Florida became a pivotal investigative landscape in the Watergate story: in Miami and Dade County, local subpoenas and bank records gave Carl Bernstein a way to follow money connected to the break-in. The state’s importance lay not simply in the presence of the accused, but in the paper trail that led from a local inquiry to questions about the Nixon campaign’s hidden funds and the officials who controlled them.

Miami and the Local Investigation

The Florida trail began with a phone-records lead that did not hold up as first described. A man told Bernstein that the phone company in Miami had said the request came from the local district attorney. Bernstein checked with the U.S. Attorney in Miami, who denied making such a request, and then began calling district attorneys in the area. On his third call he reached Richard E. Gerstein, Dade County’s state’s attorney. Gerstein’s office had subpoenaed records while investigating whether people involved in the break-in had violated Florida law. He did not know what the records contained, but said his chief investigator, Martin Dardis, could help, provided the Post did not identify the office as its source.

Dardis was reluctant to discuss the matter by telephone. He told Bernstein that he had subpoenaed some of Bernard Barker’s telephone and bank records and invited him to come to Miami. When Bernstein asked about the sum of $89,000 that Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert had said was deposited in and withdrawn from Barker’s Miami bank account that spring, Dardis replied that the amount was a little higher. He identified its apparent origin as Mexico City, but withheld the name of the lawyer involved until Bernstein could meet him in person.

The setting gave the investigation a distinctly local, physical character. Gerstein’s office occupied the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Dade County Justice building, across a narrow, palm-lined lane from the county jail. When Bernstein arrived, Dardis had gone out on a case. As Bernstein waited, police officers, detectives, defendants, and prosecutors passed through the reception area. The receptionist, Ruby, described Gerstein as a popular local prosecutor who had recently announced a campaign for an unprecedented fifth term. The office was at once a working law-enforcement center and the source of records that might illuminate a national political scandal.

The Fifth Check

Bernstein’s trip was complicated by a competing account already in print. On his flight to Miami, he read a New York Times report tracing the $89,000 in Barker’s account to four cashier’s checks issued at Banco Internacional to Mexico City lawyer Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre. The story had appeared while Bernstein was en route to meet Dardis. Rather than follow the report to Mexico City, Bernstein called Barry Sussman from the Miami airport; Sussman advised him to remain in Florida at least for the day.

When Bernstein eventually examined the records, the four Mexican checks matched the Times description: each had been drawn on a different American bank, and each carried an illegible endorsement above a typed notation naming Ogarrio. But the records also contained a fifth check, one that changed the scale and shape of the trail. Dated April 10, it was a $25,000 cashier’s check drawn on First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida, payable to Kenneth Dahlberg. Bernstein copied it by hand, as he had the other checks. The five checks were deposited together on April 20, for a total of $114,000. Four days later, Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately.

The Florida check did not, by itself, establish who had arranged the payment or what every dollar had financed. Its force was more precise: it added a separate, identifiable source of money to the four Mexican checks and complicated the apparent origin of the funds in Barker’s account. Dardis told Bernstein that investigators were still trying to identify Dahlberg. Bernstein said he had not heard of him. The unanswered question in the local office became the subject of the August 1 story about the check, and the story marked a turn in the reporters’ partnership: from then on, Watergate stories carried both Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s names.

From Florida Records to Campaign Funds

The records gathered in Florida belonged to a wider chain of reporting about how the Watergate operation had been financed. A later Washington Post account reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell, Nixon’s former campaign manager, and kept in a special Committee for the Re-election of the President account. The fund held more than $300,000 for sensitive political projects; G. Gordon Liddy received money from it, records had been destroyed, and Hugh Sloan’s resignation as treasurer followed his suspicions about Watergate. The story’s larger implication was that the indictments had not ended the conspiracy’s financial and organizational trail.

Sloan later described how authorization had worked. When he first needed money, he called Mitchell at the Justice Department; Mitchell told him to distribute it. Such calls had begun in 1971. Sloan said Mitchell was initially the sole person authorized to approve expenditures, with authority later passing to others, including Jeb Magruder. This account supplied a different kind of evidence from the Florida checks: the checks documented particular deposits and withdrawals, while Sloan described a route by which campaign money was authorized. Together, the strands helped reporters move from tracing funds in a local bank account toward investigating control of a broader campaign operation.

Significance of the Florida Trail

Florida’s contribution to the investigation was therefore both jurisdictional and evidentiary. Gerstein’s office was examining possible violations of state law, and its subpoenas gave Bernstein access to records the federal inquiry had not supplied through the reported route. The state’s attorney’s office also offered a cautious, conditional channel: Gerstein would instruct Dardis to cooperate only if the Post concealed its dealings with the office. That arrangement shaped how the reporting proceeded, requiring an in-person meeting rather than an open telephone exchange.

The fifth check made the Florida setting more than a waypoint between Washington and Mexico City. Drawn on a Boca Raton bank, payable to a still-unidentified campaign figure, and deposited alongside the four Mexican checks, it exposed a concrete connection that required further investigation without resolving every question about responsibility. Florida furnished a place to test claims against records, a local inquiry capable of subpoenaing them, and a financial clue whose significance expanded as the reporting reached the campaign’s hidden system of funds.