> Published Thursday, July 13, 2000, in the Miami Herald
>
> Illegal radio broadcasts keep authorities hopping in
> South Florida
>
> BY DANIEL A. GRECH
> dgrech at herald.com
>
> ``Ninety nine! Ninety nine!'' pirate radio station 96.9 FM crackled as a
> police cruiser pulled up to an apartment building in North Miami Beach.
> ``Ninety nine'' is modern drug parlance for ``cops.''
>
> Police believe the DJ at the unlicensed underground hip-hop station, based
> out of a corner apartment with a view of an alley known for its drug trade,
> was alerting dealers of a possible bust. Other pirate stations have been
> known to orchestrate drug deals through illegal radio broadcasts.
>
> The deejay, Luis E. Rivas, denied being a lookout and said he was calling
> out the station's radio
> frequency.
>
> But instead of drug dealers, police were looking for the pirate radio
> station -- one of dozens that radio experts say haunt the dead dial space
> between licensed commercial radio frequencies on South Florida airwaves
> each day. Miami-Dade -- where federal officials shut down 15 unlicensed
> stations in 1998 -- is one of the nation's hotbeds for pirate radio.
>
> ``I have talked to radio producers across the nation, and Miami is the only
> market in America with all
> these bootleg radio stations,'' said Kid Curry, a program director at WPOW
> Power 96 radio. The popular Top 40 station broadcasts legally at 96.5 FM --
> just a few clicks on the dial from the pirate station that was shut down
> Saturday. ``Here you can have a different station on every block, playing
> that block's favorite songs.''
>
> Low-wattage pirate stations broadcast just a few miles and can cater to
> pockets of niche listeners that aren't served by mainstream radio.
>
> Rivas' station was based out of a third-floor apartment at 2175 NE 169th
> St., just two blocks from the North Miami Beach police station. Inside the
> unit: a television, a chair, a Nintendo game system -- and $10,000 of
> high-end broadcast equipment, including a 500-watt amplifier, digital
> mixers and thousands of CDs.
>
> By tracking the broadcasts on his police cruiser's radio, Officer Joe
> Barasaoin narrowed the station's
> location to the 2100 block of Northeast 169th Street.