Cuban rapper Chocolate MC arrested after robbing fan who asked for a photo: MDSO
Around 8 a.m., the fan, who was not identified, was pulling into a Chavez Supermarket, 101 Opa-locka Blvd., when he noticed Yosvanis Sierra-Hernandez, better known as Chocolate MC, an arrest report detailed.
He waved hello to the artist and called him over to take a picture of him. Sierra-Hernandez obliged and walked to his car, but when he got there, he pulled out a gun, pointed it at the man's chest and demanded the vehicle.
That's not all he wanted, as he would soon demand the man give him cash too, the report read. When the fan showed Sierra-Hernandez his cashless wallet, he then demanded the man send him money through Zelle — the fan also did not have Zelle.
Not getting any money, Sierra-Hernandez forced the man to drive to several places for the next two hours before eventually releasing him unharmed.
Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office detectives combed through surveillance video, which showed the attempted robbery at gunpoint. After putting up wanted fliers throughout the county, authorities arrested Sierra-Hernandez late Tuesday.
As of Thursday night, he still remained in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
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Carollo calls $500K he spent to elect Rosado ‘worst political mistake' of his life
As he left the most recent Miami City Commission meeting this month, a seething Joe Carollo had harsh words for his new colleague, Ralph Rosado: 'You will never be a future mayor.' In less than a month, the longtime city commissioner went from bankrolling Rosado's campaign and celebrating his subsequent victory, to deeply regretting the sleepless nights and mountains of cash he spent to ensure Rosado would become the city's next District 4 commissioner. During the breakneck six-week special election, Carollo's political committee, Miami First, spent over a half-million dollars on Rosado's election. But according to Carollo, his help went far beyond mere financial assistance. In an interview with the Miami Herald, Carollo laid out his winning strategy that he said catapulted Rosado from trailing 25 percentage points behind opponent Jose Regalado to defeating Regalado with 55% of the vote last month. At the end, just 548 votes separated the two. That strategy entailed staying up until 2 or 3 a.m. creating campaign mailers, spending three days filming Rosado's 30-second campaign ad, and ultimately dragging the Regalado name through the mud to decimate any goodwill associated with one of South Florida's most prominent political families. A flurry of anti-Regalado attack mailers accused the former assistant building director of abusing animals and alleged that the Regalado family has ties to international drug traffickers. Rosado, who declined to be interviewed for this story, said in a written statement to the Herald that he ran a 'positive, issue-focused campaign.' Rosado said Carollo's 'insights were appreciated' but that 'ultimately, the decisions about our message, outreach and the contrasts we drew were made by our campaign, and we're proud of the way we connected with voters and executed our plan with integrity and focus.' Rosado's opponent sees it differently. 'It was character assassination,' Regalado told the Herald in a recent interview. 'It wasn't a positive campaign. It was one of the most negative campaigns I've ever seen in my life.' Carollo says he was heavily involved in Rosado's campaign and that Rosado was '100%' aware of what was taking place behind the scenes — including the anti-Regalado smear campaign. But now, weeks after Rosado's swearing-in, Carollo regrets those efforts. 'It's the worst political mistake that I've made in my life,' said Carollo, who was first elected to the Miami City Commission in 1979. His change of heart follows several City Commission votes by Rosado that Carollo took issue with. That includes Rosado's tiebreaker vote in favor of postponing the upcoming November election to 2026 — a measure backed by the mayor — as well as Rosado's vote to shutter the Bayfront Park Management Trust in January of next year. Carollo previously chaired the Trust, but he was ousted from the agency earlier this year, and it was turned over to his rival, Commissioner Miguel Angel Gabela. Rosado now joins Gabela on Carollo's ever-evolving list of political adversaries — a roster that currently includes Commissioner Damian Pardo and Mayor Francis Suarez, whose political committee spent over $1 million on Rosado's election. 'I didn't expect anything with Ralph Rosado, with the exception of him coming here to be an honest commissioner,' Carollo said. 'I didn't expect him to come here to be a lap dog — another lap dog — for Mayor Suarez.' Carollo explains his winning strategy While Suarez outspent Carollo 2-to-1 in support of Rosado's campaign, Carollo maintains that his efforts, paired with help from his wife, Marjorie, are the real reason Rosado was victorious. 'It's not just the money. … It's the strategy,' Carollo said. 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These are salad days for the likes of Joseph Uscinski, who spends his time peering down rabbit holes and poking in the dark spaces where weird and woolly things grow. There are loads of conspiracy theories out there, the granddaddy of them all being the conjecture surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. But most tend to fade and be forgotten, said Uscinski, who teaches political science at the University of Miami, where he studies public opinion and mass media, with a focus on conspiracies. "Only a select few will attract a large number of believers, have movies made... get talked about by politicians," Uscinski said. The Jeffrey Epstein saga has all the elements of one of those top-shelf intrigues, with an added Shakespearean twist — a president whose political rise has been fueled by outlandish conspiracy theories and now faces a backlash from some of his most faithful devotees, as he tries to wriggle free from a deceitful web of his own design. Delicious, especially if you enjoy your schadenfreude served piping hot. Read more: Trump resists bipartisan calls to release Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein The known facts are these: Epstein was an eye-poppingly wealthy financier, luxe man-about-Manhattan and convicted sex offender who sexually trafficked women and girls. In 2008, he agreed to an exceedingly lenient plea deal with federal prosecutors that resulted in a 13-month prison sentence, with freedom granted 12 hours a day, six days a week, under a work-release program. A decade later, an investigative reporter at the Miami Herald identified scores of alleged survivors of sexual abuse by Epstein and some of his associates. In 2019, a new federal criminal case was brought against him. About a month after being arrested, Epstein was found dead in his cell at a jail in New York City. Investigators ruled Epstein's death a suicide. An A-list fixture of the upper-crust social scene, Epstein has been linked in court documents with a galaxy of celebrities from the worlds of Hollywood, business and politics. It's an article of faith among some true believers — particularly within the MAGA movement — that a secret list of those serviced by Epstein's sexual enterprise exists somewhere in the bowels of the federal government, hidden by agents of the hated, anti-Trump "deep state." In a Fox News interview in February, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said a list of Epstein's clients was "sitting on my desk right now to review," with its public release seemingly just a matter of time. Then, like one of Trump's threatened tariffs, the list — or "list" — abruptly vanished. There was no such thing, the Justice Department announced earlier this month, along with a finding that Epstein had, in fact, killed himself and was not, as some assert, murdered by forces wishing to silence him. A piqued president urged everyone to move on and forget about Epstein. "Somebody that nobody cares about," sniffed Trump, who moved in many of the same social circles as Epstein but now downplays their yearslong friendship. All in all, conspiratorial catnip. "Saying there are files and then saying there aren't files... setting up some expectation for revelations and then insisting that actually there's nothing there" has only deepened the well of suspicion, said Kathryn Olmsted, a UC Davis conspiracy expert who's studied past instances of government deflection and deception involving the CIA and FBI, among others. Unlike some of the crackpot stuff she's heard — like Bill and Hillary Clinton murdering Joan Rivers to cover up Michelle Obama's transgender identity — the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein have at least some grounding in reality. "He was very rich and powerful and he associated with some of the most powerful and richest people in the world, including members of both the Democratic and Republican parties," Olmsted said. "And he was trafficking girls. There's an actual crime at the heart of this. It's not just something that people have made up out of thin air." That's the thing that gives the Epstein conspiracy theories their distinctly frothy frisson: a blending of vital ingredients, one very old and the other comparatively new. False allegations of child abuse date back to the blood libel of the Middle Ages and the assertion that Jews tortured and murdered Christian children as part of their ceremonial worship. From there, a through line can be traced all the way to the 2016 "Pizzagate" conspiracy, which claimed that Hillary Clinton and her top aides were running a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor. Truly vile stuff. Take that ancient trope and marry it to a modern lack of faith in the federal government and its institutions and you're gifted with an endless source of lurid speculation. "The number of threads that you can pull out of [the Epstein] fabric are many," said retired University of Utah historian Robert Goldberg, another conspiracy expert. "And they're going to be long." Read more: Trump slams his own supporters as 'weaklings' for falling for what he now calls the Epstein 'hoax' Democrats, for their part, are eagerly fanning the controversy, as a way to undermine Trump and drive a wedge in his granite-firm base. 'He said he was going to release [the complete Epstein files] and now he's saying there's nothing to see here and appears to be wanting to sweep the whole thing under the rug,' Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who played a prominent role in the Jan. 6 congressional hearings, taunted on MSNBC. "There is overwhelming bipartisan, popular demand, congressional demand, to release all of this stuff.' Indeed, Trump need only look in one of his gilded mirrors to see what's driven years of fevered Epstein obsession. "He built a coalition of people who have these beliefs," said the University of Miami's Uscinski. "And I think he's learned that once you build a coalition of conspiracy theorists, you can't get them to [stop believing]. They came to him because he was telling them what they want. He can't turn around and do the opposite now." Oh, what a tangled web we weave... Get the latest from Mark Z. BarabakFocusing on politics out West, from the Golden Gate to the U.S. me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
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