Hagridden by rain squalls, queasy in seven-foot seas, kayaker Randy Fine gave up his final bid to break the world speed record for a human-powered Gulf Stream crossing. His defeat at the hands of a rather bitchy Mother Nature occurred on Friday the 13th last month, roughly midway between Miami…
The conversion from kick-boxer to one-man buffing crew probably won’t qualify among the world’s more common career moves. But then, Peter Vincent Ignatious Chin-Tai doesn’t boast one of the world’s more common resumes. The son of a Cantonese herbalist who fled China before World War II, Chin-Tai grew up in…
Basil Earle Wainwright slumps forward, stubby fingers pressed at the temples, head drooped to reveal strands of hair combed across bare scalp. A bottomless sigh whooshes through his lips, completing the pose he has carefully crafted to suggest a withering martyr: Jesus, perhaps, spared the cross and sent into the…
One night in September, after a jumping set with his band at Churchill’s Hideaway in Little Haiti, sweat-soaked singer-guitarist Hank Milne could be found on the sidewalk out front, pressing flesh and nodding off compliments. Everyone, it seemed, had something nice to say about the Volunteers’ debut concert. Except one…
On the day before her husband was anointed, once and for all, as the democratic frontrunner for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton was at a synagogue in North Miami Beach, knocking 300 old Jews on their collective tush. Rapping at a podium conspicuously free of cue cards, the comely Clinton invoked…
Three weeks shy of his 50th birthday, Jim Chambers could still move pretty quickly. As he set out across the field, the knees that had forced him to stop playing football two decades earlier were holding up well. He was charging hard, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping. He didn’t seem to…
Edward Margolis was raised on the AM radio wars of the 1960s. Back when Margolis was knee-high to a soundboard, his father Allan bought WMBM-AM (1490), a nearly bankrupt radio station on Miami Beach. The senior Margolis, a Wall Street dropout with a passion for rhythm and blues, leaped into…
It’s early afternoon, only hours before the opening bash at the newly restored Marlin Hotel on Miami Beach, and the place is alive. The traffic outside on Twelfth Street backs up behind semi-trucks unloading sound and stage equipment, and young, suave workers from Jamaica, Britain, New York, and Miami bustle…
Like the village that surrounds it, the Coconut Grove Playhouse has lived to middle age in more-or-less constant tension, its stage the locus of a long tug of war between art and commerce, spiritual ideals, and materialistic forces. For entire decades, as in the Thirties and Forties, the Spanish rococo…
Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta didn’t climb to the highest echelons of the drug world by sitting on their duffs and letting life pass them by. They were go-getters who turned adversity into opportunity. And in the process, federal prosecutors say, the partners built an empire. So it should come…
Pity the poor gallery owner. Face it, most people see art as a luxury, not something that’s required in order to make it through the day. When the economy turns sour, sales shrivel. But that hasn’t dissuaded Gables art dealers from hustling, forging ahead, looking for ways to keep business…
When Dexter Lehtinen resigned suddenly this past January 13 from his post as South Florida’s U.S. Attorney, prosecutors past and present joined together to celebrate. Gathering the night of the announcement, the group hoisted beers and breathed a collective sigh of relief amid strains of James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”…
With the New Hampshire and Georgia, et cetera, behind us, and the March 10 Florida primary looming, you may find yourself stomping around in circles, bellowing (in the manner of James Earl Jones in Yellow Pages ads), “Choices! I NEED choices!” – because the choices you’ve gotten so far just…
The fight began just after dusk and within minutes the scabbed asphalt in front of Bootsy’s Grocery was standing room only, the aimless human electricity of a Saturday night in Opa-locka conducted from the housing project across 22nd Avenue into a schoolyard knot around the spectacle. Monica Dawe, a 25-year-old…
In what might be the beginning of a lengthy legal battle, a state labor judge has ruled that Bob Kunst, fired this past August from his executive post at Cure AIDS Now, is entitled to the unemployment benefits he has been collecting. On February 17 Josefa Perez, an appeals referee…
One might be tempted to think two local fire departments would be able to devote their combined energies toward the common goal of providing an indispensable public service. But during cutthroat economic times, controversies erupt in the most unlikely places, and these days union leaders representing the City of Miami…
For the past 37 years the Florida Bar has honored media organizations for “outstanding journalism aimed at increasing public understanding of the system of law and justice in America, particularly in Florida.” In Tampa this past Saturday, New Times was presented with one of four Florida Bar Media Awards for…
On the morning of February 5, moments before her umpteenth press conference, Cheryl Little received an unsettling phone call. For Little, the crusading supervising attorney at Miami’s Haitian Refugee Center, unsettling phone calls have been part of the daily grind since a September 30 military coup toppled Haiti’s fledgling democracy…
The late-October sun was still asleep as Lawrence Allen and Tania Figuerola set out for the Keys and talked about things that only lovers know. They discussed their relationship, how in a giddy seven months they had reached profound depths of intimacy usually reserved for characters in romance novels. And…
When Miami Beach commissioners interview Norman Hickey for the island’s city manager post on Tuesday, they might consider asking the San Diego County administrator whether he’s still engrossed in contemplation of the Book of Revelation and the end of the world. Back in September 1985, when Hickey was in his…
Aside from a predilection for anchovies, Denise Cruz’s pizza fetish never sparked much controversy. In fact the self-employed bookkeeper was such a loyal crust hound when she lived in north Coconut Grove that employees of the Domino’s Pizza franchise at 3740 Bird Rd. knew her by her first name. But…
With the New Hampshire primary behind us, and the March 10 Florida primary looming, you may find yourself stomping around in circles, bellowing (in the manner of James Earl Jones in Yellow Pages ads), “Choices! I NEED choices!” Because the choices you’ve gotten so far just don’t cut it. The…
