A Bridge Too Far

In 1996 Ron and Pat Book hired a nanny to help manage their frenetic household in Plantation, Fla. Ron is one of the state's most powerful lobbyists and was traveling constantly. Pat was consumed with running a chocolate shop she had recently opened. So they needed a hand tending to their three kids: Lauren, 11; Samantha, 7; and Chase, 4. The couple had already cycled through numerous nannies who didn't work out and felt fortunate to find Waldina Flores, who seemed attentive, efficient, and firm-handed. (Article continued below...)

For Lauren, though, Flores's arrival marked the beginning of a private horror. One day early on, the nanny asked the girl to spit out her chewing gum. When Lauren refused, Flores leaned in, stuck her tongue into Lauren's mouth, and removed the gum with it. Flores explained herself the next day by saying that was how people behaved when they loved each other. Soon she began molesting the girl in bed at night and watching her shower in the morning. Over time, Flores became more violent. She beat the girl and threw her down the stairs. Once, when Lauren joked to her father at Flores's expense, the nanny later confronted her. "You think you are funny?" Flores asked, according to Lauren. "No. You are s--t." And then she defecated on her.

Lauren's parents didn't suspect anything. Flores was canny about concealing her abusiveness, and Lauren says she was too pliant, confused, and ashamed to divulge what she was enduring. When Lauren's parents asked her one day if she was interested in any guys in her eighth-grade class, Flores set out to find the girl a boyfriend, hoping to avert suspicion. She pointed to a kid in Lauren's yearbook, Kris Lim, and coached her on how to woo him. Lauren and Kris went out and soon became a couple. As the nanny's beatings became worse, Kris noticed Lauren's bruises and asked her how she got them. After lying repeatedly, she eventually confided the truth to him. Kris urged Lauren to tell her parents, but she refused. It wasn't until Flores threatened to kill Kris that Lauren finally relented. In a session in 2001 with her psychiatrist--whom she'd begun seeing because of her despondency and loss of appetite--she shared her saga of abuse. As soon as Lauren left his office, the psychiatrist called Ron Book and asked him to come in the next day to discuss an urgent matter. When Book learned the news, he felt the world had come undone. "I was spinning, spinning, spinning," he says. Much of their session focused on Book's feelings of rage and overwhelming guilt for not having detected his daughter's abuse. He fought back fantasies of violent retribution. In the end, he channeled his wrath into the one arena in which he maneuvers so deftly: the corridors of political power.
Book's relentlessness as a lobbyist is legendary. Compact and pugnacious, he sports a large diamond-studded ring, wears impeccably tailored Brioni suits, and drives a Bentley V12 convertible and an Audi R8. He carries three cell phones, and during the legislative session in Tallahassee you can often see him juggling calls in each ear while also wheedling a passing lawmaker. "His drive, especially toward the end of the session, is like a whirling dervish," says former Florida House Speaker John Thrasher. Other lobbyists love going against him, because even if they lose--which is likely--they know that fighting "Ronnie" will reap a bounty of billable hours.

In the wake of Lauren's abuse, Book mounted a legislative onslaught on sexual predators. Among the many measures he championed, the most significant were local residency restrictions that barred registered sex offenders from living within a certain radius--usually 2,500 feet--of places where children gather, like schools, parks, and playgrounds. By the time he was done, Book had helped pass such ordinances in some 60 cities and counties throughout Florida and beyond.

The impact on the offenders was severe. Entire cities were suddenly off limits to them. They became pariahs, confined to remote and shrinking slivers of land. The most egregious example is a colony of predators camped out under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which spans Miami's Biscayne Bay--a place so surreal and outlandish that it has become a lightning rod in the debate over America's treatment of sex offenders. For a long time, Book was unrepentant about having helped create that community of outcasts. Predators, he'll repeatedly tell you, are "monsters" and "the creeping crud of society." But eventually the fury began to subside, and was replaced by something Book isn't accustomed to having: doubts.

At the Julia Tuttle camp, the sex offenders begin trickling in around dusk. It is a squalid and dreary place. The air is thick and stifling, reeking of human feces and of cat urine from all the strays that live there. Overhead, the bridge drones and trembles with six lanes of traffic. Makeshift dwellings sprawl out in every direction--tents clinging to concrete pylons, rickety shacks fashioned out of plywood, a camper shell infested with cockroaches. There is no running water or sewage system; inhabitants relieve themselves in shopping bags and toss the sacks into a pile of refuse that they burn periodically. Some men fish along the shoreline, then gut and fry up the catch for anyone who's hungry. For diversion, there's a nightly dominoes game, or perhaps a bottle of booze sipped in solitude.