On July 20, State Attorney Janet Reno sent a four-page letter to circuit court Chief Judge Leonard Rivkind proposing the formation of a new Youthful Offender Court. Such a court, Reno explained, would allow a judge to draw upon “a full range of adult and juvenile sanctions” in sentencing young…
Joan Green’s story of woe in the wake of Hurricane Andrew is, in many ways, sadly typical of many thousands of South Dade residents and business people. Her tropical fruit groves southwest of Florida City were ravaged. Looters then tried to steal what was left. A few miles away, the…
Hurricane Andrew’s assault on Dade left the county’s nature lovers with a monumental grievance to lay at the feet of Mother Nature, in the form of a million or so scattered trees and acres of wind-blasted real estate. But the storm not only laid waste to Miami’s landscape, it may…
A discreet warmth now fills the heart of every carpenter, electrician, and auto-body repairman in South Florida. Hardware merchants, lumber barons, and yacht salvagers are wearing secret smiles. But of all the economic winners Hurricane Andrew left behind, few know the pleasures of the catbird seat like Jolan Gamblin, South…
In their more candid moments, they refer to themselves as “the underground” — always in hushed tones, and often with the trace of paranoia that haunts the sleep-deprived. Their base of operations: the shadowy regions of Red Cross headquarters, at 1657 NW Seventeenth Ave. Their mission: to bypass an insensitive…
Traffic signage, in case you hadn’t noticed, tends toward the functional: Stop. Merge. Yield. The strictures of rush-hour attention spans, not to mention space, preclude anything approaching flamboyance. Were poetry their medium, the nation’s traffic sign specialists would no doubt produce haiku of the driest variety. How, then, to explain…
Since his arrival in May 1990, Miami Beach Police Chief Phillip Huber has taken a number of steps to erase public perception that his department is rife with gay-bashing bruisers. The boldest measure, one widely praised by gay activists, was the introduction in spring 1991 of sensitivity classes designed to…
The shadows, those skewed flat forms that first began to appear on Miami sidewalks and walls about a year ago, have begun to catch up with Vincent Luca. He’s the earnest artist in horn-rim glasses and holey cut-offs who has loosed the shadows on South Beach and downtown Miami: images…
In most respects, James Eloissaint is like any five-month-old child. He squirms and bounces on his mother’s knee, tugging at a tiny T-shirt, sucking on a finger, smiling and gurgling all the while. But unlike most toddlers in this country, James doesn’t have a birth certificate. Born to Haitian-refugee parents…
The calls first started coming in about a year ago, taking a confused Dayle Jacobs by surprise. “People would call us and say, `I’d like to make a comment,'” says Jacobs, a manager at Miami’s Sylvan Nursery Farms. “And I’d say, `Go ahead,’ figuring they were calling about our business…
Title 26 of the United States Code has proven to be a powerful weapon for federal agents combating the proliferation of machine guns, preferred tools of the drug-trafficking trade. The law makes it a crime to possess or sell unregistered machine guns and calls for penalties of up to ten…
“Every cabbage,” Frenchman Jean Giraudoux once wrote, “has its pimp.” Given the absurd mutterings Giraudoux inflicted upon his characters, the line passed as little more than fanciful. Surely the playwright could never have anticipated the true-life biker corollary to his queer pronouncement: Every hog must have its trademark attorney. At…
Dorothy Richardson has never thought much of police officers. “Got no use for them,” snaps the 60-year-old retiree, whose night table is stacked with medications for arthritis and other assorted ailments. “Survived so far without them and I’ll survive the rest. Shoot, I don’t even call the police when trouble…
He was a down-on-his-luck youngster facing a bleak future when the scouts found him in eastern Iowa, running with the wrong crowd. Beneath his rough exterior, they detected a courage and dignity that couldn’t be taught, the instinct and poise of a born champion. So they decided to give him…
Bjorn DiMaio is sixteen years old, Anthony Vincent is seventeen. Next Monday, in accordance with Florida law, the two boys will begin serving second-degree murder sentences for the killing of their best friend, Andrew Morello. According to the official version of events, the sixteen-year-old Morello was shot and killed on…
United States District Court Judge Federico Moreno gave the City of Coral Gables a spanking this past Thursday in federal court and upheld the right of New Times to be distributed in distinctive red boxes throughout the so-called City Beautiful. Since seizing seven New Times boxes and 400 copies of…
Harvey Ruvin didn’t think it was going to be any big deal. When the veteran county commissioner met with attorney/activist Dan Paul months ago to discuss a proposed county charter amendment that would require a countywide referendum on major commercial projects in parks, he figured the measure was a gimme…
For most of the past decade, South Beach was anything but a Miami Vice pastel playground for the young and restless. From Alton Road to Collins Avenue, the hunched-over elderly lined the porches of dilapidated residential hotels and apartment buildings. Landlords allowed Art Deco edifices to decay with little regard…
Years ago, when Dean Powell moved to Broward, he swore off Miami for good. In the eyes of the Sixties hippie turned computer-programming yuppie, the Magic City had lost its luster, yet another soulless metropolis with neither direction nor purpose, bloating in the sun. Yet something called him back for…
Swamilike, the man they call Tomato Richard is seated peacefully in a folding lawn chair beneath an oak tree in Coconut Grove, his thin legs crossed so tightly they’re braided, a flip-flop dangling from bony toes. He’s holding forth in his crackly tenor about the spiritual pleasures of the farmers’…
Just when zealous county and state bureaucrats thought they had all their ducks in a row last Tuesday, up popped Kirk Swing, bandy-legged homunculus, noisy organizer, ecological heretic. Swing installs large neon signs for a living but yearns for wilderness. Lately he’s taken to toting a faded snapshot in his…
For the past several weeks radio listeners tuning in to WDNA-FM (88.9) have heard only static where once they could find Miami’s most eclectic music mix: jazz, Latin, blues, folk, rock, and funk. Not to mention Indian, Haitian, Pakistani, and more. Those curious or desperate fans of the community-sponsored, nonprofit…
