Michael DeFilippi peers down a dingy Miami Beach alley a few blocks from Ocean Drive, watching intently as two men in red T-shirts and baseball caps disappear into the early-evening darkness. He’s absolutely, positively convinced they’re drug dealers — has been since hours earlier that November day, when, he says,…
Antonio Brooklen was sworn in as police chief in Miami Gardens — one of the poorest and most crime-plauged areas of Miami-Dade County — in November 2015. The previous chief had been arrested in a prostitution sting. Less than a year later, Brooklen quit. While he says he left to…
Late last year, the Miami Beach stoner whose exploits in arms dealing became the basis of War Dogs, agreed to dismiss his lawsuit against Warner Bros., in which he’d claimed the company stole parts of his memoir and falsely marketed the movie as a true story.
Most killings by police likely don’t need to happen. They are extremely rare in European countries — only five people were shot dead by law enforcement in the entire United Kingdom in 2017. According to figures recently released by MappingPoliceViolence.org, a national anti-police-brutality activist group, 1,129 people were killed by police officers in the United States in 2017.
Boca Raton’s GEO Group — the second-largest private-prison company in America, which makes a huge portion of its income imprisoning people on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — has repeatedly denied that inmates in the prison facilities it runs are forced to work against their will.
Miami just wants to go one six-month stretch without a bystander getting hit by celebratory gunfire. Is that too much to ask? Every Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, city and county officials must remind South Florida’s insane, physics-challenged residents that, indeed, when you shoot a gun straight up into the air, those bullets don’t just magically rocket off into the sun.
This year was a hell of a lot better than 2016. Alabama Democrat Doug Jones overcame a child molester to win a spot in the U.S. Senate. Harvey Weinstein and his misogynist colleagues from Hollywood to Miami are on the run. The stock market is surging. And the new Star…
Besiki Luka Kutateladze couldn’t believe the statistics: Between 2015 and 2016, the Miami-Dade Police Department — the country’s eighth-largest force — reported just one hate crime. Kutateladze’s interest in the numbers was both professional and personal. For years, he has led research on criminal justice issues. But he and his husband were considering moving from New York to Miami, and just months removed from the Pulse shootings, they wanted to know that they and their four young children would be accepted.
Despite his laundry list of complaints and lawsuits from civilians, City of Miami Police union vice president Javier Ortiz received a big promotion at the department in October, getting a bump from lieutenant to captain.
Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, who is running for U.S. Congress, sent the Miami Beach Police chief a flurry emails demanding a major donor to her campaign not be arrested for an alleged spree of machete destruction, according to text messages and emails New Times obtained this week.
In the early-morning hours of December 7, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Louisiana woke up 92 Somali detainees and shackled them by their wrists, waists, and ankles. The Somalis were then loaded onto a chartered airplane that was supposed to return them to Somalia. But then, for reasons the government has not yet explained, the plane landed in Dakar, Senegal. It sat on the ground for 23 hours and then headed back to the United States, landing in Miami.
From long-lost cocaine lords found hiding in Orlando to steroid-slinging gym owners to a truly Satanic plot to robocall millions of phones with spam messages, 2017 ended up as a 1. FCC Fines Miami Man $120 Million for Making 96 Million Robocalls in Three Months Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission…
For the umpteenth time in recent years, a Miami-area officer has been cited for mishandling a domestic dispute and endangering a woman who asked police for protection from stalking and harassment.
Last week, a Georgia inmate sued Florida Department of Corrections officials for permanently damaging his stomach and intestines. For about a month during the summer of 2016, Peach State native Marc Caesar worked at a car wash in Doral as part of a work-release program.
Julie Sheppard says she was driving her 10-year-old stepson home from school in Coconut Grove last week when she heard someone slap the back of her car. In her rear-view mirror, she saw a Miami Police officer, so she pulled over and rolled down her window. The first thing he said shocked her.
Pascual Diaz-Plasencia was arrested on misdemeanor drug possession charges June 29, 2012, after police caught him with less than 20 grams of marijuana. Diaz-Plasencia had recently undergone a kidney transplant and had to take a set of pills twice daily to ensure his body didn’t reject the organ.
This past July, a group of young Florida bros filmed themselves dragging a live shark behind a boat until the poor thing disintegrated into a bloody pulp. The crew of numbskulls then sent the clip to Miami’s infamous shark hunter, Mark “the Shark” Quartiano, because they thought the famed fisherman would find the footage entertaining.
The North Miami Police Department’s interim chief, Larry Juriga, claimed in a lawsuit two years ago that the police department “discriminated” against him for being a “white redneck.” As ridiculous as that claim might be, it seems another NMPD officer (and reported friend of Juriga’s) is so incensed about racial diversity…
In August, a female police officer with the tiny Muttontown, New York police department sued the village and its police chief because she said she’d faced gender discrimination on the job. Jennifer Lavin’s suit alleged that after she was injured while handcuffing an emotionally disturbed person, Chief Phil Pulaski refused to grant her line-of-duty benefits or light duty and blamed her pregnancy for her pain.
Comedian Hannibal Buress has made Wynwood something of a second home in recent years, regularly showing up for surprise shows at Gramps when he’s not filming Broad City or the Eric Andre Show. It’s not clear exactly what he was doing in Miami last night, but a cell phone video…
It wasn’t just media hype: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents really did ramp up their enforcement efforts during Donald Trump’s first year in office. According to year-end figures ICE released yesterday, the agency arrested 6,192 immigrants in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands this year — a 75 percent jump from last year, in which only 3,524 people were apprehended.
Miami-Dade is a gigantic county, larger than Rhode Island, packed with two million people and perpetually understaffed and overworked regulators. All of which is to say, you/ can get away with a lot of crazy stuff on a remote piece of land: cockfighting rings, grow-house empires, illegal horse slaughterhouses. Even…
