You are seven feet, two inches tall. You own two dozen pairs of size eighteen high-top sneakers. You are painfully addicted to The Andy Griffith Show. Where are you? If your name is Alan Ogg A and it would almost have to be A you are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, watching…
Panchanita Fordham is outside on the front steps of Northwestern Holy High School with the Lord’s tingle in her belly so bad she’s buckling at the knees. From her right hand hangs a borrowed Bible, from her left a Kool cigarette, which she attacks with the ferocity of the ex-junkie…
Among those historians who have made it their business to inspect the tainted archives of Western imperialism, it is widely believed that the first slave ship to return with human cargo from Africa was christened the Jesus Christ. Whether apocryphal or not, the notion that a Christ delivered the first…
Miami has simply gone mad for Thomas Kramer, that debonair German millionaire who’s gobbled up South Pointe like so much brautwurst during Octoberfest. Everyone’s talking about the man. And since the New Times cover story, “Tycoon Thomas,” appeared on December 16, callers have swamped the paper’s office with Kramer sightings…
In a matchup the sportswriters are calling the Super Bowl of College Football, the University of Miami Hurricanes, ranked number one in the nation, will battle number-two Alabama in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day. Fans will cram the New Orleans Superdome for the showdown of undefeated teams. Approximately…
When Dennis Whitt returned to Opa-locka from Tampa on December 11, he wore the broad smile of a vindicated man. The reason: barring a minor miracle, police officer Charles Jones would finally lose his badge. Whitt, a vociferous city manager and ex-cop, says the 46-year-old Jones is a “disgrace to…
Considering the circumspect tenor of his campaign, Bill Clinton’s first major policy decision ranked as a doozy. Just one week after his triumph over George Bush, the president-elect stunned a phalanx of reporters massed around the State House rotunda in Little Rock, Arkansas, by promising to lift the 48-year-old ban…
Given the lurid particulars, it’s not surprising that no one wants to talk about the charges filed against Ignacio A. Perea, Jr. The son of a successful Hialeah business owner, 31-year-old Perea stands accused of raping three young boys last fall. “To hear these kids’ stories,” reports one source at…
Annette Beauplan picked up the phone, and for a few seconds she lost her bearings. She knew the voice on the line was her brother, Maxau Pierre. But she couldn’t figure out where in God’s name he was calling from. “He was flying back from Haiti that day and I…
In the clubs and restaurants of Miami’s Jamaican community, they still tell stories about the Mighty Viking. Stories, mostly, about his death: “He’d just been with a lady, you know, and he went to take a shower. That’s where they got him.” “The Mighty Viking — that was something the…
From the outset, this was not a routine Immigration and Naturalization Service raid. For one thing, the timing was all wrong. The three INS agents arrived at Gula Gula more than an hour before the restaurant opened. The setting made no sense, either. Rather than bursting into the kitchen to…
About this there can be no argument: hours after his May 1 run-in with two of Miami Beach’s finest, Roger Zayas wound up with one doozy of a shiner. Less certain is to what extent Zayas’s black eye will bruise the carefully cultivated relationship between Miami Beach police and the…
On July 20, State Attorney Janet Reno sent a four-page letter to circuit court Chief Judge Leonard Rivkind proposing the formation of a new Youthful Offender Court. Such a court, Reno explained, would allow a judge to draw upon “a full range of adult and juvenile sanctions” in sentencing young…
In their more candid moments, they refer to themselves as “the underground” — always in hushed tones, and often with the trace of paranoia that haunts the sleep-deprived. Their base of operations: the shadowy regions of Red Cross headquarters, at 1657 NW Seventeenth Ave. Their mission: to bypass an insensitive…
Hurricane Andrew’s assault on Dade left the county’s nature lovers with a monumental grievance to lay at the feet of Mother Nature, in the form of a million or so scattered trees and acres of wind-blasted real estate. But the storm not only laid waste to Miami’s landscape, it may…
Traffic signage, in case you hadn’t noticed, tends toward the functional: Stop. Merge. Yield. The strictures of rush-hour attention spans, not to mention space, preclude anything approaching flamboyance. Were poetry their medium, the nation’s traffic sign specialists would no doubt produce haiku of the driest variety. How, then, to explain…
Since his arrival in May 1990, Miami Beach Police Chief Phillip Huber has taken a number of steps to erase public perception that his department is rife with gay-bashing bruisers. The boldest measure, one widely praised by gay activists, was the introduction in spring 1991 of sensitivity classes designed to…
“Every cabbage,” Frenchman Jean Giraudoux once wrote, “has its pimp.” Given the absurd mutterings Giraudoux inflicted upon his characters, the line passed as little more than fanciful. Surely the playwright could never have anticipated the true-life biker corollary to his queer pronouncement: Every hog must have its trademark attorney. At…
Dorothy Richardson has never thought much of police officers. “Got no use for them,” snaps the 60-year-old retiree, whose night table is stacked with medications for arthritis and other assorted ailments. “Survived so far without them and I’ll survive the rest. Shoot, I don’t even call the police when trouble…
Harvey Ruvin didn’t think it was going to be any big deal. When the veteran county commissioner met with attorney/activist Dan Paul months ago to discuss a proposed county charter amendment that would require a countywide referendum on major commercial projects in parks, he figured the measure was a gimme…
In its own paradoxical fashion, the Haitian Refugee Center’s lawsuit against Secretary of State James Baker was a coup. A media coup. The court action, filed in November 1991 and aimed at blocking the repatriation of refugees fleeing the September 30 military coup in Haiti, catapulted the local agency into…
At a time in history when South Florida’s mainstream media have devoted unprecedented resources to brainless babies and crackhouse testimonials, it’s comforting to know that at least one member of the fourth estate is determined to keep the grounds free of garbage. The Lantana-based Weekly World News scored another journalistic…
