America's Most Wanted

As with many exhibits, the materials in Crime in Miami came from a variety of sources. Most of the artifacts and photographs are from HistoryMiami’s collection, but there are also a variety that come from law enforcement agencies and private individuals.

One portion of the exhibition that did not come from our collection is a video that features Samantha Steinberg, a forensic artist who works for the Miami-Dade Police Department, showing how she creates an age progression. The age progression, which is featured in the “Forensic Art” section of the exhibition, is of Gustavo Falcon, an alleged drug kingpin from the 1980s who was never apprehended.

The video came to be a part of the exhibition because of the television show America’s Most Wanted. AMW featured Gustavo back in 2008. The goal of the show, of course, is to encourage private citizens to help law enforcement locate fugitive criminals. Since the most recent photograph of Gustavo was from 1990, Samantha was enlisted to give viewers a better idea of what he would look like almost twenty years later.

After locating the video on the website of America’s Most Wanted, I contacted them to see if they would provide us with a copy. As with any organization that is unfamiliar, it took me some time to locate the people who were able and willing to help. There were many phone calls and a number of e-mails, but I found people with a passion for what they do in the form of the Miami-based producer and the folks at the D.C. headquarters, including a lawyer who authorized the use of the footage, technicians who located the master file and burned it to a disc, and the administrative assistant who coordinated it all.

When all was said and done, I had the finished product in my hands about a week and a half before the exhibition opened. It was a bit tight, but into Crime in Miami it went. Getting the disc to play the way we wanted in the space we already had was a task, but that’s a story for another time.

If you want to see the footage, check out the Gustavo Falcon fugitive brief on the America’s Most Wanted website: http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=61019 (click on the “Media” tab). Maybe you’ll see something that will help to bring in the last of the Cocaine Cowboys.

-- Robert Harkins

Out with the Old, in with the New!

The Education Department at HistoryMiami has had the pleasure of working in the community for decades. We service a wide array of students, from ages 4 through the collegiate level. Our programs engage students in as many subject areas as we can, while sticking to our mission to educate people about South Florida history. This summer, we will officially scrap most of the programs we have and roll out a new, sophisticated, inter-disciplinary and highly interactive series of programs.

The menu for our programs once looked like an “all you can eat buffet,” and has slowly been whittled down to an a la carte list of options. The curriculum team has lately been looking at our galleries through new lenses. This reassessment, coupled with input from teachers we surveyed for the last two years, enabled the team to come up with seven new programs. We are thrilled to introduce just a few to you.

Our new Architecture: We Built this City program takes students through different techniques and tools used for the last 10,000 years in South Florida. The tour also hits the streets of downtown Miami for a first-hand look at the Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival styles for which our city is world renowned.

Technological progress presents new possibilities and problems. Did the Tequesta people have technology 10,000 years ago? Of course they did! The Technology through Time program encourages students to look creatively at tools from the Miami Circle tools from the Miami Circle archaeological site, and hypothesize how the dredges, famously put to work in the Everglades, drained our wetlands and make space for people.

Lastly, we have all come to Make Miami Home, and our new program with the same name looks at the different people who have done this over time. Were you born in South Florida? How about your grandparents? Chances are your family came here from somewhere else for one reason or another. People migrate for a variety of different reasons, and we will connect students to their family stories.

The curriculum team will spend the summer perfecting titles for the programs, inventing and crafting different hands-on projects and writing scripts for our Educators to use. Teachers may begin booking these new programs in September 2010.

-- Jenna Vaisman, School Programs Manager