For two years, Miguel Exposito was the head honcho at the Miami Police Department. They were jolly times for the Magic City’s muckrakers, who made an easy living as Exposito butted heads with Mayor Tomas Regalado and produced a too-crazy-to-be-true litany of scandals and shootings. When he was fired in…
Since 31-year-old Rudy Eugene was shot and killed by a Miami Police officer while devouring a homeless man’s face, his family has stayed mum. But this evening, Eugene’s former stepfather, who raised Eugene through much of his childhood, spoke for the first time to Riptide– and said that the police…
Nash Perez was driving his kids home from a Sunday afternoon at the Miami Children’s Museum when a curious sight made him tap his brakes. A few hundred feet ahead, about midway up the sharp hill 395 climbs near the Miami Herald, a naked man was gesturing angrily at the…
People who knew face-eating Rudy Eugene before he became the “Miami Zombie” have been telling news outlets– including this one– that he was a good kid who must have been made insane by a drug binge. But Eugene previously had at least one extremely violent episode, when he was 22…
Ronald Poppo is currently in critical condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital after having large portions of his face chewed off by Rudy Eugene on Saturday near the MacArthur Causeway. However, it’s not Poppo’s first trip to Jackson Memorial Hospital after receiving near-fatal injuries in downtown Miami. Poppo was shot at…
New arrest numbers are out from Miami Beach during the four-day Memorial Day weekend that now coincides with the loosely organized Urban Beach Week. Despite a beefed-upped police presence, cops made just 373 arrests this year compared to 431 last year.So who was getting arrested? The vast majority were black…
North Miami Beach mom Vivianne Perpignan remembers Rudy Eugene as just another good kid from the football team, who’d stop by her house while hanging out with her son Teddy. The Perpignans live on a residential street a five minute drive from North Miami Beach High, and the neighborhood feels…
Despite disputed reports of a 2,000-person arrest quota, Miami Beach Police only cuffed 321 people during the three-day Memorial Day weekend. That’s slightly down from 332 arrests last year, and the vast majority of those arrests were for misdemeanors. Crowd numbers too seemed to have been down as well. We…
So a naked a man was shot and killed by City of Miami police yesterday after he was caught literally chewing off the face of another man on a sidewalk near the MacArthur Causeway. That’s really all you need to know to send your head off into a tizzy, but…
The first high-profile arrest of Miami Beach police’s pumped-up presence heading into Memorial Day weekend or just a coincidence?New Yorks Knicks player J.R. Smith was arrested on South Beach on a warrant for not having a valid driver’s license last night around 9…
Kyle Morrison, 22, has been arrested for trying to storm the American Airlines Arena court without pants during the Miami Heat’s win against the Indiana Pacers Tuesday night. He now faces charges of disorderly conduct, resisting an officer with violence, battery on an officer, trespassing, and indecent exposure. Apparently the guy…
Remember last Memorial Day weekend on South Beach? Yes, that was the one when Miami Beach cops unloaded more than a hundred rounds into the car of Raymond Herisse, a Palm Beach resident police say tried to run them over on Collins Avenue. Not all those bullets hit Herisse, though. At…
Are Miami Beach Police planning to arrest 2,000 people during the notorious Memorial Day weekend parties on South Beach? As in they’ve actually set a quota regardless of whether or not 2,000 deserve to be arrested. To put that in prospective, the record number of arrests over Memorial Day weekend…
Ten days after the City of Miami evicted the Occupy Miami camp from the Government Center downtown, reporter Michael Miller and I visited “Fort Peace,” the inner city apartment complex opened as a safehouse to the movement by Rodrigo “Señor Paz” Duque.One of the first photos I shot, of seven…
Somewhere in Miami there’s a masseur named Jeff. If you run into him, buy the poor bastard a drink or an appetizer or something — he’s been through enough already. Jeff was just trying to give John Travolta a massage at the Eden Roc when Mr. Saturday Night Fever grabbed…
Frank Cairo is used to being on camera. He currently works for TV Azteca, but has had hosting stints on Univision, Telemundo and Mega TV. Though, his latest on-camera work shows him stealing two lawn chairs and a rug from his neighbors apartment in Doral. Cairo, whose real name is…
Prosecutors in the Trayvon Martin case released a stash of evidence to a mouth-watering press horde yesterday evening, making public hundreds of pages of witness testimony, medical reports and photos. The headline takeaways: Zimmerman was hurt (his nose broken and head bloodied) and a few neighbors told police he was…
Joaquin Serrapio Jr., the 20-year-old Miami college student who threatened to kill President Barack Obama in messages posted on Facebook and Twitter, will now plead guilty in the case. Serrapio, a local bar band musician who also went by the name of Jay Valor, wrote on Facebook back in February…
Insurance fraud is a really tough crime to prove, especially when scammers deliberately set fires. To show it’s arson, all kinds of experts have to do painstaking analysis on burn patterns and chemical traces. It’s incredibly time consuming and difficult.That’s assuming, of course, that the crooks aren’t total morons who…
Photo by Eric BartonPhillips served as his own attorney for years while A trying to prove his innocence.A federal judge declined today to release a man from prison where he is serving a 24-year term on drug charges, despite the fact that prosecutors have agreed to drop the charges against…
Ronald Miranda, one of the FBI’s most wanted men who disappeared for 31 years only to resurface in Florida City, will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. The 65-year-old was convicted last month of the 1980 murder of Mitch Arambel in Los Banos, California. Yesterday a judge…
Last Thursday, a 31-year-old named Brian J. Weiss was holding a meeting in a Hilton hotel near Kennedy International Airport when a man pulled out a .380 Baretta and shot him five times in the head. That man, Gary Zalevsky, then killed himself as four others in the room dove…
