​Several media are reporting that eight people have been shot and two killed in an Orlando office building. It happened just before noon at the Gateway Office Center near Lake Ivanhoe. The Orlando Sentinel says that one victim has been killed, and two are in serious condition. Police have taken suspect Jason Rodriguez, 40, into custody.
Rodriguez is a former employee of Reynolds, Smith & Hill, and all the victims have been confirmed to also have been employees of the company, but that he shot indiscriminately.
Bodies were found on the eighth and twelfth floor of the building, which is called Legions Place, the Sentinel reports. People throughout the skyscraper had barricaded themselves into offices.
Governor Charlie Crist has cancelled his events for the day, and is headed to Orlando.
The shooting follows yesterday's massacre at Texas's Fort Hood, in which 31 people were wounded and twelve killed. You can see live video of the site here.
Our misadventures in destroying -- and failing to rebuild -- the Everglades have led to one of the highest concentrations of endangered and threatened animals in the U.S. There are 13 endangered species in the Glades today and another nine on the threatened list, according to FIU's database.
Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced two more lucky winners that have been sufficiently screwed by South Florida to merit consideration under the Endangered Species Act.
Meet the Florida bonneted bat and the Florida bristle fern. Please be kind to them, because apparently there aren't too many left.
​Is the University of Miami crazy? Well, if they are don't be surprised if their new psychiatrist pumps them full of lots and lots of GlaxoSmithKline pills.
psychiatry department. Nemeroff is an internationally known expert on depression, unfortunately he's also widely known for a bit of deception.
While head of Emory University's psychiatry department he failed to report $800,000 he was given for speaking fees from drug company GlaxoSmithKline.
Since 2000, Nemeroff had taken more than $2.8 million from drug companies. That's the company that makes anti-depressants like Paxil and Wellbutrin, and his ties to the company presented a conflict of interest. Criticism even extended to the Senate where he was taken to task by Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Riptide was feeling all warm and fuzzy this morning. No, it wasn't just from all the vodka in our coffee. (What, like you don't start your day with a little 'Russian java'?)
​The latest employment numbers came out this morning, and it looks like our Kanye-on-the-VMAs-esque disaster of an economy is finally on the rebound. The ArmaRecession may finally be hitting rock bottom. Yay!
But then we talked to Peter Zalewski, head of Condo Vultures and both Riptide and Michael Moore's favorite messenger of doom on our housing market. Zalewski just released some new foreclosure numbers for the area, and damned if they didn't sober us right up out of our Moscow espresso haze.
On average, South Florida lenders filed foreclosure papers on 272 properties every single day last month, according to Zalewski's research.
"It's still a lot of foreclosures compared to past years," Zalewski says.
The October foreclosure-fest means that lenders in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami are on pace for 98,000 foreclosures this year -- a huge leap from the 33,000 they filed in 2007, according to Zalewski's research.
​In 2007, popular University of Miami Law Professor D. Marvin Jones was arrested for allegedly pulling up to an undercover cop in his 2004 Mercedes SL500 and offering her $20 for sex. Jones maintained his innocence, and the charges were quietly dropped. That should have been the end of that, but last month popular blog Above the Law (which bills itself as "a legal tabloid," and which you might remember from its part in the Miami White scandal), got a hold of the info and made a series of posts, milking it for gossipy fun. (Sample joke: " If you're looking to score some ass, why not stick to the U. Miami student body? At least they won't charge.")
The handful of City of Miami voters who bothered to roll by the polls yesterday sent an age-old but always cringe-inducing message: Cash and name recognition wins elections.
via Tomas Regalado for Mayor
Your next mayor's real campaign slogan: NO!
​Actual plans for the city? Meh. Not so important.
In the four contested races in the city, voters went nuts over well-funded Tomas Regalado for mayor (71.67 percent) and incumbent Michelle Spence Jones in District 5 (82.75 percent), and gave a nod in District 3 to Frank Carollo (52.29 percent). They sent District 4's Francis Suarez and Manolo Reyes to a runoff.
So what do these guys have in common? What grand, overarching vision for the City of Miami's future can we divine from these results?
First, take the mayor's race. Tomas Regalado's message to voters basically boiled down to one word: NO. Regalado didn't really run on his merits as much as he ran as far away as possible from outgoing mayor Manny Diaz. Regalado was the change candidate and his opponent, Joe Sanchez, could never escape his typecast as Diaz's Mini-Me.
It didn't hurt his chances that Regalado raised almost a third more cash than Sanchez, and dominated the older, Cuban-American demographic (who were likely none too upset about his past support for terrorist Eduardo Arocena).
​On Sunday, a gambler at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Tampa was playing a $4 slot machine when its bells started ringing and an enormous figure began flashing on its jackpot screen: $166,666,666.65. Bill Seebeck thought he was set for life.
It's not the first time the Seminole tribe has pulled a similar gambit. In 2007, a Sunny Isles man was playing the slots at Seminole Hard Rock Resort & Casino in Hollywood when it appeared that he hit a jackpot worth more than $259,000. He was even given an oversized check for the amount- before casino officials attributed the win to a "computer glitch" and told him he would not be paid. After the story hit was reported in the news, the tribe decided to pay the full amount.
Seebeck probably shouldn't hold his breath for a similar reversal concerning his own enormous jackpot- although you can't blame him for trying. From an ABC news report:
Seebeck says he is looking for a lawyer to help him comprehend the
convoluted federal Indian gaming regulations to possibly pursue legal
action.
Update: Well, that was quick.We just received a statement from Seminole Hard Rock with the news that they've reached a "good faith" settlement, for an undisclosed amount, with Seebeck. Something about the way this is worded tells us the gambler remains a non-millionaire- although he might have a couple of thousand bucks to whittle away on more slots:
The Seminole Hard Rock Casino Tampa has made an offer to William Seebeck, and he has accepted, recognizing that the slot machine he was playing on Sunday malfunctioned, in what can be best described to the layman as a "computer glitch." The maximum payout on the Ultimate Party Spin machine played by Seebeck is $99,000, although his bet of $1.50 at the time of the malfunction could have generated a maximum payout of only $2,500, with the right combination. Determination of a malfunction was made by representatives of the machine's manufacturer and software provider, according to established gaming industry standards, with confirmation from an independent third-party laboratory analysis. The casino has opted to settle this matter for an undisclosed amount as a good faith gesture, and we look forward to welcoming Mr. Seebeck on future visits.
Let's just get this out of the way: Riptide is the last place you'll read any criticism of Alan Grayson, the U.S. representative from Orlando, for his raging political Tourette's syndrome.
​We wish more politicians would jump on the Grayson crazy train.
Or possibly our favorite Grayson quote, talking about his deep loathing for Dick Cheney:
I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth when he's talking.
Boom! You say, "lowering the national dialogue," we say pure political comedy gold.
Well, if you missed it this weekend, the New York Times "Week in Review" weighed in on the Grayson phenomenon and came up with a novel theory on the freshman rep: He might just be the first liberal wing nut.
​A swastika was found drawn on a University of Miami bathroom wall near the Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies. Another swastika was found in the same area almost a year ago.
President Donna Shalala released a statement condemning the act:
On Tuesday someone drew a swastika on a wall in the men's restroom near the Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies in the Merrick Building. This incident and a similar one that occurred last November in the same location have been reported to University Police and are under investigation. Defacement of University property is a crime--and to do so with this symbol of hatred, which is offensive to all of us, is a despicable and cowardly act. The University of Miami is a place where all are welcome in a spirit of learning and acceptance. There is no place in our community for bigotry and intolerance. I condemn these acts in the strongest of terms on behalf of the University.
If the other radio stations jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?
​Just don't hold your breath for any real explanation from the candidate.
A quick recap: in 1983, a Spanish-language radio station where Regalado worked as program director helped raise more than $21,000 for the defense fund of Eduardo Arocena. The dockworker was eventually convicted of blasting 32 bombs in NYC and Miami and planning the murder of a New Jersey activist.
Regalado declined to return multiple phone calls from Riptide on the subject -- and even dodged a call from the "King of All Spanish Media," Enrique Santos.
That finally changed in this morning's Miami Herald, where Regalado offered the classic kindergarten playground excuse for supporting Arocena: But everyone else was doing it!
via Miami Coaltion Against Breed Specific Legislation
​There's a flip side to that story, though, and it's Miami's idiotic attempt to stop dog-fighting before it happens.
Miami-Dade has one of the country's oldest bans against the entire breed of pit bulls. And, as I wrote back in May, the ban has led Animal Services to take hundreds of healthy, friendly dogs -- many of which probably aren't even real pit bulls -- away from owners to die from a lethal injection.
Everyone from the Humane Society to the American Veterinary Medical Association opposes the ban, but it's still on the books. This weekend, the Miami Coalition Against Breed Specific Legislation -- a group trying to end the ban in Miami -- is co-hosting a barbecue in Fort Lauderdale.
Of all the outrages perpetrated at Guantánamo Bay -- which New Times explored in depth earlier this year on our visit to the prison camp in southern Cuba -- one of the strangest has to be the military's music-based "futility technique."
via Wikimedia Commons
In case you've succeeded in washing the stain of Gitmo from your memory, Army interrogators came up with a laundry list of disturbing "enhanced interrogation methods" -- also known as "torture" to the nonmilitary among us -- to try to force detainees to talk.
Those methods included sleep deprivation, faux dog attacks, and, Dick Cheney's personal favorite, waterboarding. And in recent months, the Army has also admitted to using music as a torture device.
In this memo, declassified by the National Security Archive, the Army admits interrogators' "futility technique included the playing of Britney Spears, Metallica, and rap music."
Another memo notes that one prisoner, named Mohammed Al-Sliha, was "exposed to variable light patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pools' "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor."
Pretty messed up, right? Well, today a coalition of big-name musicians has signed onto a Freedom of Information request to the Pentagon demanding that the military declassify all memos related to how their music was used to torture detainees.
​The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent affordable housing developers in Miami-Dade County an early Christmas present.
This past October 16, HUD secretary Shaun Donovan announced 18 south Florida cities will receive $69 million for community development grants, homeowner assistance programs, emergency shelter grants, and housing for people with HIV/AIDS.
The pot of money includes $26.2 million for Miami, $1.4 million for Miami Gardens, $3 million for Miami Beach, $1.7 million for North Miami and $6.7 million for Hialeah.
​If you're a health conscious consumer left with no choice but to eat at a fast food joint you'd assume one of the healthier options available might be a grilled chicken salad or sandwich. Well, according to a lawsuit filed today against McDonald's, Friendly's and Miami-based Burger King you'd be wrong. That grilled chicken might cause cancer.
Cancer Project filed the suit in Connecticut on behalf of two residents, and claims the chains concealed the fact that they're selling chicken that contains a carcinogenic chemical.
The chemical in question, PhIP, is a know carcinogen, but 100 samples of BK and McD's grilled chicken were found to contain "substantial levels," in tests conducted by the Cancer Project.
Burger King hasn't publicly responded yet, but a McDonald's spokesman told Bloomberg news, "There is no scientific evidence to suggest the small amount of PhIP that can be created as a by-product of cooking methods humans have employed for thousands of years poses a health risk."
Saying Michael Pizzi is the kind of guy who's made a few enemies in this town might qualify as the understatement of the year.
​The U.S. probation officer turned criminal defense lawyer turned politician and elected Miami Lakes mayor is a full-time crusader who lives for a dirty street brawl.
New Timesprofiled Pizzi in 2004 when he was in a race for state attorney (calling him "Saint Pizzi" in a headline, no less). Here's what his wife Maria said about him: "He's a person who looks for and enjoys a challenge. He doesn't back down from a fight when he believes he's right."
Most recently, that's meant taking on Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez in a big way. Just last month, Pizzi filed a lawsuit trying to make it easier for voters to mount a recall effort against the embattled politico.
All of which is a long runup to saying that police have ample reason to be suspicious of a raging fire that broke out at Pizzi's law office in Miami Lakes early this morning. Det. Rebeca Perez, a Miami-Dade County PD spokeswoman, tells Riptide that arson investigators are looking into the blaze today.
The fire erupted at Pizzi's office, at 15271 NW 60th Ave., sometime after midnight, Perez says. Firefighters were called to the scene at 12:46 a.m., and MDPD's arson team soon joined them.
Not only does Escobar's wardrobe blur the lines between gender, but also this look clearly blurs the line between Lady Gaga and Queen Amidala like nobody's business.
​All 16-year-old Jonathon Escobar wanted was a better education, and apparently that meant getting the hell out of the Miami-Dade school system. So he moved in with his sister in Atlanta to attend North Cobb High.
But North Cobb wasn't prepared for his wardrobe, which includes traditionally female attire. Escobar toldthe Souther Voicethat officials told him he either had to dress more gender-appropriately or be home-schooled. Isn't Atlanta home to Housewives Nene and Kim? You think they'd be used to unadulterated fierceness in a wig.
School officials claim they simply asked Escobar to tone down his warbdrobe and say a YouTube video he posted with a charmingly sarcastic comment that another student "wants to suck my asshole" also crossed the line.
Escobar decided to withdraw and will return to live with his parents and finish high school in Miami. After that, he plans to attend beauty school.
But before all of that, apparently Escobar flew to New York to join his spiritual sister in weave by appearing on The Tyra Banks show. No word on the air date.
Florida Memorial University has had a rough recent history. In 2005, 15 employees were accused of changing students' grades in return for cash and sexual favors. Last November, a 17-year-old student was shot on campus. And this year, the school's president was abruptly canned.
Add yesterday's near-riot to the list. As shown in the above video, a fracas between students and security guards, employed by Allied Barton, erupted on campus on Monday. At the thirty-second mark, a nightstick-wielding guard can be seen battling a student in a bathroom as a mob attempts to push in. At the 1:13 mark, a guard pulls his handgun and points it at the crowd after a student kicks through the bathroom door. None of the students appear to be armed.
​The story of Jasper Howard wasn't supposed to end in murder. A gifted football player from Miami Edison Senior High, a troubled inner-city school, was recruited by University of Connecticut. He had dreams of supporting his mother, and also had a son on the way.
But on Saturday, after helping his team with a big win, the starting cornerback attended a school-sponsored dance and was stabbed to death when a fight broke out.
Police have arrested one man in connection with the stabbing, 21-year-old Johnny Hood. He's being charged with interfering with an officer and breaching the peace. Police believe he was involved in the fight, and gave officers a fake name, but aren't fingering him as the murder suspect. No suspects have been identified yet.
Meanwhile, Howard's family back home is grieving.
"All he wanted to do was just make a career of his life and help me, that's all he used to tell me. They took him away from me," his mother, Joangila Howard, told CBS4.
Back in March, New Timesproclaimed the death of the SunPost, Miami Beach's scrappy and once impressive weekly rag.
​If we didn't turn out to be precisely right -- a few stray copies of all-but-content-free issues are still appearing from time to time around Lincoln Road -- we were pretty damn close.
Since then, life has apparently gone from bad to worse for longtime SunPost publisher Jeannette Stark. Stark's husband, Felix, created the SunPost in 1985, and her son, Andrew Stark, shepherded it through the paper's best years.
Riptide has learned that this past August, Stark filed for bankruptcy. And according to her filings, she owed more than $1 million to creditors -- and listed only $250 in assets.
Stark also faces four civil cases in Miami-Dade Court, including two from banks and one from the paper's Hialeah printer.
Here at Riptide, we've had a lot of fun lately with recently declassified CIA documents.
via Wikimedia Commons
Who is on that grassy knoll?
​Last week, the spooks gave us files from the 60s that proved Luis Posada Carriles -- Miami's most famous terrorist still walking the streets today -- used to snitch for the agency back in the day.
Even more shockingly, the CIA's new files showed that Jorge Mas Canosa -- the founder of the Cuban American National Foundation so revered in Miami that we renamed Biscayne Boulevard after him and gave him a middle school -- sponsored Carriles and other terrorists and plotted to blow up Cuban ships off the coast of Mexico.
Apparently, the agency is refusing to release hundreds of pages of field reports about a former Miami station chief named George E. Joannides, whose job was to run the hundreds of anti-Castro agents living in the Magic City.
Why should you care? Only because Mr. Joannides and his merry band of anti-Fidelistos are smack in the middle of every JFK assassination conspiracy theory on the planet.
​Last winter, the Miami Herald ran an article about pet owners who were forced to give up their animals. The reason: They were broke, the economy was crap, and having a cat or a dog is expensive. Fortunately, feline lovers were able to leave their pets at an intimate, family-run shelter on NW 191st Street in Miami Gardens called Pet Rescue.
The refuge was unique. It refused to euthanize tough-to-adopt pets. (Some were antisocial; others were impossible to potty train.) Eventually the owners of Pet Rescue ran into money trouble. And yesterday the Humane Society took over.
Workers at the shelter are worried. The Human Society accepts only "adoptable" animals. And volunteer Terry Alice says many of the quirkier cats will become homeless. "I'm not worried about the pretty ones," she says. "This is Miami; people can be shallow. It's the shy ones and the ones that are semi-feral who I'm concerned about."
Pet Rescue employee Katherine Sullivan would say only: "We're really scrambling to find homes for them."
"If they're not adoptable," Alice says, "what are they gonna do?"
​We're not living in post-racial America quite yet. A new study conducted by the University of Miami School of Business Administration shows that white, Asian, and Hispanic managers tend to higher more whites and fewer blacks than black managers do.
When a black manager is replaced by a white, Asian, or Hispanic manager, the number of blacks hired falls from 21 percent to 17, while the number of whites hired increases. The effect, unsurprisingly, is even more pronounced in the South.
According to the study, when a black manager is replaced in the South, a store with 40 employees could see three or four black workers replaced by white workers within a year.
White workers are also 15 percent more likely to quit their job when a black manager replaces a white manager.
"We interpret this increase in the white quit rate as evidence of
discriminatory sorting by white job seekers," reads the study. "It implies
that whites who dislike working for black managers often avoid working for
black managers in the first place."
Citizens of Miami will soon be as happy as this adorable CP+B created tool of advertising!
​Windows 7, the highly touted (if only because it apparently doesn't suck as bad as XP Vista) operating system from Microsoft, won't be available to the general public until October 22nd, but some of Miami's most disadvantage are already familiarizing themselves with it.
Mayor Manny Diaz's Elevate Miami program aims to "better prepare our community to participate and compete in the new digital society and digital economy by assisting our citizens in becoming more comfortable with and adaptable to new technologies," and as part of that goal has installed hundreds of computers through out dozens of city parks for learning purposes for senior citizens and poor.
The program is wasting no time in making sure their tech is up to date, and two of the program's eLabs already have Windows 7 installed, with plans to roll it out in more locations soon.
​Antonio Guerrero, a member of a group of men collectively known at the Cuban Five, has had his sentence reduced from life in prison to 21 years and 10 months. Taking into account time served and good behavior, Guerrero could be out of jail in seven years, his lawyer says.
Guerrero was convicted of spying for the Cuban government after trying to break into a U.S. military facility in the Florida Keys and spying on Miami's anti-Castro exile community. He's been in U.S. custody since 1998.
The harsher sentence was overturned today in a U.S. Appeals Court and is the latest episode in a long legal saga. Supporters said the Five's original trial wasn't valid because Miami's exile community would prevent a fair trial.
Three of the original 2001 sentences were overturned last year. Resentencing for the other two has been postponed.
​TeleCuba, a small Miami firm, says it has won permission from the Treasury Department to lay the first fiber-optic cable between Miami and Cuba. The announcement comes after the Obama administration eased some restrictions on telecom links to Cuba in April.
The line could make calling from Miami to Cuba a lot cheaper, as well as spread Internet access to the Cuban people, but the Communist government will have the final say about that.
The Cuban government places tight restrictions on Internet access. Only government employees, academics, and researchers are allowed to have their own accounts, but even then, many sites are blocked.
However, a small number of dissident bloggers, such as Yoani Sanchez, have been able to work around the rules to communicate with the outside world. New Times' feature story two weeks ago chronicled Revolico, a Craigslist-like website, that brings Cuba's capitalist black market online.
TeleCuba expects the line to be operational by mid-2011.
​State CFO Alex Sink has about $1 billion she would love to give you. Problem is you have to claim it. Most of that is money from dormant bank accounts and forgotten securities holdings, but quite a bit of it is in the form of actual stuff. Like jewelry and gold coins.
The Florida Bureau of Unclaimed Property is sick of holding on to some of it and will hold an auction October 23 and 24 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Fort Lauderdale (public welcome), so you might want to act fast to claim your lost heirlooms. Luckily there's a pretty user-friendly website, FLTreasureHunt.org, that lets you check if you're owed any unclaimed property.
Unfortunately, no one owes this blogger any money, but we decided to see if any famous faces have secret stashes of unclaimed goods.
Record producer Scott Storch, who could probably use the money, is apparently owed some cash by People's Gas in Pennsylvania. Hulk's ex, Linda Hogan, whose divorce lawyer knows she loves money, is owed a refund by a Miami company -- if she actually legally uses that name. Charlie Crist, or someone with his name who happens to do business in Tampa Bay and Tallahassee, is owed two checks by Comcast. Sylvester Stallone is apparently owed some back wages. And a certain Oprah Winfrey is owed a refund by someone on Fisher Island.
​Well-known Miami DJ Juan Carlos Portieles, known professionally as DJ Seasunz, turned himself in to police yesterday after driving around with the dead body of his 18-year-old girlfriend, Jaclyn Torrealba. The 30-year-old Portieles is charged with second-degree murder.Read the arrest affidavit here.
Police say the couple became involved in a "heated verbal altercation" on the side of the road in Southwest Miami-Dade. Portieles began to punch and bite Torrealba, according to the police report. She attempted to fight back, but Portieles choked her until she stopped moving. Police found scratches on his face and torso, as well as a swollen hand.
Portieles then placed the body in the front passenger seat of his car and drove to several friends' homes to tell them what he had done.
By 7 p.m. Sunday, Portieles had turned himself in at the Miami-Dade Police station in Doral. There he led officers to a body in a gray Toyota Camry.
He also told police he had been involved with Torrealba for two years, meaning they would have begun the relationship when she was 16.
That Portieles had a girlfriend 12 years his junior comes as little surprise, say various acquaintances from the club scene. As DJ Seasunz, he was known for promoting and playing often to a younger crowd. His MySpace page (which lists his full name as "Seasunz Manson") devotes an entire section of flyers to all-ages parties. The most recent flyer in that section promotes a headlining slot at a series of all-ages nights at Flavour in Coconut Grove.
​One of the FBI's longest-known fugitives turned himself into federal law enforcement officers in New York yesterday after hiding in Cuba for more than four decades.
Louis Armando Peña Soltren, 66, and two other men hijacked a Pan American flight in November 1968 after entering the cockpit armed with guns and knives. They then demanded the flight change course to Havana. The plane landed in Cuba, accompanied by Cuban fighter jets and cheering crowds.
Soltren's two accomplices have previously been tried and convicted. Soltren finally decided to turn himself in, and made arrangements to do so with the FBI and State Department, citing family members who either live in Puerto Rico or Miami. He could now face life in prison. It's not known how or if the Cuban regime was involved in the surrender.
​No disrespect, but it's rare when Miami Dade College is named in a top 25 list alongside schools like Tulane and Carnegie Mellon, so let's hope the school is celebrating this honor. MDC has been ranked the 21st best neighbor college in America.
Put together by Dr. Evan S. Dobelle, president of Westfield State College in Massachusetts, the list highlights partnerships among schools and the cities surrounding them.
"Colleges and
universities, as well as the towns and cities in which they are located, are
now under severe economic pressures. The positive financial impact of higher
education on local communities is well-documented," said Dr. Dobelle.
"Increasingly," he said, "more sophisticated partnerships are emerging that
are addressing complex issues such as homelessness and health care and are
serving as catalysts for community change. Colleges and universities are doing
more and more to support their local communities, and it is a win-win
situation for both."
The University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California shared the top spot on the list.
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