Despite New Times basically devoting an entire beat to Miami Police Capt. Javier Ortiz’s shameful exploits over the last decade, he’s only managed to fail upward, ascending the ranks from lieutenant last year. While he’s technically stepped “down” from running Miami’s Fraternal Order of Police union, he remains the…
On November 26, Fort Lauderdale Police found Bob Karpinen slumped over dead on a bench at Colee Hammock Park. Identifying the body wasn’t difficult — the 58-year-old had an ID in his wallet and a pill bottle with his name and his doctor’s name listed on the side. Officers Jesus Gonzalez and Scott Bellinger filled out a report, jotting down contact information for Karpinen’s 77-year-old mother in Delray Beach.But for some reason, neither officer bothered contacting her or anyone else in the family. Within hours, Karpinen’s body was hauled off, his property seized, and the report closed out.
At her home in the tiny village of Palm Springs, just outside Lake Worth, Anna Mae Kiger started each morning the same way. After rising around 7, she walked down the driveway to pick up her newspaper. Then the 75-year-old Air Force veteran hoisted an American flag high up a…
“This is new?” a worried passenger asks while she films U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stalking the aisle of a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale and demanding proof of citizenship from the riders. Moments later, the agents arrest a passenger, pulling her and her luggage off the bus.
Blanco laid the violence on thick to convince male kingpins around her that she was not to be messed with.
When a series of disturbances and insurrections erupted across state prisons nationwide in 2016 on the anniversary of New York’s 1971 Attica prison riots, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) danced around acknowledging whether a set of incidents that had occurred in the Sunshine State were related to the nationwide movement.
Various media sources are reporting this morning that Kodak Black, one of the most talented rappers in South Florida but a magnet for trouble, has been arrested for grand theft of a firearm, possession of marijuana, child neglect, two counts of possession of a weapon by a felon, and two counts of probation violation.
Apparently, living off his fame as an ’80s Miami cocaine smuggler tied to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel wasn’t quite enough for Michael “Mickey” Munday. One of the Magic City’s most colorful characters and a man who hosts film events and parties all over town, he was found guilty today of smuggling cars for an enormous auto-theft ring.
When FX’s American Crime Story premieres tonight, Miamians will be familiar with much of the landscape. Season 2 of the hit series explores the assassination of Gianni Versace, who was gunned down on the front steps of his Ocean Drive mansion in 1997. The death of the iconic Italian fashion designer stunned South Beach and sent police scrambling to find the murderer.
Hundreds of people demonstrated in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park yesterday to protest the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention of two of the city’s most prominent immigrant activists: Ravi Ragbir and Jean Montrevil. The two run the city’s New Sanctuary Coalition, a group that helps families fight deportation…
Cornelius Brown lived with schizophrenia and liked to carry a broomstick around his Opa-locka neighborhood “playing nunchucks.” His family says that simply being black and carrying a stick in public eventually got him killed at the age of 25. In 2015, Opa-locka Police officers said they were forced to shoot Brown dead after he attacked them.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing drugs — so long as you’re not in the business of arresting other people who do drugs. This has been the dilemma for Miami-area cops since the city’s cocaine explosion began in the 1970s and ’80s — getting paid to bust people for drugs…
Nestor Yglesias, ICE’s South Florida spokesperson, confirmed that five 7-Eleven locations from Vero Beach to Homestead had been visited by ICE agents today.
According to a lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade County Court, Miami Police Officer Adrian Santos was thrown out of the downtown Miami nightclub E11even in the early-morning hours of November 18, tossed into the back of a cop car, and given a drug test. He was quickly fired but claims in court he had no idea why.
When the summer sun in Florida pushes temperatures past 100 degrees, state prisoners — the vast majority of whom are stuck in jail without air-conditioning on drug charges — feel it. When those inmates work (they were forced, for example, to clean up after Hurricane Irma), they typically don’t get a dime in return. When their mostly poor families send them money for food and necessities, a $4 case of soup costs $17.
Michael DeFilippi peers down a dingy Miami Beach alley a few blocks from Ocean Drive, watching intently as two men in red T-shirts and baseball caps disappear into the early-evening darkness. He’s absolutely, positively convinced they’re drug dealers — has been since hours earlier that November day, when, he says,…
Antonio Brooklen was sworn in as police chief in Miami Gardens — one of the poorest and most crime-plauged areas of Miami-Dade County — in November 2015. The previous chief had been arrested in a prostitution sting. Less than a year later, Brooklen quit. While he says he left to…
Late last year, the Miami Beach stoner whose exploits in arms dealing became the basis of War Dogs, agreed to dismiss his lawsuit against Warner Bros., in which he’d claimed the company stole parts of his memoir and falsely marketed the movie as a true story.
Most killings by police likely don’t need to happen. They are extremely rare in European countries — only five people were shot dead by law enforcement in the entire United Kingdom in 2017. According to figures recently released by MappingPoliceViolence.org, a national anti-police-brutality activist group, 1,129 people were killed by police officers in the United States in 2017.
Boca Raton’s GEO Group — the second-largest private-prison company in America, which makes a huge portion of its income imprisoning people on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — has repeatedly denied that inmates in the prison facilities it runs are forced to work against their will.
Miami just wants to go one six-month stretch without a bystander getting hit by celebratory gunfire. Is that too much to ask? Every Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, city and county officials must remind South Florida’s insane, physics-challenged residents that, indeed, when you shoot a gun straight up into the air, those bullets don’t just magically rocket off into the sun.
This year was a hell of a lot better than 2016. Alabama Democrat Doug Jones overcame a child molester to win a spot in the U.S. Senate. Harvey Weinstein and his misogynist colleagues from Hollywood to Miami are on the run. The stock market is surging. And the new Star…
