Nixon purchased 500 Bay Lane in 1969, buying the first of what would become three waterfront properties from his former Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida. The compound sat on Key Biscayne, a barrier island accessible by the Rickenbacker Causeway, surrounded by the warm, shallow waters of Biscayne Bay. Nixon visited the property at least 50 times during his presidency, from 1969 to 1974, earning it the informal title of the Florida White House -- or, as some called it, the Winter White House. The tropical setting provided a stark contrast to the formality of Washington, and Nixon used it as both a retreat and an alternative seat of power, hosting meetings and making decisions that shaped American foreign policy while the warm Florida breeze came off the bay.

Nixon's compound was not an isolated retreat. Just next door at 490 Bay Lane lived Charles "Bebe" Rebozo, a banker and Nixon's closest personal friend. Rebozo, president and owner of the Key Biscayne Bank, would later be indicted for money-laundering a $100,000 donation from Howard Hughes to the Nixon campaign. Nearby lived industrialist Robert Abplanalp, the inventor of the modern aerosol spray can valve. According to journalist Don Fulsom, Nixon and Rebozo secured their real estate at bargain prices through Donald Berg, a Rebozo business partner with Mafia connections -- ties serious enough that the Secret Service eventually advised Nixon to stop associating with Berg. The lender on one of Nixon's properties was Arthur Desser, a man who consorted with both Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and mobster Meyer Lansky. By the 1960s, FBI agents monitoring organized crime had classified Rebozo as a "non-member associate of organized crime figures." The Key Biscayne Bank itself was suspected of serving as a pipeline for Mafia money flowing from James Crosby's casino operations in the Bahamas.

Key Biscayne carried presidential history even before Nixon arrived. After the 1960 presidential election, President-elect John F. Kennedy and Nixon -- the man he had just defeated -- met for the first time at an oceanfront villa in the old Key Biscayne Hotel, a graceful concession between rivals. Nixon returned to Key Biscayne as president himself less than a decade later, but his relationship with the island darkened as Watergate consumed his administration. As the scandal intensified, Nixon spent increasing stretches of time in seclusion at the compound, far from the press corps and congressional investigators in Washington. The tropical isolation that had once offered relaxation now served as a bunker.

The U.S. Department of Defense spent $400,000 of taxpayer money constructing a helicopter landing pad in Biscayne Bay adjacent to the Nixon compound, ensuring Marine One could deliver the president directly to his doorstep. When Nixon later sold the property -- including the helipad -- public accusations followed that he had enriched himself at taxpayer expense. The compound gained an unexpected second life in 1983 when it served as a filming location for Scarface, Brian De Palma's violent epic starring Al Pacino. The house appeared on screen as the home of drug lord Frank Lopez, played by Robert Loggia, its waterfront elegance providing the perfect backdrop for Miami's fictional cocaine underworld. The real underworld connections lurking in the compound's history made the casting almost too appropriate.

In July 2004, developer Edgardo Defortuna, president of Fortune International Realty, razed the original building. The demolition erased the physical structure but not the site's significance. Key Biscayne itself remains an affluent barrier island community southeast of downtown Miami, its palm-lined streets and waterfront properties commanding some of the highest real estate prices in South Florida. From the air, Bay Lane is a quiet residential road curving along the western shore, the kind of place where nothing appears to have happened at all. But for five pivotal years of American history, this unassuming stretch of shoreline was where a president retreated, where powerful men with troubling connections gathered over drinks, and where the walls of an administration slowly closed in. The Florida White House is gone, but the shadow it cast on Key Biscayne has never fully lifted.