Meyer Lansky: Mafia boss spends his final years in Miami Beach

Meyer Lansky, gray eminence of organized crime, died of lung cancer at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, in 1983. By popular belief, never proved legally, Lansky taught the Mafia’s crude leadership of the 1920s and 1930s, showing them the subtleties of financial manipulation, concealment and investment of the proceeds of bootlegging and gambling. Publicly, […]

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Gary Hart: The sex scandal that changed American politics

May 3, 1987 Miami woman is linked to Hart By JIM McGEE and TOM FIEDLER Gary Hart, the Democratic presidential candidate who has dismissed allegations of womanizing, spent Friday night and most of Saturday in his Capitol Hill townhouse with a young woman who flew from Miami and met him. Hart denied any impropriety. Hart, 50, […]

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Emilio Milian: Cuban newsman’s car is bombed

Through the 1970s and into the ’80s, local law enforcement authorities were chasing bombers all over Miami. Just as one bomb was ripping apart a Little Havana cigar shop, another was going off at “Fidel friendly” magazine offices. The Mexican consulate was hit, as were “Castro compliant” shipping companies. During this wave of violence, Emilio […]

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Barbara Jane Mackle, kidnap victim buried alive

Kidnappers took Barbara Jane Mackle of Coral Gables from a Georgia motel room on December 17, 1968, buried her alive in a box on an isolated hillside and demanded a half-million-dollar ransom from her father, developer Robert Mackle. For 83 hours, the 20-year-old Emory University student remained underground until the ransom was paid and Mackle […]

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Prince’s Purple Rain concert at the Orange Bowl, 1985

Fans Crown Prince King Of OB Rock By LAURA MISCH Herald Staff Writer April 8, 1985 Dig if you will the picture — of Prince and Miami engaged in a kiss. A long, slow, wet kiss, Prince’s favorite kind, fueled by the purple passions of 55,000 rock fans gone crazy. In the Orange Bowl Sunday […]

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Brigade 2506 at the Orange Bowl

It started on April 17, 1961. The soldiers of Brigade 2506 were Cuban exiles fighting to rid their land of Communist domination. They had the political and military support, they thought, of the U.S. government. Fidel Castro’s days were numbered. The invasion ended in blood and confusion and the deepest despair a fighting force could […]

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Latin Quarter nightclub fire

The Palm Island Club opened in 1922 at 159 Fountain Street on Palm Island in Miami Beach. Prohibition? Not here. Booze flowed. But 159 Fountain Street’s most famous identity came in 1939 when New York producer Lou Walters (father of Barbara Walters) reopened the venue as The Latin Quarter. A ritzy nightclub, the venue drew […]

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First space shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center

Columbia’s first departure on April 12, 1981, was hailed around the world as a major step in space exploration because it returned to Earth for reuse instead of being discarded as previous space vehicles were.  Astronaut John Young was the commander of the first shuttle mission out of Kennedy Space Center.  Named after an 18th-century […]

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The 1986 FBI Miami shootout

FBI agents and two suspected bank robbers exchanged at least 131 shots during the April 11, 1986 shootout on a residential South Dade street that left two agents and the two gunmen dead. Forty of the bullets were fired by Michael Lee Platt, a former U.S. Army Ranger, who carried a rapid-fire, .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14 […]

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