For nearly five years, Telmo Ricardo Hurtado lived a quiet life in sleepy Surfside, moving between low-rent apartments just off Collins Avenue with his mom and his younger brother. Neighbors knew him as a quiet, middle-aged Peruvian who kept to himself. No one saw the day coming in 2007 when…
An unruly high speed car chase that lead police on a pursuit of one or possibly two armed robbery suspects through out the streets of Miami this morning ended when the driver violently crashed his car into the back of a tanker truck on I-95. The driver survived and was…
If the Dolphins’ Phillip Merling did violently assault his pregnant fiancée it seems he won’t be facing any formal consequences for it. The Broward State Attorney’s office has announced that they’re dropping all charges after the victim in the case refused to continue cooperating. The Dolphins meanwhile never punished Merling. Even following his arrest…
Stephanie Peterson, age 22, was babysitting a young child in the apartment of Kizzy Williams, 31, when her boyfriend showed up ready for an argument. Tavaris Fair, 25, fired several shots in the North Miami apartment before ending his own life after a long standoff with police…
A bit of free legal advice from the offices of Riptide and Riptide, LLC: If you’ve just finished drunkenly swerving your car into a school bus full of children and someone thrusts a TV camera in your face, plead the fifth. Or walk away. Or act like you only speak…
Last May, we brought you the story of Albert Gonzalez, Jonathan James, and their Miami-based band of hackers who engineered the largest online credit card theft ever before it all fell apart. The story, even six months later, is still incredible.Now the New York Times Magazine has weighed in, devoting…
Miami-Dade police didn’t hear the gunshots, but they did hear the phone ring. If it wasn’t for an anonymous phone call they may not have found the body of a dead man in a Northwest Miami-Dade apartment. Now, with little clues and few apparent witnesses police must solve the mysterious…
Reggae star Buju Banton, who faces a February retrial on a criminal charge of conspiring to buy cocaine from an undercover police officer, could soon be released from Tampa jail. He has been locked up for the past 11 months. On November 4, Federal Judge James S. Moody Jr. denied…
If you’re going to use part of your place of residence as a make-shift marijuana grow house, South Beach probably isn’t the best neighborhood to do it. For one thing, rent is expensive. Sure maybe your “side business” helps off set that, but you’re also dealing with thin walls, small…
Allen Stanford, the would-be cricket baron who engineered an $8 billion Ponzi scheme from his Miami headquarters, bought Coral Gables castles for his mistresses, and all-but ruled Antigua as a personal fiefdom, has not had an easy go of it in prison since the fraud disintegrated last year. He checked…
I think a lot of people love David Cassidy, so what are they so afraid of? Maybe that he’ll swerve into them in his white Mercedes while allegedly driving drunk. Yes, the former teen idol and Partridge Family star, now 60, was arrested in South Florida for driving drunk. When…
In a story sure to outrage the Marco Rubio camp on the eve of the midterms, two Florida firefighters have resigned after an investigation into their tea-bagging while on duty. What kind of upside-down nation are we living in where two public servants can’t express their pol … oh wait…
We all know cigarettes are deadly, but for at least the second time this year in Miami a man has died following a fight that started over a cigarette. An unidentified 54-year-old man is dead after a fight broke out somehow spurred by an argument about a smoke. 29-year-old Frank Alonso has been…
Tipsy beach bunnies routinely barf in their back seats. Robbers put guns to their heads, demanding cash. Crack addicts try to beat them to death for no reason.Life is tough for Miami’s 4,500 cab drivers. Now it’s getting tougher, as they could have to pay for new security cameras meant…
Was anybody surprised by the allegation that two brothers– one a Surfside police officer and one a Tremont Towing driver– were involved in a bribery scheme? Tiny Surfside is historically scandal-ridden, and this year another cop there was cuffed for a scheme involving false accident reports and insurance payouts. Tremont…
Rakontur is currently finishing up Square Grouper, their documentary on Miami’s pot smuggling heydays, but that’s not all in the past. The South Florida US Attorney’s Office announced that they recently found a boat just miles off the coast of Miami packed with 800 pounds of pot. Four arrests have…
In a Jacksonville courthouse yesterday, Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, pleaded guilty to charges of second-degree murder in the death of her 3-month-old son, Dylan Lee Edmondson. Her chilling motive: The boy was annoying Tobias while she was trying to play the highly addictive Facebook game Farmville. She was too busy…
Police are searching for suspects in two separate firearm attacks that occurred overnight in North Miami-Dade. One was fatal; the other victim is not expected to survive. A 25-year-old man was found shot to death near his black SUV near Barry University in Miami Shores. In the other shooting, a…
Surfside is one of those three-block hamlets that subsists entirely on the hundred-dollar fines slapped on drivers unlucky enough to crawl through a hair over the limit. Surfside PD doesn’t exactly have a lot of CSI-worthy affairs to spend their time on (although they did fine work tracking that masturbator…
Miami Police have arrested a suspect in a recent rash of taxi cab robberies.Christopher Albert Debanos, 21, was arrested yesterday on robbery, burglary, and gun charges in connection to as many as seven stick-ups this summer. Debanos has already confessed to at least one of the robberies, according to police…
Residents of two blocks of a Miami neighborhood awoke this morning to find their street littered with the corpses of dozens of headless animals, NBC Miami reports. Neighbors heard a loud boom early in the morning and came outside to discover the stench and sight of the bodies…
Miami has long been the country’s capitol for Medicare fraud schemes, and today federal authorities arrested four people associated with American Therapeutic Corporation and charged the Miami-based company with fleecing $200 million from Medicare. The company is accused of preying on patients with severe dementia, and forcing them to go…
