Mel Fisher is the closest thing Florida has to Indiana Jones. Recently retired Floridians adopt the state’s Jimmy Buffett-inspired, faux-pirate persona after spending 30 years selling renters insurance in Denver, but Fisher was the real deal. He spent his life diving for pirate treasure and most famously hit the mother lode…
Late one Tuesday night, a heavyset man in a worn-out sport coat lumbered out of a sprawling restaurant on Hollywood Beach to his parking spot, the one closest to the building. His basset hounds, Amos and Tillie, tagged along. Even at 78 years old, Joe Sonken was usually the first…
In September 2014, Miami-Dade Police Sgt. James Edwards submitted a two-sentence letter resigning from the department with a “heavy heart” because of personal circumstances. But those circumstances also happened to involve two other people: a 15-year-old boy and his 16-year-old brother.
The Florida Department of Corrections remains adamant that “Operation PUSH,” a statewide prison-labor strike designed to force state officials to treat prisoners better, never actually happened, even though prisoner-rights groups released a statement last week about the action. They say prisoners in more than a dozen facilities either went on…
Last week, a video went viral showing a Jamaican-born grandmother being hauled off a Greyhound bus at a Fort Lauderdale station. The woman was returning from visiting her grandchild for the first time in Orlando, according to activists who mounted a campaign to pressure the bus line to stop granting federal agents access to randomly demand papers from its customers.
Miami Beach leaders took turns last week heaping praise on the founders of a secret Facebook group aimed at banishing criminals from the city. “You’ve taken an active role to become part of a solution for your community, and it’s just beautiful,” Commissioner John Elizabeth Alemán gushed. Added Commissioner Kristen Rosen…
Accused rapist and ultrapopular South Florida rapper Kodak Black live-streamed his own arrest last week. A masked squad from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office descended on his Pembroke Pines mansion as Black and a large entourage of friends, including Black’s own toddler — named King Khalid — hung out in a…
Despite New Times basically devoting an entire beat to Miami Police Capt. Javier Ortiz’s shameful exploits over the last decade, he’s only managed to fail upward, ascending the ranks from lieutenant last year. While he’s technically stepped “down” from running Miami’s Fraternal Order of Police union, he remains the…
On November 26, Fort Lauderdale Police found Bob Karpinen slumped over dead on a bench at Colee Hammock Park. Identifying the body wasn’t difficult — the 58-year-old had an ID in his wallet and a pill bottle with his name and his doctor’s name listed on the side. Officers Jesus Gonzalez and Scott Bellinger filled out a report, jotting down contact information for Karpinen’s 77-year-old mother in Delray Beach.But for some reason, neither officer bothered contacting her or anyone else in the family. Within hours, Karpinen’s body was hauled off, his property seized, and the report closed out.
At her home in the tiny village of Palm Springs, just outside Lake Worth, Anna Mae Kiger started each morning the same way. After rising around 7, she walked down the driveway to pick up her newspaper. Then the 75-year-old Air Force veteran hoisted an American flag high up a…
“This is new?” a worried passenger asks while she films U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stalking the aisle of a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale and demanding proof of citizenship from the riders. Moments later, the agents arrest a passenger, pulling her and her luggage off the bus.
Blanco laid the violence on thick to convince male kingpins around her that she was not to be messed with.
When a series of disturbances and insurrections erupted across state prisons nationwide in 2016 on the anniversary of New York’s 1971 Attica prison riots, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) danced around acknowledging whether a set of incidents that had occurred in the Sunshine State were related to the nationwide movement.
Various media sources are reporting this morning that Kodak Black, one of the most talented rappers in South Florida but a magnet for trouble, has been arrested for grand theft of a firearm, possession of marijuana, child neglect, two counts of possession of a weapon by a felon, and two counts of probation violation.
Apparently, living off his fame as an ’80s Miami cocaine smuggler tied to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel wasn’t quite enough for Michael “Mickey” Munday. One of the Magic City’s most colorful characters and a man who hosts film events and parties all over town, he was found guilty today of smuggling cars for an enormous auto-theft ring.
When FX’s American Crime Story premieres tonight, Miamians will be familiar with much of the landscape. Season 2 of the hit series explores the assassination of Gianni Versace, who was gunned down on the front steps of his Ocean Drive mansion in 1997. The death of the iconic Italian fashion designer stunned South Beach and sent police scrambling to find the murderer.
Hundreds of people demonstrated in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park yesterday to protest the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention of two of the city’s most prominent immigrant activists: Ravi Ragbir and Jean Montrevil. The two run the city’s New Sanctuary Coalition, a group that helps families fight deportation…
Cornelius Brown lived with schizophrenia and liked to carry a broomstick around his Opa-locka neighborhood “playing nunchucks.” His family says that simply being black and carrying a stick in public eventually got him killed at the age of 25. In 2015, Opa-locka Police officers said they were forced to shoot Brown dead after he attacked them.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing drugs — so long as you’re not in the business of arresting other people who do drugs. This has been the dilemma for Miami-area cops since the city’s cocaine explosion began in the 1970s and ’80s — getting paid to bust people for drugs…
Nestor Yglesias, ICE’s South Florida spokesperson, confirmed that five 7-Eleven locations from Vero Beach to Homestead had been visited by ICE agents today.
According to a lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade County Court, Miami Police Officer Adrian Santos was thrown out of the downtown Miami nightclub E11even in the early-morning hours of November 18, tossed into the back of a cop car, and given a drug test. He was quickly fired but claims in court he had no idea why.
When the summer sun in Florida pushes temperatures past 100 degrees, state prisoners — the vast majority of whom are stuck in jail without air-conditioning on drug charges — feel it. When those inmates work (they were forced, for example, to clean up after Hurricane Irma), they typically don’t get a dime in return. When their mostly poor families send them money for food and necessities, a $4 case of soup costs $17.
