Crime & Police

Valentina Villafane estaba sentada en su aula de segundo grado cuando una bomba de gas lacrimógeno explotó en su escuela. La directora de su escuela privada fuera de Barquisimeto, Venezuela, lo vio primero: un guardia nacional lanzaba la bomba que voló entre los barrotes de la puerta del recinto educativo…

Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta ran the largest smuggling ring of the Miami’s cocaine-fueled heyday. The two high-school friends built a $2 billion trafficking empire, which snaked through multiple banks, states, properties, and even one speedboat-racing league. Though “Willy and Sal,” as they were known, were eventually caught and convicted after nearly a decade of court proceedings in the 1990s, Willy’s brother, Gustavo “Taby” Falcon, vanished 26 years ago before the feds could lock him up.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the county’s top prosecutor, made history yesterday. For the first time in her 24 years on the job, she charged a Miami-area cop for an on-duty shooting when she filed attempted manslaughter charges against North Miami Officer Jonathan Aledda, who shot Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man, in the leg last year.

Twenty-six years ago, the feds busted the biggest smuggling operations of the entire Cocaine Cowboys era, a $2 billion pipeline run by high-school pals Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta. It would take another decade of contentious court battles before the pair was finally convicted, wrapping up one of…

Rarely is it worth calling the cops over anything less than $20. Too much can go wrong to bring police into a fight over something worth the cost of a fancy sandwich. Candace Padavick, a Miami Beach resident, says she lived that very nightmare in 2013: After she couldn’t pay a $16 cab fare in cash, Padavick’s cabbie called the cops. Padavick, in the meantime, went inside to take a shower, and her doorman paid the cabbie.

Going into debt with a drug dealer is never a fantastic game plan. But police say one Miami man who stiffed his connection on $500 worth of narcotics ended up suffering far worse payback than he ever could have imagined. The victim, whom police haven’t identified, ended up kidnapped at…

In a broken-down speedboat off the coast of Cuba, Marty and Dana Gottesfeld watched the sun creep closer to the horizon. Salty wind whipped Dana’s chestnut-colored hair as her husband buckled himself into an orange life jacket. The facts were stark and unavoidable: Their boat was stuck in the middle…

The North Miami Police Department appears to be in disarray: In the past two years, the department failed a critical accreditation test and shot Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man. After audio emerged last week of the department’s chief describing widespread dysfunction among his cops, North Miami officials have been desperately trying reassure the public that the force is fixing its problems.

Across the nation, politicos and police alike have pushed a “compassionate” response to the heroin epidemic. Everyone from Chris Christie to Eric Holder have called the problem a public health crisis and argued the best response is a combination of reduced legal opioid prescriptions (in part through legal medical weed) and better treatment options for addicts.

Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man, was simply trying to help Arnaldo Rios Soto — an autistic man holding a toy truck — out of the street last July when North Miami Police Officer Jonathan Aledda shot Kinsey in the leg. Now, yet another officer involved in the case has told investigators that Aledda was warned before he shot that neither Kinsey nor the autistic man had a gun, according to a transcript of his testimony obtained by New Times.

Earlier this week, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office released an hourlong interview by North Miami Police Chief Gary Eugene — a move that sparked a new media firestorm over last July’s police shooting of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed black man lying in the street with his hands up. In the interview, Eugene describes a police department in disarray…

Alone in his car on the side of the highway, Corey Jones made his tenth call for help. Tinny music echoed through the speaker of the 31-year-old drummer’s iPhone. A streetlight shrouded the gray Hyundai Santa Fe in orange and highlighted bunches of trees along the I-95 ramp where the…

South Beach appears to be coming apart at the seams this month. Sure, spring break is nuts every year in Miami Beach, but 2017 was supposed to be different: Police have instituted liquor bans on the beach and even rolled out license-plate readers to try to track down alleged criminals who have entered the city.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami’s top prosecutor, hasn’t been the subject of much public outrage during her 24 years in office. Despite wielding a huge power over Miami’s criminal justice system, she’s largely flown below the radar since she took over for Janet Reno in 1993, despite having…

The three kids heard something in the night but figured mom was just arguing with her boyfriend Carlos. So they went back to sleep. Friday morning, 8-year-old Noah got up for school and awoke his siblings, 4-year-old Martha and 3-year-old Michael. Mom and Carlos still hadn’t stirred, so he walked…

In 2010, Miami-Dade County Police became the first law enforcement department in the nation to buy a drone. The $50,000, military-grade flying robot was paid for with a U.S. Department of Justice grant. But although buying an expensive drone is easy enough, figuring out how to legally fly what is basically a garbage can full of privacy-invading cameras is hard to do. So MDPD’s drone has sat virtually unused since 2011.