Crime Florida

The men of Wilbur Enterprises are never at a loss for firepower. At work in their fortified office, out on a job in their company trucks, off for a night on the town, they dress for the occasion and they always pack heat. Loaded guns lay scattered, in desk drawers and under counters, throughout the light-construction firm's warehouse on a hardscrabble stretch of 7th Avenue in north Miami. Inside his waistband, the boss, Blair Wilbur, 67, keeps a .

Of course, the tourism delegation Miami dispatched to London and Frankfurt, Germany, earlier this month talked up the $5.6 billion being spent to renovate hotels, replenish the beaches and improve the highways here. And the group passed out plenty of brochures featuring palm trees, tropical drinks and fun in the sun. But perhaps most important--and most unusual--in the delegation's pitch to European travel writers and tour operators was the presence of John S.

A Venezuelan couple became the latest victims of crime against tourists in Miami, but the robbers were apprehended after a witness to the heist alerted police. No one was hurt in the latest incident, which follows an international wave of publicity after six tourists have been slain in less than four months. Venezuelan visitor Nancy Perez told police she and her husband had stopped to get gas for their car when a man jumped out of the car behind, stole her purse and ran off in broad daylight.

The memories are mostly of beauty and weirdness, of sunbeams that made the bay waters sparkle like a carpet of gems and of news stories that seemed to warp toward the surreal in this city's subtropical heat. At times, the beautiful and the bizarre layered over each other the way they would in a Salvador Dali painting. Always, the sky was the most luminous of blue; often, the world below the most haunting of dreamscapes.

"This is a jack!" someone shouted. Tim Miller, who had spent 10 years as the lone clerk at a drive-through beverage store, looked up to see two guns pointed at him. The faces behind them were very cold, very mean--and very young. "You gotta be kidding," Miller blurted out. One kid, at 5 feet 2, could barely see above the drive-through window. A seventh-grader, he had turned 13 the week before. He thrust the gun within inches of Miller's face. "Shoot him!"

On the first day of their vacation, John and Rose Hayward flew in from Britain, rented a car at the airport and were promptly lured off the freeway into a crime-ridden northwest Miami neighborhood where they were shot, wounded and robbed. On the second day of their vacation, they were hospitalized, celebrity victims.

Murder, she wrote. And wrote. And wrote. And wrote. More than 5,000 of them over the last 16 years. As the premier police scribe in the country, Edna Buchanan is the Queen of Crime, the Maven of Mayhem, the Sultana of Stiffs. "A lot of people don't have time to pay attention to dead people," she says. "Somebody has to speak for them." Other victims of crime "can get mad, speak out, join a lobby. But nobody talks for the dead. They're just dead."

A Florida man visiting relatives for the holidays was in custody Friday in connection with sexual assaults on seven women in three Orange County coastal communities, police said. Melvin Earl Miller, 26, of Fort Lauderdale was apprehended in Laguna Beach and held on suspicion of sexual battery in three of the cases, said Sgt. Greg Bartz of the Laguna Beach Police Department. Miller also faces a charge of resisting arrest for allegedly running from an officer who approached him on the beach.

The California Assembly approved vastly expanding the availability of concealed handgun permits to citizens who pass background checks and safety training classes. The measure now goes to the state Senate, but given the political history in other states, it is almost inevitable that California eventually will have a "shall issue" law, directing local law enforcement officials to issue permits to most people who apply.