Yesterday, a little after 2 p.m., a woman went to visit her friend in her new home, a squat, pastel-painted ranch on a quiet block of SW 5th Terrace just off SW 8th Street in West Miami. When she walked inside, she found her friend on the floor, dead in…
Cutler Bay man smuggles cigarettes through the Port of Miami and goes to prison
Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega met with gay leaders earlier this afternoon at city hall, promising changes one week after the ACLU announced a suit charging that Beach cops regularly harass gay men in Flamingo Park. Noriega stressed that the two officers at the center of the ACLU suit…
Blood tests have been completed on Carlos Bertonatti, the aspiring musician accused of drunkenly killing a cyclist on the Rickenbacker Causeway last month and then speeding away. The verdict: Bertonatti was drunk. The 28-year-old’s BAC came back at .122, Riptide’s sources say. In Florida, anyone who blows over a .08 is liable…
Carlos Bertonatti, the musician charged with drunkenly killing a cyclist and then speeding away on the Rickenbacker Causeway last month, was handcuffed and escorted back to jail this morning. After Bertonatti pleaded not guilty to the charges of vehicular homicide, DUI manslaughter, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, and…
As we mentioned in our live blog, Riptide still isn’t entirely sure how it got an invite to the Super Bowl. And we have no comment on whether blackmail may or may not have been involved.Either way, we were there dammit! We saw Drew Brees carve up the Colts secondary, we watched…
Riptide got invited to the Super Bowl!We know. We couldn’t believe it either. It’s amazing what twenty bucks and some extremely compromising Polaroids of Roger Goodell at King of Diamonds will get you. Not that we have anything like that.Anyway, the point is we are at the muthaflippin Super Bowl…
Last summer, New Times brought you the story of Roman Vidal, a quiet Cutler Bay resident whom authorities linked to a very troubling international conspiracy. Starting in 2001, the 57-year-old smuggled millions of South American cigarettes through the Port of Miami, hidden beneath floorboards and shipments of yarn on freighters, bound…
Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega certainly picked a terrible day to leave the Beach for an out-of-state conference. First came a fiery meeting with the City Commission, when the police union decried plans to force them to help make up a city budget deficit. Then, lost amidst the sound…
Hit-and-run driver Carlos Bertonatti isn’t the only troublemaker in his family
More than 100 Miami Beach Police officers and members of the local Fraternal Order of Police chapter packed into the city commission chambers this afternoon with a simple — if fiery — message. The Beach is on its own for security at private Super Bowl events this week. As a…
To the unitiated, Super Bowl Media Day must sound like some outrageous backstage fantasy. Media and players partying together! Celebrities around every corner! Free buffet lunch! Well not to worry, ignorant and uninvited masses. Riptide is here to shatter those dreams. Imagine, instead, an airless room packed way beyond fire…
Chad Ochocinco hasn’t yet accecpted New Times’ informal offer to write a 10,000-word odyssey/cover story about wearing Snuggies at McDonald’s and living a double life as Esteban the Most Interesting Footballer in the World. But we’ll consider his effort this afternoon at Sun Life Stadium a trial run. With a massive uniformed…
Frustrations came near a boiling point in Haiti this weekend, as Gov. Charlie Crist and President Obama bickered over who was to blame for a suspension of flights bringing injured Haitians to Florida hospitals.Crist says the feds stopped the planes after he asked for help in paying for treatment. Obama…
A prisoner’s offhand request for some holiday liquor led to a sting operation that yesterday brought down a guard at Miami’s downtown Federal Detention Center on charges of selling alcohol and cocaine to inmates. The FBI arrested Octavius Allen, a 37-year-old guard, charging he made thousands of dollars by unloading plastic…
A narcotics bust in West Miami took a wild turn last night, with a high-speed chase leading to a foot race leading to undercover cops slaying a neighborhood dog to save a suspect in an Ecstasy ring. It all began around 7 p.m., says Officer Kenia Reyes, a spokeswoman for…
Lithium from Bolivia could reshape Miami and the world
It’s been more than one week since Carlos Bertonatti slammed into cyclist Christophe Le Canne on the Rickenbacker Causeway and then sped away as the 44-year-old died on the roadside, but the crime is still reverberating in the Magic City. Bertonatti, as we first reported here in Riptide, had a…
Beneath the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats in a remote corner of South America’s poorest nation, there’s an untapped fortune below the white crust. Nearly half the world’s lithium — 5.4 million tons of it, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — lies in the briny water…
Cyclists flooded the Rickenbacker Causeway this past Sunday for a memorial ride in honor of Christophe Le Canne, the 44-year-old biker killed in a horrific hit-and-run accident last weekend. As you can see in the video — shot by a Riptide reader — hundreds rode in the memorial, which began outside Mast…
One year ago, I traveled to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to watch firsthand as President Barack Obama pledged to close the extrajudicial prison. I was witness to Guantánamo’s “final days,” I wrote. It seemed like a reasonable thing to say. After all, on his very first day in office, Obama promised…
Bart Sherwood passes the grisly photos around the Miami-Dade County Commission chambers.In the first image, his face is scraped and swollen, his arms are wrapped in plaster, and IVs run into his body. In the other, one ass cheek is completely covered in gauze, and his back is a mess…
