Lewis Moncrief beams from behind his secondhand desk like a CEO in a Brickell high-rise. His apartment, which doubles as his office and the headquarters for his nonprofit organization Mother Nature’s Kitchen, is furnished with items scrounged from sidewalks and thrift stores. To his left a battered filing system with…

Ron Jones, a microbiologist and renowned expert on the fragile Everglades ecosystem, spent months devising the details of a contract to transfer laboratory equipment from Florida International University, his former employer, to Portland State University in Oregon, where he now works. Attorneys were close to finalizing the deal when New…

Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel emerged from the city’s urban battleground in 2001, born of outrage over fatal police shootings, a perceived heavy-handedness by cops during the Elian Gonzalez standoff, and the general sentiment that officers were running roughshod over minority communities. The panel’s function — the CIP has the power…

Ron Jones was startled to see police lights strobing in his rearview mirror. The microbiologist, whose tenured professorship at Florida International University had just drawn to a close, is nothing if not meticulous and conscientious, definitely not the type to run a stop sign or even exceed the speed limit…

Men in white guayaberas starched parchment-crisp escorted women in evening gowns into the Manuel Artime Theater in Little Havana as night fell on November 15. Backstage, teenage girls twittered nervously in front of makeup mirrors, the scent of powder and hairspray floating on a chemical perfume cloud. By the end…

Skirmishes between protesters and cops may have ended with the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks, but Miami will continue to be a battleground, as police and civil libertarians square off over the right to free speech and the accountability of law enforcement. Miami police Chief John Timoney, in…

The Free Trade Area of the Americas talks have been over for two weeks now, and most of the national media covering the events wrapped it up neatly on Thursday, November 20, the day the meetings ended. Their happy news: The talks were a success and the protests were peaceful…

Last week’s union-sponsored FTAA protest march wound through a locked-down and deserted downtown Miami, the sidewalks inhabited mostly by media and at the Overtown Metrorail station, a pod of poorly costumed undercover cops. What police department they belonged to, we’ll never know. We identified ourselves as reporters and asked where…

It’s been a hectic couple of months for business reporters. First Cancun in September and now Miami in November. Covering the WTO meeting in Mexico was arduous. Between the dangerous mob of protesters and the general disorganization of the event itself, newspaper reporters, especially those forced to file daily stories,…

Andean Region On the great-grandfather clock of time, 500 years is about a second. And in that second, European mestizos have managed to plunder this region of nearly all its mineral wealth, subjugate the Indian populations, and force on them Western laws and the Catholic Church. But if the recent…

Miami is known for its combustible mix of people from all points on the sociopolitical spectrum. At Home Depot the wealthy former somocista bumps into the Sandinista commander who appropriated his Managua mansion. The retired Medellín cocaine kingpin lives in the same Key Biscayne condo as the attorney general who…

The Miami International Film Festival took eighteen years to become a legitimate, beloved cultural event, the kind of thing people eagerly anticipate all year. It took just three years, under the sponsorship of Florida International University, for the festival to morph into a celluloid-steroid behemoth, wobbling on the brink of…

David Byrd has been around — and in — the Miami River for most of his 55 years, and he has one word for the river these days: “Garbage.” Byrd isn’t talking about the actual floating detritus that plagues the 5.5-mile waterway. He uses the word to describe the long-heralded…

The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach’s premiere visual-arts institution, lost three full-time employees last week, a serious blow to an ailing organization. Says museum director Diane Camber: “We only have about eighteen full-time employees, so other staff people will have to pick up the slack.” The personnel cuts are…

On Friday, August 1, Everglades National Park administrators were gearing up for a big meeting to be held the next week. This was an annual event involving the top brass — a brainstorming, looking-ahead session, a sort of “State of the Park” conference. But given the national park’s precarious financial…

Struggling local arts groups started snapping like hungry hyenas last month when they learned the grants they expected to receive from Miami Beach were slated to be cut by $1000 each. Their hackles were raised even higher when they discovered the money would be going to Judy Drucker. Drucker, who…

Battleground Anyone walking into the E2 Café on 107th Avenue, across from Florida International University, hoping to get in a little e-mailing is likely to be surprised. The room behind the smoked-glass windows is not a typical Internet café, with a couple of terminals and a two-head espresso machine. This…

A world away from South Beach’s glam dance spots, kids — teenagers mostly — crouch in a parking lot in Allapattah, drinking beer out of paper bags and smoking cigarettes. Many wear clothes that could have come from a time capsule buried in London 25 years ago: Sneers flicker under…

At noon on South Beach, with the tourist season well under way, balmy breezes toss the palm fronds along Ocean Drive. Pale Midwesterners in flip-flops and brand-new swimming trunks gawk at the menus on sidewalk display. Between the foreign entrée items and the aggressive hostesses who hustle passersby like Bourbon…