Things you should never ask your co-workers: If they believe in a Righteous Christian God; if they want to Make America Great Again; if they “have a Brazilian wax.” The last one rings especially true if you happen to work as a cop. In a lawsuit filed last Friday, Miami-Dade…
The grainy security video shows Steven Rodgers, a 43-year-old Miami-Dade County Public Schools Police officer, inside his Miami Edison Senior High School office. His silver badge glints against the dark blue of his uniform as he grins into the camera. And his penis is in his hand as he pleasures…
The action in Carl Hiassen’s Miami crime novel debut Tourist Season begins when a body is found floating down a river in a suitcase. That was very much fiction, but the idea of body parts being found stuffed into weird things in weird places remains very much a chilling reality…
Two men burst into a suburban Delray Beach office park on a muggy weekday in August 2014, demanding to talk to the CEO. They were there to get answers. In a beige office lobby decorated with abstract IKEA-style art, their target crossed his arms and smiled nervously. Dressed in an…
A lot of weird things happen in Florida every week, and on Fridays we’re here to bring you the weirdest. Elderly Florida Man Shoots Up Woman’s Home Over Sex Refusal The Villages is Central Florida’s massive planned retirement community that sometimes gains national notice for its reputation of unbridled elderly…
From The Sting to Oceans 11 to The Inside Man, good heist tales are widely loved in America. Though Miami may not have any masterminding thieves quite as suave as George Clooney and Robert Redford, the Magic City has been home to its fair share of amazing and downright bizarre real-life…
One of Rafael Pedroza’s earliest acting credits was a burglar on the Colombian soap opera Me Amaras Bajo La Lluvia (or, in English, You Loved Me in The Rain). Now he’s a suspect in a real life robbery here in Miami-Dade. Sunny Isles Beach Police are on the hunt for…
Migdalia “Milly” Cowan and her husband, Alex Paez, were regulars on the national bodybuilding circuit, traveling cross country to flex while glistening in Speedos. But while they competed, prosecutors say, they left their horses — which they used as props in muscled photoshoots — to starve back on their South…
Davone Bess’s latest bizarre confrontation with police started as a simple, routine traffic stop and then quickly escalated to a standoff with a SWAT team. Bess, best known as a former player with the Miami Dolphins, is behind bars today in Maricopa County, Arizona and facing three felony charges after the…
Around 9:30 one night back in March, residents in a Palmetto Bay neighborhood called police about a man who was outside apparently smashing car windows and puncturing car tires with a pick-axe. Officers quickly arrived to investigate and soon traced the suspect, 25-year-old Ethan Rincon, to his home on Southwest…
The evidence that FIU professor David Ralston raped an unconscious woman seems strong. The attack was caught on surveillance video, they say, that he had set up in his Lee County home. So when Ralston got word that detectives were trying to persuade him to voluntarily surrender, Ralston fled. After more…
Tatiana F. Tascon had a good little scam going for a while. Out of a showroom set up in her pricey Coconut Grove home Tascon peddled fake designer handbags from the likes of Louis Vuitton and counterfeit Rolex watches. Through selling clients a fake version of the good life earned over $700,000…
For months, Marco Rubio has resisted increasingly desperate calls from his colleagues to throw his name back into the ring for the bruising race for his seat in the U.S. Senate. But Rubio hinted yesterday that he might just be softening that stance because the massacre in Orlando had pushed…
Outside of Orlando itself, few places have been as closely impacted by the massacre at Pulse Nightclub as Miami — and in particular the Magic City’s LGBT community. South Florida’s gay scene is closely linked to that in central Florida, and at least one of the victims who died Sunday…
In the horrible hours after 49 club-goers were massacred in Orlando early Sunday morning, everyone in Florida grasped for how to respond to the brutal tragedy. Family members texted and checked in safe on Facebook. Hundreds lined up to donate blood. And one Florida sheriff decided the moment…
At least fifty people are dead, authorities have now confirmed, in an overnight mass shooting inside a packed gay nightclub in Orlando. At least 53 others were wounded and are in local hospitals. Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency and leaders asked for blood donors to step…
The call came in to police at 1:16 a.m. November 22, 2009: a burglary in progress at the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Marina, a former yacht club that had become a resort hotel perched on the Intracoastal Waterway just off the 17th Street Causeway. Kenneth Post, the burglar, was a 46-year-old,…
Eleazar Gadea thought that all it takes to get your way with Miami-Dade County government is a few discretely handed off $100 bills. He even thought that perhaps the county would look the other way if he wanted to hold a paint party until 4 a.m. despite local zoning laws…
Last week, Miami Beach Police busted a brazen cocaine and gambling operation run out of South Beach’s VFW hall. An illegal betting machine ran out in the open in the smoky South Beach bar, police say, while a bartender and a regular openly sold drugs. But the police failed to mention…
Financial schemes are so common in Miami that not even one of the area’s most respected research institutes is safe from fraudster’s sticky fingers. The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the University of Miami’s highly regarded Virginia Key-based oceanography school, was embezzled out of $2.3 million over a…
While the general consensus is that the calamity and controversy surrounding Urban Beach Weekend has continued to calm down since its peak in 2011, the arrest totals in Miami Beach over the 5-day Memorial Day weekend period were slightly up from last year. Police made 195 total arrests in Miami Beach…
Mention Miami today to an out-of-towner and a few images immediately pop to mind: Crockett and Tubbs in glorious pastel, white sand beaches and lots of extremely attractive people in scant clothing bathing in the sun. Miami is sexy. There is no denying it. But at heart the Magic City…
