The neighborhood park is a thing of verdant beauty: Manicured baseball diamonds and other athletic fields. Shaded playgrounds of swing sets and sandboxes. Unsullied green spaces, woods punctuated by nature paths, quiet lakes and ponds. Tennis and racquetball courts in private condominium complexes. Rec rooms. saunas and spas. Television lounges…
On February 1, readers of the Miami Herald learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee had made a public appearance in one of Dade’s most beautiful parks. An extraordinarily public appearance. “Two Metro-Dade police officers reported finding Albee, 63, naked in Crandon Park on Jan. 19,” read the story, filed…
My good friend Zap is on the phone, telling me the monkeys are gonna whistle tonight. Naturally I believe him. I take inventory: A T-shirt, two sweatshirts, a sleeveless exercise jacket with hood, a London Fog with hood. Bandanna, hat, two pairs of socks, sneakers. Plenty of smokes. A Thermos…
Last August, on the day Bob Kunst was fired from Cure AIDS Now after a spate of allegations, audits, and front-page Miami Herald stories, an uncharacteristic silence emanated from the Miami Beach residence of the AIDS organization’s deposed executive director. Bob Kunst, the Herald reported tersely the next day, could…
Smuggling cocaine into the United States wasn’t Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta’s only business venture. According to federal agents, the pair was also heavily into the South Florida real estate market. During the past eight months, the U.S. Marshals Service has seized more than $16 million in property they say…
It was a day for redemption, a chance to win back a little respect after years of embarrassment. Everyone wanted to be in on the arrest of Willy and Sal, to be able to say they’d been there when the legend died. So on a rainy afternoon last…
Crack all the jokes you want about household engineering and inefficient repairmen, but Irving Spiegel isn’t laughing. For three years, he and his employees at Mirror Poster Printing in downtown Miami waded through shoelace-deep effluent while a procession of bumbling Metro-Dade and private plumbers continually unclogged their commodes. The problem…
Today Danny Donovan is a wealthy man. To begin with, the 30-year-old handyman is about to receive $2.2 million in cash. After that he’ll receive $20,000 per month for the rest of his life, plus an extra $50,000 every five years. All of it is tax-free. But he’ll probably never…
The relatively new and still evolving retail used-CD business is sending a capitalist shiver through the old-style marketeers, sparking debate, not to mention outrage, in the boardrooms of major record labels, distributors, and retailers. A used compact disc often costs less off the shelf than a new one costs wholesale…
In the dimly lighted courtyard of the Bayside Motor Inn on Biscayne Boulevard, newly arrived Haitian refugees cluster in doorways and against walls, speaking softly in Creole. Mona Coicou wanders through the shadows from room to room, looking for her sister, once a judge in Port-au-Prince. “I spoke to her…
By the time accounts of Paula Redo’s arrest hit the evening news, acquaintances, even friends, had trouble recognizing the 29-year-old Lauderhill woman. Her cheeks bruised and purple, one eye puffed into a grim wink, Redo’s face reflected the fate of a boxer with too strong a chin. As did her…
Si Ayiti pa fore, ou jwenn tout bet ladan-l If Haiti isn’t a jungle, why then all these beasts? – from “Ayiti pa fore” (“Haiti Is Not a Forest”) by Manno Charlemagne Under the pinkish lights, Manno Charlemagne’s features looked exaggerated. Somehow too real, fans would later say, his stubborn…
By noon the New York Timesman was tipsy on bootleg champagne. His necktie was long gone, and he found himself stumbling up an endless flight of stairs. The whole scene was too much. Since stepping off the train in Miami two days ago, January 14, 1926, he’d been pulled and…
At least in terms of its location, there isn’t all that much to recommend the Howard Johnson Port of Miami Hotel. The view across Biscayne Boulevard – Bicentennial Park and the port beyond – isn’t bad, but nor is it anything to write home about to the folks back in…
It was the strangest sort of mass hypnosis, like Jonestown without the candy colors and the suicides. Only twelve months have passed since someone somewhere kicked sand across the line in the desert and E Pluribus Unum temporarily, tantalizingly, rang with high truth. Suddenly we were a country of drive,…
On the Wednesday in April 1988 that Kenneth E. Moore walked into his video store and asked to buy five kilos of cocaine, proprietor Sam Ferguson wasn’t hurting for cash. Ferguson had met the Delray businessman through mutual acquaintances, and for the Liberty City shop owner it was no big…
For years John Schiefer’s family took meticulous care of their prize Cadillac, a white 1973 convertible Eldorado identical to the pace car used at the Indianapolis 500 that year. The car was a gem when Schiefer’s parents gave it to him as a wedding gift two years ago. The spare…
It was members’ night at Uncle Charlie’s, and everyone was having a pretty good time drinking and dancing to the DJ’s mix of Top 40 tunes. Until about 1:00 a.m., that is, when 30 masked men burst through the door of the bar, wielding clubs. “Everybody thought they were gay-bashers…
If there was ever a test of your sobriety, manual dexterity, and trust in others, it’s launching yourself onto Dade’s unsympathetic roadways astride a bicycle. As any cyclist new to Miami finds out soon enough, this ain’t Holland. In fact, one need only look at the area’s fatality and accident…
Evelyn Streiff is muttering something about her father, about the suicide he planned as a starving young lad on the Lower East Side and abandoned for a hitch with the cavalry in Kansas, back when Miami Beach was a soggy tongue of land full of critters and mangroves and, in…
For John Featherstone, the nature tours were the best part of working at Arch Creek Park. The self-taught naturalist enjoyed leading groups of schoolchildren along winding trails, the leafy brown mulch crackling beneath their feet as he’d point out the flora and fauna in the shady, eight-acre green space off…
When Miami Herald sportswriter Gary Long picked the University of Washington over the hometown Hurricanes as the number one football team in the land, he catapulted himself to public enemy number one in Miami. Long, who contributes South Florida’s only opinion to the highly respected Associated Press rankings, had the…
