After Ultra Music Festival’s organizers had to shell out $400,000 to an innocent concertgoer who was thrown to the ground, beaten, and tasered by Miami Police officers who lied about their actions in official reports, festival organizers understandably asked the city to send different cops next time.
The utterly bizarre and horrid tale of Pennsylvania-turned-Florida-turned-Cuban priest George Zirwas has taken an even darker turn this week. More than 15 years ago, New Times published a meticulously reported feature delving into Zirwas’ 2001 murder in Havana, where he was injected in the neck with an overdose of muscle relaxant…
The last time a giant protest turned into a chaotic state of civil unrest in Hialeah was — well, it’s hard to point to a recent example. The city’s police stay busy chasing crotch-grabbing car dealers, fake veterinarians, and mail thieves, but a mob of angry rioters has yet to descend upon the “City of Progress.”
North Miami City Clerk Michael Etienne might have just committed the most wholesome theft of public money in American history. Sure, people steal a few thousand dollars in taxpayer cash all the time — but instead of using that money to cover something heinous, like dog-track gambling debts, Etienne legit stole some money to stare at Abraham Lincoln’s giant head…
When 25-year-old Cuban native Danay Ojeda got into her car last Wednesday afternoon, she had no idea she was being watched. By the time Ojeda loaded 26 pounds of marijuana into the back of her 2017 Dodge Durango, the cops had already been tailing her for weeks.
Bribing the head of an entire nation’s anti-corruption task force is apparently cheaper and way less glamorous than you might think. Luis Gustavo Moreno Rivera, who was the director of Colombia’s Office of Anti-Corruption, admitted in court today that he could be bought with about $132,000 and that he’d taken a portion of that money inside a bathroom at Miami’s Dolphin Mall.
Raymond Odigie Uadiale, age 41, is great with computers. Good enough to be hired by Microsoft as a network engineer. And good enough, according to the feds, to run a virus scamming ring that seized computers via a fake warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, charged people a $200 “fine” to unlock their desktops, and warned users they might be sent to prison if they didn’t pay up.
In 2014, Miami Police officers chased a 21-year-old graffiti artist named Demz who was tagging a wall in Wynwood during Art Basel. During the pursuit, the cops ran the artist over, killing him. The officer who ran over Demz, who just happened to be the son of a Miami-Dade prosecutor,…
Even in 2018, it’s a shock to actually hear cops admit to straight-up framing black suspects as a matter of policy. That’s exactly what’s happened in Biscayne Park. In June, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment alleging that Raimundo Atestiano, the former chief of the tiny Miami-Dade town, had intentionally framed…
Ever since the Parkland massacre, the Broward School Board and superintendent Robert Runcie have insisted that the school system did everything possible to help Cruz, who’d been a known violent threat for years. And yet the school board has also fought tooth-and-nail in court to avoid releasing detailed records about Cruz’s…
On March 7, Lighthouse Point Police Officers Christopher Thompson and Joseph Valdes knocked on the door of a third-floor condo with a brick façade and waited for Dominic Signorile. The cops in the small coastal town in Broward County wanted to check on Signorile after someone reported seeing him clutching…
Boca Raton’s GEO Group is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s single biggest contractor, with more than $400 million worth of deals to run private prisons, including the Broward Transitional Center, a site housing “low-priority” detainees. As the Trump administration has ripped families apart and jailed immigrants with no criminal records, GEO has come under heavy fire…
America largely phased out the use of privately run, for-profit jails and prison facilities in the early 20th Century after the public realized the practice of making a profit from caging people was a particularly heinous piece of the capitalist economy. But amid a government privatization push under Ronald Reagan, the idea came back. Two private-prison firms — California’s CoreCivic and Florida’s GEO Group — dominate the for-profit human-caging business today.
Twenty-five years ago, Maria’s mom kicked her out of the house. Maria was 18 and had just arrived in Miami from Holland a few months earlier. She was also pregnant. “I was in a state of mind where I felt like I didn’t have anybody left, like everyone was leaving me,” Maria says.
When Vincent Gaines was sentenced to five years in prison on robbery charges in June 2013, state officials recommended he be placed in a mental-health unit because he had regular visual and auditory hallucinations. So Gaines was transferred to the Dade Correctional Institution in South Miami-Dade County, where he was placed on a “boneless diet” that left the five-foot-nine man 40 pounds lighter — dropping from 190 to 151 — in just 18 months.
After learning her brother hadn’t shown up for work at the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department for several days, Kathy Kavalin called Miami Police to report him missing. She didn’t know he’d been dead for more than a week.
Last month, Miami’s federal prosecutors unveiled a string of indictments in an international scheme to funnel a staggering $1.2 billion out of Venezuela’s state-owned oil firm and then launder that money in South Florida. In fact, prosecutors believe that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is wrapped up in the scheme, the Miami Herald reports.
Last week, the Hollywood Police Department conducted a useless, money-wasting “sting” on an adult store, where they arrested 13 men who were masturbating or having consensual oral sex in private, locked rooms. Rather than ask why the hell HPD thought it should be arresting gay men for no reason…
Miami Police Officer Rony Rodriguez’s cruiser was idling in Brickell this past March when he turned to the camera and joked about whether he should really be filming a vlog while working on-duty as a cop.
The football media world exploded in 2017 when New York Jets wide receiver Robby Anderson was arrested for allegedly shoving a cop at Miami’s Rolling Loud. But as New Times warned at the time, the arresting officer — infamous Miami Police captain and union boss Javier Ortiz — has a history of making bogus arrests at music festivals.
Hollywood Police have now raided the same adult store twice in a single year. This past Thursday, Hollywood cops arrested 13 men for masturbating and having consensual oral sex in a secluded, private room — hardly the sort of police work that makes locals safer. Thanks to Hollywood PD, 13 men will likely be harassed or retaliated against by their families or employers simply for consensually enjoying themselves at a gay-cruising destination.
In February 2017, Miami-Dade Police arrested Bernardo Osorio, a decorated math teacher at Cutler Bay Senior High, and charged him with sexually abusing an underage student. The school district quickly fired Osorio and issued a statement condemning his behavior. But a new lawsuit from Osorio’s victim says the district failed to discipline the teacher after another student made similar abuse allegations years earlier.
