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psycho.”
    The shooting also inspired a religious revival in Albert. He embraced his mother’s Santeria and became obsessed with San Lazaro—Saint Lazarus—the biblical figure exalted in Santeria for his purported power over death. Albert filled the house with statues of him, the biggest a nine-foot behemoth covered in a frock that Albert bragged was spun from gold. Others were painted in flesh tones and adorned with human-hair wigs. One room contained a shrine with a cauldron in which toy boats were placed to ensure safe passage of smugglers’ loads coming from the Bahamas. According to Albert’s stepdaughter, Jenny, Albert’s mother served as priestess in family Santeria ceremonies.
    Brutality permeated the place. Although Albert and his father were close in public, inside the house they often engaged in violent physical contests. According to Jenny, “Every morning at six they’d wake up and argue. They would beat the crap out of each other. Albert once hit Frank with a glass ashtray so hard, he split his head open. We thought he’d killed him.”
    Lourdes says her most unshakable memory was of Albert’s treatment of the dogs. He choked the more recalcitrant ones into submission by hanging them from hooks. It could take half an hour for an animal to lose consciousness and earn its release. “He did it for fun,” Lourdes says. “You’d see dogs with their tongues out, fighting to breathe.”
    His stepdaughter Jenny Cartaia—in testimony before a U.S. immigration court in 1996, as well as in interviews with me—offered the most disturbing account of life with Albert. When she was thirteen, she says, Albert began raping her. When she was sixteen, after her mother went to prison on drug charges, Albert “married” her in a ceremony his mother presided over. Though Albert’s lawyer disputes her testimony, certain facts are tough to dismiss. At seventeen, Jenny gave birth to the first of two sons by Albert, whom she raised alongside her half brother (the son her mother had with Albert). As Jenny explains it, “My half brother is my kids’ half brother, but he’s also their uncle, too. It’s like in the movie Chinatown. ”
    Adding to the trauma of life with Albert were regular beatings. “Albert used to beat me with his weight-lifting belts,” Jenny says. “He’d throw me down and kick me. I have a scar where he broke a broomstick over my head. I was pregnant for the third time when he beat me so bad I lost my baby.”
    What most confused Jenny about her childhood was the fact that no one intervened. “We’d have dinners and political parties in the house. I was a child. Nobody ever said, ‘Mr. San Pedro, how come you’re married to your daughter?’ Nobody would say such a thing. They worshipped him.”

The Great Corrupter
     
     
    Public officials led the parade of worshippers. Miami was in the midst of a gold rush, driven by the drug trade, and its political class was eminently corruptible. Into the fertile slime of the civic culture Albert ventured forth, plotting a new order of backroom influence, with himself at the top.
    His outreach to the community began in the mid-1970s, when he organized neighborhood cookouts on the feast day of San Lazaro. He made friends in the Hialeah Police Department by hosting Fraternal Order of Police dinners and department judo tournaments at his house; Albert’s brother, John, later joined the department. The Hialeah police parked a cruiser protectively outside Albert’s house, and off-duty cops provided security alongside Transworld detectives. Following Albert’s indictment for cocaine trafficking, a popular Hialeah police lieutenant—later implicated in Albert’s extortion schemes—defended him as an “inspiration to kids” and told reporters that during his visits with Albert their time was spent “practicing martial arts and reading the Bible.”
    Albert provided financial backing for a new Spanish-language paper, Las Noticias, and then for the