Miami Beach voters might just get a chance this year to decriminalize pot. If the measure is approved, it would become the first city in South Florida to let small-time tokers off the hook with a $100 fine instead of criminal charges. That’s because Sensible Florida, a legalization group we…
Anthony Bourdain has the best travel show on television not just because he’s an asshole, but because he’s such a damn astute one. He doesn’t buy the Chamber of Commerce’s bullshit, but he also doesn’t lean on cynicism for its own sake. Like any good journalist, in other words, he…
British Alexander Mitchell, better known as rapper Brisco, turned himself in to North Miami police last night to face a charge of aggravated battery. Police say he savagely beat an 18-year-old last week after — yes, really — heatedly arguing with the teen’s mom.Brisco’s mug shot, meanwhile, may not rise…
For years after she moved to Sderot, a town near Israel’s border with Gaza, life was quiet for Michelle Fendel. With her husband, Rabbi David Fendel, the Long Island-born transplant helped start a school in the countryside.Today, Sderot isn’t so mundane. When an alarm network blares — a weekly occurrence…
Derick Kuilan, the cop fired for slamming his ATV into two beachgoers last Sunday — allegedly while drunkenly joyriding on duty — didn’t make the list we published last year of Miami Beach cops who earned six figures. But it turns out he came pretty damn close.Kuilan hauled in $91,032.51 in salary…
Lincoln Road’s Actors at Law hires out talent to read witness testimony
When a royal brouhaha erupted last week over Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito’s allegations that city officials offered him a “bribe” to resign, Riptide filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a copy the infamous $200,000 check.Well, the check just landed in our inbox. It shows that Mayor Tomas…
Miami Beach Police have identified the officer who plowed his ATV into two beachgoers early Sunday morning as 30-year-old Officer Derick Kuilan, as investigators continue looking into whether he was drunk and joyriding with a woman he’d met at the Clevelander.Victim Luis Almonte tells Channel 7 that Kuilan didn’t have…
Manny Fernandez was defending an insurance company in Miami-Dade court when a witness, speaking in a halting, Ecuadorian accent, got emotional when he recalled seeing his roommate mauled in a construction accident. “He was amazing,” Fernandez says. “I was really blown away.”The testimony was especially impressive because the real witness…
Three people are recovering in local hospitals this afternoon, and police are looking into whether an on-duty Miami Beach cop put them there by getting blitzed at the Clevelander, picking up a girl, and then joyriding on an ATV early this morning.Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega says investigators are…
Hours after the Hoedown in Hadley Park, Riptide caught up with Mayor Tomas Regalado in Little Haiti to press him on the $400,000 “bribe” Chief Miguel Exposito says he was offered to resign. This time Regalado argued the deal was a perfectly legal severance package — negotiated solely by ex-CFO…
At an anti-gun rally in Charles Hadley Park this morning, Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado and arch enemy/police chief Miguel Exposito blasted one another before TV cameras.The whole thing started like Sharks vs. Jets about 10 a.m. when Regalado was holding forth to a horde of reporters and a couple dozen…
A story that started yesterday with blogger Al Crespo posting a mysterious, voided city check for $200,000 ended with more ammo fed into the raging firefight between the Miami Police Department and City Hall when Chief Miguel Exposito admitted the check was part of a huge payout he was offered…
In 2007, amid the champagne-drenched corporate orgy known as the Super Bowl, a busload of reporters found itself on a very different kind of junket. Rather than locker-rooms full of millionaire fat guys, the journalists tiptoed through cardboard shacks populated by penniless homeless men. Instead of boozy SoBe parties, they…
Hazel Mays is 85-years-old, frail and hard of hearing. But according to one Miami police officer, the elderly Coconut Grove woman was strong enough to push him around and try steal his gun.Mays, though, tells a local TV station that the police used excessive force after she simply couldn’t hear…
Ana Teresa Martin had only one simple wish when she agreed to let an Univision TV crew dig up her mother’s bones and ship them off to a University of Florida expert: To find out whether she was secretly descended from the Russian Romanov dynasty. Who can’t empathize with that?But…
Concern over a looming budget gap and leadership turmoil has led Moody’s, the bond rating agency, to downgrade its outlook on the City of Miami’s $226 million in obligations from “stable” to “negative,” according to an investor’s report obtained by blogger Al Crespo. The agency also downgraded the city’s tax and…
In 2007, amid the champagne-drenched corporate orgy known as the Super Bowl, a busload of reporters found itself on a very different kind of junket. Rather than locker-rooms full of millionaire fat guys, the journalists tiptoed through cardboard shacks populated by penniless homeless men. Instead of boozy SoBe parties, they…
Cecilia Stafford stood in a Miami-Dade courtroom this afternoon and stared at Merrit Sims, the man who twenty years ago shot and killed her husband, Miami Springs officer Charles Stafford. “On behalf of my family, my children and myself, may you rot in hell,” Stafford said.Sims listened stoically and then…
Reggae superstar Buju Banton will spend the next decade in federal lockup, a judge in Tampa ruled this morning. The sentence comes after Banton — who played to a packed crowd at Bayfront in January and won a Grammy this year — was convicted of trying to engineer a cocaine…
Have you heard the one about the 65-year-old business traveler from Phoenix who likes to spice up his life by flying in women’s undies? He’d been flying US Airways in his skimpy attire for years, actually — until this week, when a passenger in Fort Lauderdale sent photos of his…
Former Yahweh cult member Khalil Amani turns his life around
