still…
Last week, as construction crews hurriedly put the final touches on a new restaurant in the center of Coconut Grove, an unsettling sense of dej” vu hovered over the scene. Here was a Grove property owner opening a sprawling, so-called adventure bar, dismissing the complaints of neighborhood residents, receiving compliant…
After a long dry spell, Miami Beach is once again the nightlife capital of America, a wide-open town with nonstop action, the playground of the Western world. The Euro-chics, the celebrated, and the simply rich, the emblems that guide the rest of the glitter-hungry world are pouring in: Gianni Versace,…
The leather man sits in the shadows with a smug look on his face. He outlines his request, I outline my fee. He wants to take me to a hotel room. I tell him it’s out of the question. “What can you do to me here?” he asks in broken…
Burnie had it right. Five minutes before the Heat embarked upon its embarrassingly ugly loss to Milwaukee this past Thursday, Miami’s mascot clamped himself onto the stiltlike leg of Alan Ogg and refused to let go. Refused as the congenitally good-natured Ogg chatted with old Heat teammates. Refused as Ogg…
When Genesi Mallay and her husband opened the Lazy Lizard restaurant on Lincoln Road two years ago, the plan was to offer customers the tropical cocktails best suited to Mexican food: margaritas, daiquiris, even the occasional pi*a colada. That was before Mallay collided with Florida’s alcoholic bureaucracy. Because her eatery…
It began peacefully enough on that late-November day in 1991. Miami Beach residents were exercising their Constitutional right to vote, as candidates for mayor and city commission stood by shaking hands and kissing babies in a final attempt to curry electoral favor. That’s what most of the candidates were doing,…
Seventeen of the 30 current and former public officials listed below are people you probably don’t want to bump into in a dark alley. Can you pick out the pistol packin’ politicos? U.S. Rep. Carrie P. Meek U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen Former State Rep. Barry Kutun State Rep. J. Alex…
You must grasp up front that Samantha Strong is sex incarnate, a living blueprint of the American definition of pure, raw, hetero lust: big-haired (and blond, natch, or maybe not so natch), big-chested, thin-waisted, red-lipped, and generally as subservient as a shoe. Even dressed down as she is for this…
If Thomas Kramer has flaunted anything in his tenure as South Beach’s latest eccentric rich boy, it is a talent for well-publicized charity. While he extinguished his Ocean Drive nightclub, Hell, two weeks ago, and his grandiose plans to convert South Pointe into a faux Italian village remain drawing-board fantasies,…
Among those historians who have made it their business to inspect the tainted archives of Western imperialism, it is widely believed that the first slave ship to return with human cargo from Africa was christened the Jesus Christ. Whether apocryphal or not, the notion that a Christ delivered the first…
The bang of the crash didn’t wake me, but the piercing, high-pitched whir of a revving engine roused me to semiconsciousness. Three o’clock in the morning, Friday, November 20. As the revving stopped, I began to drift back under, victim to the migraine headache that had plagued me for the…
Panchanita Fordham is outside on the front steps of Northwestern Holy High School with the Lord’s tingle in her belly so bad she’s buckling at the knees. From her right hand hangs a borrowed Bible, from her left a Kool cigarette, which she attacks with the ferocity of the ex-junkie…
You are seven feet, two inches tall. You own two dozen pairs of size eighteen high-top sneakers. You are painfully addicted to The Andy Griffith Show. Where are you? If your name is Alan Ogg A and it would almost have to be A you are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, watching…
Betty Wright is talking about being born again when she’s interrupted by the beeping of her phone, a high-heeled pink pump with pushbuttons. On the other end is a girlfriend, crying and nearly hysterical. “He just did that?” Wright asks in a low voice. “Well, you got to live for…
