Dade County, Florida, is where Carl Bernstein followed a local prosecutor’s subpoena trail into Bernard Barker’s telephone and banking records, turning a disputed report into a concrete line of Watergate inquiry. The county’s state attorney, Richard E. Gerstein, was investigating whether people involved in the break-in had violated Florida law; his chief investigator, Martin Dardis, had obtained records that could illuminate Barker’s financial and communications links. The investigation unfolded in the county justice building, amid the ordinary business of a local prosecutor’s office, while the records themselves opened onto a much wider political operation.

Setting and Local Authority

The office of the state’s attorney of Dade County occupied the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Dade County Justice building, directly across a narrow, palm-lined lane from the county jail. When Bernstein arrived, a receptionist named Ruby told him Dardis had gone out on a case and could not say when he would return. Bernstein waited as uniformed policemen, detectives, defendants, and prosecutors moved through the reception area. Their conversations included questions about how Gerstein was doing in his campaigning: ten days earlier, the prosecutor had announced a run for an unprecedented fifth term.

The office’s local character mattered to the investigation. Gerstein was a Democrat, a World War II bomber pilot, and, according to Ruby, the biggest vote-getter in the history of the state’s attorney’s office. But the inquiry he oversaw was not simply a matter of local political interest. His office had subpoenaed records while trying to determine whether Florida law had been broken by people involved in the Watergate break-in. Gerstein himself said he could not get the FBI to tell him anything about the case, underscoring the gap between a county investigation seeking evidence and the federal investigation Bernstein was trying to understand.

The Subpoena Trail

Dardis had told Bernstein that he had subpoenaed some of Barker’s telephone and bank records and invited him to come to Dade County to discuss them. When they spoke, Dardis was in a hurry and did not want to talk over the telephone. Bernstein asked about a sum of $89,000 that Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert had said was deposited in and withdrawn from Barker’s Miami bank account that spring. Dardis replied that the amount was a little more than $89,000; Bernstein pressed him with the possibility that it was closer to $100,000. The exchange established that the sum at issue was larger than the figure in the earlier account, without settling its exact amount in the conversation.

Unable to reach Dardis after arriving, Bernstein went to the county registrar’s office and requested copies of subpoenas issued by Gerstein’s office during July. A clerk brought him an accordion file arranged by day. In it he found a subpoena to Southern Bell for long-distance calls billed to Barker or Barker Associates, Barker’s real-estate firm, and another to Republic National Bank for Barker’s bank records. Other subpoenas sought documents and records concerning the other three Watergate suspects from Miami. Dardis’s name appeared on each; Bernstein took notes on the subpoenas bearing it.

That paper trail gave the investigation particulars that a secondhand account could not. The subpoenas identified the kinds of records sought, the institutions asked to produce them, and the local official responsible for obtaining them. The telephone records and bank records offered different routes into the same inquiry: one tracked communications, the other money. In Dade County, those routes were not yet a complete explanation of the Watergate operation, but they were documentary leads that Bernstein could pursue rather than merely repeat.

Reporting Under Deadline

Bernstein’s visit began after a telephone company had said that a local district attorney was seeking records. Before rewriting the New York Times story, Bernstein called the U.S. Attorney in Miami, who denied making such a request. Bernstein then phoned local district attorneys in the area; on his third call he reached Gerstein, whose office confirmed that it had subpoenaed the records. Gerstein agreed to have Dardis cooperate on the condition that the Post not reveal it was dealing with his office. Dardis called that evening, but the practical difficulty of protecting the source and getting information on the record remained part of the reporting problem.

At the justice building, waiting for Dardis consumed time. Bernstein asked Ruby whether she could reach him by car radio, then continued trying to work the story. When he saw Gerstein pass with aides, he asked to see him; after a conference, Gerstein invited him into his office. Bernstein explained that it was nearly five o’clock and that the Post’s first-edition deadline was approaching. He had expected an early-afternoon appointment and information that might produce a story, but the account he was trying to verify had already appeared in that morning’s Times, and the source he needed was nowhere to be found. He had overstated how near the deadline was, having decided not to risk losing more time.

The episode shows how Dade County entered the reporting not as a distant backdrop but as a place where verification depended on access, documents, and timing. Bernstein could not simply wait for Dardis: he searched the registrar’s files, took notes, and called Bob Woodward from a pay phone. Woodward had not reached Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre and had not independently confirmed the Times story, but he had learned that the men from Miami had bought photographic equipment and paid for developed film at a camera shop in a Cuban neighborhood. Bernstein, working from the Miami yellow pages, began calling photo shops. The local inquiry thus combined official subpoenas with separate, on-the-ground attempts to locate corroborating details.

Place in the Wider Investigation

Dade County’s significance in this account lies in the meeting of local authority and national reporting. Gerstein’s office was pursuing possible violations of Florida law, while Bernstein was trying to establish what the records meant for a story about the Watergate suspects. The county registrar’s file supplied verifiable evidence of investigative steps; Dardis’s knowledge offered a potential explanation of the financial records; and Gerstein’s office provided a channel of cooperation, albeit one Bernstein was asked to keep confidential. Each element was distinct, and none alone resolved the larger case.

The records also placed Bernard Barker at the center of more than one documentary trail. The subpoenas covered long-distance calls billed to him or his firm and banking records, while other subpoenas reached toward the other Miami suspects. In a separate account of a telephone associated with E. Howard Hunt, a former White House employee recalled that Barker regularly called Hunt there, sometimes while Hunt spoke Spanish; most calls on that line fell between August and November. That evidence does not establish that the telephone was in Dade County, but it helps explain why records concerning Barker’s calls could matter beyond the county’s own inquiry.

Dade County therefore functions as an investigative junction rather than a final answer. Its prosecutor’s office had gathered records that connected named people, communications, and money, while the county setting gave Bernstein a way to examine the paperwork and challenge what he had been told. The work was slow and contingent: a missing investigator, an accordion file, calls from a pay phone, and an approaching deadline. Yet those ordinary local procedures helped move the Watergate story from an unverified report toward a documented account.