FUGITIVE

"Orlando."

In a dim, nearly deserted Everglades farm stand, nothing moved.

Orlando Boquete, hybrid of youth and age -- his body springy and
athletic at 52, but knitted to a startlingly ancient head -- peered
at the stalls through thick eyeglasses.

Other than a faint buzz, the shimmer of heat trapped in a tin roof,
the word "Orlando" was the only sound.

An impatient companion called to him.

"Orlando. Hey, Orlando."

Not a flicker, head to toe. For more than a decade, Orlando Boquete
lived as a fugitive, his very identity a shackle he slipped out of,
again and again. He hid bits of sandpaper in his wallet so that in a
pinch, he could abrade his fingerprints. Every bit as revealing as
the ridges of his fingers, the ordinary, reflexive responses to his
own name -- a grunt, a sideways glance, a shifting foot -- also
vanished under the grind of fugitive life. It was as if someone had
suddenly clapped hands in front of his eyes and he did not blink.
Standing still, not saying yes or hello or uh-huh became a martial art.

The word "Orlando" floated in the thick, steaming air, then sank
without trace into the wizened face.

Technically, he was no longer running from anyone, so this denial was
vestigial habit. He could say who he was. He lifted a mango, rolled
the fruit in the palm of his hand, half-smiled and turned to greet
the man behind the counter. He announced that he was Cuban. Then he
asked a question.

"Es Mejicano?"

The fruit man nodded, yes, he was Mexican.

At that, the words erupted from Boquete's mouth, personal history as
volcanic rush.

"These Mexicans in the sugar-cane fields helped me," he began.
"Twenty-one years ago, when I escaped from Glades, I hid with them.
Right here, by choo-choo."

He pointed toward the railroad tracks, but the fruit-stand man did
not shift his blank gaze. It was almost possible to see him rewind to
the phrase "when I escaped from Glades."

On the way into the town of Belle Glade, the welcome sign in this
capital of sugar cane declares, "Her Soil Is Her Fortune," but
another gravitational force goes unmentioned: Glades Correctional
Institution, the state prison one mile down the road. The prison had
brought Orlando Boquete to Belle Glade, but it could not keep him there.

He started speaking in gusts of alternating language, Spanish one
sentence, English the next phrase, a saga of life in flight -- of
hiding places in the sugar cane, disguises that tricked the police,
gratitude to the Mexicans who helped him.

Fugitivo.

The fruit man did not bother to mask his anxiety. As he listened to
Boquete, he slid the mango off the counter, with no sign that he was
going to bag the purchases of this garrulous criminal. Boquete
realized he should present his bona fides. He turned and pointed to
me -- here, this white newspaper writer from New York has come to
look at the canals where he hid with alligators, the mucky fields
where he crawled like a snake.

"I don't read newspapers," the fruit man said blankly.

At Boquete's shoulder, his nephew, Jose Boquete, spoke into his ear.

"Tio," he said. And he stage-whispered into his uncle's ear, "DNA."
Not missing a beat, the older man spoke the word "exonerated" and the
abbreviation DNA and finally, three more letters that registered with
the fruit man.

"CNN," Boquete said.

"Ahh," said the fruit man, who pointed to the television in the fruit
stand, reciting the shards of the tale that lodged in his memory. A
Cubano broke out of Glades Correctional. He ran for years. Then he
was caught. And finally, he was proved innocent. There must be more
to the story, but it was enough for the fruit man. He pushed the
mango across the counter. On the house. Boquete protested. The fruit
man insisted.

By Feb. 6, 1985, the night he fled prison, Orlando Boquete, 30 years
old, had already spent two years behind bars for a sexual assault and
burglary he had nothing to do with, the victim of a victim who
mistook him for the man who climbed in her window. Ahead of him, as
far as the eye could see, were mountains of time: five decades.

He bolted.

Of the 194 people exonerated by DNA tests since 1989, only Orlando
Boquete undid society's mistake by fleeing. And he kept undoing it:
over the next decade, he was in police custody again and again, only
to vanish in a forest of identities that were false, borrowed and
stolen. His prison break was the start of a decadelong journey of
near-disaster and daring inches, with no money, no home, no name --
but with good looks, charm and a quick mind. Craving family and a bed
to call his own, Boquete instead found refuge in an underworld of
outlaws. "I did certain things that I had to do," he said. "To
survive. But I never, never harmed anyone."

He would appear at family gatherings, enchanting the children in
stolen moments when he again became, without worry, Orlando Boquete.
Then he would quietly slip behind the mask of fugitive life. (A
niece, Danay Rodriguez, remembers her parents coming home with a
flier that showed her tio Orlando as one of the state's most wanted
men -- a mistake, the grown-ups assured her.) He held dozens of jobs,
legal and illegal; at times, he worked as legitimately as someone
with a fake name could. Other times, he worked por la izquierda, on
the left -- meaning, he said, under the table.

He had always been good at running. Boquete (pronounced bo-KETT-eh)
boarded a shrimp boat in the port of Mariel, Cuba, in 1980, when he
was 25, leaving behind one son, two marriages, a career as a diesel
mechanic in Havana and a jail record as a Cuban Army deserter -- this
last credential essential, he believed, to helping him clear
bureaucratic hurdles for departing Cuba. He joined 125,000 Cubans,
known as Marielitos, who formed an extraordinary exodus that year,
when Fidel Castro felt pressure from a poor economy and allowed them to leave.

For two years, Boquete led a life that was pretty much on the level.
He worked construction, then in Cafeteria La Palma in Miami's Little
Havana and later as clerk in a convenience store on the
midnight-to-dawn, no-one-else-will-do-it, armed-robbery shift. By
June 1982, Boquete was living with an uncle in a trailer in Key West,
hoping for work as a commercial fisherman along the archipelago.

On June 25, with the summer heat at full blast, he had a cousin shave
his head of thick black hair, leaving only a mustache. That night,
various Boquetes later testified, they sat in the trailer, watching
baseball and the World Cup from Spain. Afterward, they strolled to a
Tom Thumb convenience store for cigarettes and beer. As they
approached, police officers asked them to wait in the parking lot.
Another police car pulled up. Inside was a woman who had awoken from
a sound sleep in her bed in the Stock Island apartments, a few blocks
away, to find a man on top of her. He ejaculated on her bedclothes.
He had no hair on his face, she said, and a buzz cut on his head.
Another man lurked in the apartment with him, she said, but had not
taken part in the assault. They grabbed a few items and left.

From the police car, the victim saw Orlando Boquete and told the
officer, "That's him." Although he had a prominent mustache, he was
the only person in the vicinity with a shaved head. That single
glimpse shaped Boquete's life for decades.

Before trial, the prosecutors offered him a deal: plead guilty and
give evidence against the other man who had broken into the
apartment, and he would have to serve only one year in jail, followed
by two years probation. On the witness stand, Boquete explained why
he had declined. "If my freedom depends on my falsely stating that
I'm a culprit or guilty," he said, "I would rather go to jail. I'm
conscious of the fact that if the gentlemen of the jury and the
ladies of the jury, if they vote against me, they are going to
destroy my life, and I'm not afraid to stand here."

Besides the alibi provided by his cousins and uncle, the defense
seemed to hold one other card. A second man, Pablo Cazola, was
arrested for the attack and pleaded guilty. He also signed an
affidavit stating that Boquete was not his accomplice. But he refused
to testify at trial. At the time, DNA testing -- the ultimate proof
of identity -- had not yet been used in court. So the jury was left
to weigh the eyewitness identification of a very confident victim, on
the one hand, against the alibi of Boquete and his relatives, all of
whom testified he had spent an evening watching television and drinking beer.

It was January 1983, a particularly poor moment for a Marielito
accused of a violent crime; there had been many fevered stories about
their supposed rampant criminality. Convicted after brief
deliberation, Boquete was sentenced to 50 years for the burglary and
another five years for attempted sexual battery. The case was over
and, so it seemed, was the life Orlando Boquete had sought in
America. He was 28 years old.

He moved into the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections
with one treasured possession, he told me, passed along by an inmate
he met in the county jail: a Spanish-language edition of "Papillon,"
the prison memoir that became a movie starring Steve McQueen and
Dustin Hoffman. It is the account of Henri Charriere, who wrote --
perhaps accurately, though some scholars are skeptical -- of his many
escapes from French penal colonies over the years.

"This is a real book," Boquete told me. "He gives to you power.
Esperanza. Hope."

He set about adapting Charriere's lessons to his own life, finding
principles and tactics that could transfer from penal colonies of the
1930s to a state prison in Florida in the mid-1980s. On one occasion,
Charriere was undone by an informant. The lessons, by Boquete's
light: study and silence. "Be patient if you want to escape from
somewhere," Boquete said. "You have to be observant. Don't run your mouth."

He studied the terrain. Two fences ran around Glades Correctional.
The first was short, easily scalable. Between it and the second was a
strip of boundary area, about 10 feet wide, mined with pressure
detectors. A footstep would set off alarms. Beyond the boundary was
the second fence, about 15 feet, with curls of razor wire running
along the ledge. Guards watched from towers, but the pursuit of
escapees was left to officers who circled the perimeter in a van, on
a road just beyond the outer fence.

A natural, compact athlete, Boquete ran every day, processing the
details of prison life. Inmates occasionally were taken by a shotgun
squad to work in sugar-cane fields near the prison. On one such
excursion, Boquete saw a swampy irrigation canal, about 300 yards
beyond the outer wall. It served as a moat, complete with resident
snakes and alligators. This gave him pause. "Alligators have
territory," he explained. "If they have babies over there, and you go
there, you're in trouble."

He made a pinpoint search for useful, secret-worthy inmates and found
one man from the town of Belle Glade, who agreed to map the roads and
landmarks. He was staked $30 by a Colombian inmate with ties to
organized crime.

Charriere wrote in "Papillon" of the ocean waters around Devil's
Island, noting that every seventh wave slapped against the shore with
greater strength than the ones that came before or after. Ultimately,
he marshaled the power of a seventh wave to get clear of the island.
At Glades, Boquete timed the orbit of the van, to see how long he
would have from the moment he triggered the ground alarms until his
pursuers could get back to him. About a minute, he figured.

In "The Fugitive," a movie starring Harrison Ford, an innocent man on
his way to death row seizes a chance to run for his life. In the
unyielding reality of prison, innocent people often do the precise
opposite of running. They dig in their heels. Many go before parole
boards and refuse to apologize for "their" crimes, unwilling to offer
themselves as exemplars of how the penitentiary really is a place of
penance. In Pyrrhic glory, these innocent people prolong their
incarceration by refusing to fake remorse for things they did not do,
while the guilty quickly learn that the carrot of parole awaits those
who muster the necessary show of contrition.

Even if Boquete had been willing to profess regret for something he
had not done, parole was years away. Still, running would inevitably
land him in a purgatory of deception and evasion. Moreover, the law
does not permit innocent people to flee prison any more than it
permits them to resist arrest. The guards would be armed and ready to shoot.

"I know that can happen," he reflected years later. "I don't care. If
they kill me, anyway, I'm gone. I finish my sentence. I was ready,
physically, mentally, spiritually. I don't be scared about nothing
when I escaped. Only a little scared of alligators."

The evening of Feb. 6, 1985, was miserable, wet and cold. Perfect.
"Nobody likes to jump in the cold water," Boquete said of the guards.
"Nobody wants to stay in the sugar-cane fields in the cold weather.
The cold weather makes their job more difficult."

Just before 8 p.m., as he sorted carrots on an assembly line, he
caught the eye of George Wright, a 29-year-old man serving 75 years
for robbery. Boquete said they had joined forces while jogging in the
yard; Wright, who is back in prison and due to be paroled next month,
has a somewhat different version of events but declined, through a
relative, to be interviewed.

They slipped outside, unnoticed, and walked past the prison's
construction warehouse. They grabbed a door frame someone had left
out for them to use in scaling the two fences, Boquete said, then
pulled the frame with them over the first fence. Now they were on the
pressure-alarmed land. The 60-second clock started running. They
propped the frame against the tall fence, then scrambled up to the
barbed wire summit. Boquete, who stands 5-foot-4, went first. He
briefly got in the way of the 6-foot-4 Wright, who simply brushed past him.

Once they hit the ground outside, they sprinted to the wide, swampy
irrigation canal. They paused, caught their breaths. In the distance,
they could hear the dogs. Boquete had steeled himself for this
moment, but in his heart, had hoped that perhaps he would not have to
get into the water. The advance of the dogs convinced him. They had
no choice. They plunged ahead and never saw each other again.

Soon, the baying of the hounds was joined by another sound: the beat
of helicopter rotors. Boquete immersed himself, surfacing his nose
for a gulp of air, seeing beams of a searchlight sweeping across the
fields and water. The dogs barked. He had no religious upbringing but
wore a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and he put the cross in
his mouth to calm himself.

He later guessed that he had been in the water two hours or so, most
of it fully submerged, when he finally pulled himself, shivering,
onto the bank of the canal. He crawled on his belly into a field,
then dug a shallow burrow with his hands. He dropped into the hollow
and covered himself with dirt and grass. He could hear his pursuers
shout. He tried to lie still.

Something pinched his face. Then one arm. Thousands of biting ants,
resident in his hideout, swarmed over his skin. He shielded his eyes
with his hands, and listened as the clatter of the search receded.
Finally Boquete climbed out of the canal on the same bank that he
went in, the prison side of the moat. His pursuers expanded their
search but he had hardly gone any distance. As they moved on, he
oriented himself, then half-crawled to an orange grove. He ate five
oranges, slumped under a tree, ant-bitten, filthy, exhausted. He was
quite happy. This grove was near railroad tracks, a less conspicuous
route than the main road. The next stop was a sugar-cane field.
There, he dug another hole, and after checking for ants, covered
himself and slept.

At daylight, he moved like a snake, belly-crawling short distances,
cringing when the cane rustled or popped, then pausing to listen.
With a small knife he peeled bits of the cane to eat.

He was running for his life, but barely moving. After his second
night in the fields, he saw farm workers nearby and realized he had
lingered near the prison long enough. He crossed four more canals,
the last so wide that he worried he would not make it to the other
side. Finally, he reached the railroad tracks, picked up a stick and,
bent like a hobo, followed the rails southwest toward Belle Glade.

By late afternoon, he had emerged from the apron of farmland on the
prison outskirts and came to Avenue L. Across the road, big trucks
were lined up, leaving for everywhere; the map had shown a depot. In
the escape of his imagination, he simply hopped a truck; as a
tireless runner in the prison yard, he had not foreseen the toll of a
slow-motion sprint. He was spent.

Just east of the tracks was a pay phone. Surely, the authorities
would be checking with all the relatives who had visited him. He
dialed a cousin in Miami. She was shocked to hear his news; the
family knew nothing of his escape. He proposed that she pick him up.

She hesitated.

"No, mi primo, no," she said. No, my cousin, no.

He would stay clear, he told her; she should not worry, he said. "No
se preocupe."

He hung up.

Just beyond the pay phone, a few Mexican migrants idled in front of
shacks. The Belle Glade man had told him he might be able to take
refuge with them.

It was two full days since he had escaped from Glades Correctional
Institution; he had risked getting maimed on razor wire, shot by
guards, mauled by dogs, eaten by alligators, poisoned by snakes. It
had taken every ounce of strength in his fleet, 30-year-old body to
avoid those fates, and he had covered all of 1.2 miles. He was
transformed: the innocent person, wrongly accused, now was an outlaw
who could be shot on sight. He didn't care.

"Oye, hermanos," Boquete called. "Necesito ayuda."

Hey brothers, I need help.

The Mexicans looked at the bedraggled specimen. Then one of them
spoke, Boquete recalled.

"He says, 'Why do you need help?' I said, 'I need help because I run
from immigration.' "

A day later, one of them asked the logical question: why was a Cuban
running from immigration, since Cubans were never deported?

"I tell them the truth. And they laugh, and said, 'Oh, that was you.'
Because one of them got stopped the night I escaped. They heard the
helicopters."

He worked in the fields for two months, picked up every morning in a
truck. Had anyone been looking for the fugitive in the first few
days, it is possible that his swollen face would have been hard to
recognize. By springtime, he and the migrants decided to pool their
earnings and head for Miami. They bought a car for $800. It was
mid-April, about 10 weeks after the breakout. Somewhere, Boquete had
acquired an Army uniform. Raw as Boquete's English was, the Mexicans
had none. He would drive.

On the road south, a radiator hose burst. As Boquete patched it, a
police car stopped. He spoke a phrase he had used often in the
previous two years.

"Yes, officer?" he said.

What was going on, the cop wanted to know. Boquete explained about
the radiator hose. "Be careful," the officer advised.

He was. The Mexicans dropped him in Miami, near Little Havana.

Though Boquete's escape was brave and harrowing, his flight does not
particularly distinguish him. In the 1980s, the Florida prisons
virtually leaked prisoners: 972 prisoners broke out the year Boquete
ran, 1,234 the next year and 1,640 the year after. Most walked away
from work crews. Prisoners also left in file cabinets, garbage
trucks, dressed as women. From Glades, six murderers dug a tunnel
from a chapel, a spectacular breakout that roused alarm and moved
state officials to clamp down. The trick was not just getting out but
staying out. After the initial burst of excited hunting around a
prison, the pursuit of fugitives can be anemic; the search for
Boquete and Wright lasted four hours. Prisoners are less often caught
than found, unable to sustain endless caution in their affairs.
Somewhere, they trip a bureaucratic circuit -- they use or respond to
their real name, are arrested for crimes much like those that brought
them to prison or are bartered by someone else trying to get out of
trouble. George Wright, who escaped with Boquete, avoided the
authorities for a year and a half, then was caught in the Pacific Northwest.

Boquete turned himself into a hermit crab, sheltered in identities
abandoned or left by the dead, an endless scuttle. A resume, pieced
together from his memories and public records, traces a route of
dizzying turns and determination.

He worked in sugar-cane fields and danced in the Orange Bowl when
Madonna came to perform "La Isla Bonita." He hauled food in the
Florida Keys as a truck loader and sledgehammered into the wall of a
clothing store in Miami as a burglar.

He learned to ride a Jet Ski. He taught nieces and nephews to
snorkel. He washed dishes in a New Jersey restaurant and ran errands
for players in the underground economy of South Florida. One night,
with cash in his pocket, he settled at the bar of a fancy hotel in
North Miami and proclaimed that he was a boxing trainer who had just
won a big bet on a Hector Camacho fight. He bought rounds of drinks
for the house and met a real-estate woman from New York. They jogged
together on the beach.

All those years, he walked barefoot along a borderline as thin and
treacherous as the blade of a knife, the boundary between tension and
exhilaration, where freedom was just one unguarded moment -- Hey,
Orlando! Oye, Boquete! -- from vanishing.

He called himself Antonio and Eddie and Hilberto, dead or missing
people whose Social Security numbers kept a pulse for a year or so
after their demise. A half-dozen times, Boquete said, he was arrested
while a fugitive: some of his benefactors left unfinished court
business when they departed, and Boquete inherited their petty
troubles: drunk-and-disorderly summonses, driving under the
influence. He did a week here, 30 days there, he said. He also got
into trouble of his own devising.

Rolling his freshly sanded fingertips into police ink pads, he was
not connected by the authorities to the man who owed five decades of
time to the state. It was simple enough for him to do the short bits,
not that he had much choice. In the early days of a six-month
sentence, he simply walked away from a jail work crew, making him a
fugitive under two identities.

He agreed to take me back over some of the territory he had covered.
We traveled through 300 miles of southern Florida, hunting for traces
of the self he had worked to keep invisible.

After his Mexican patrons dropped him off in Miami, he returned to
Little Havana, a place he knew well. On one of his first days back,
with nothing in his pockets, he followed an acquaintance to a utility
room in an apartment complex. Someone was using the space to hoard
stolen goods, and they found a boom box with detachable speakers.
They sold it in three parts. He found a room in an apartment on
Northwest Seventh Avenue and took a job at a grocery store, and
anywhere else he could find work with no unanswerable questions asked.

The 1980s were years of staggering opportunity and danger in that
part of the world. South Florida was the loading ramp for the
illegal-narcotics trade in the United States. The Miami River runs
through Little Havana. "Lots of boats," Boquete said. "Lots of
drugs." Some had been handled by a woman he knew as a child in Cuba.
Around 1987, she was caught in a federal drug case and was being held
in central Florida. She sent word back to Little Havana that she
needed clothing, cigarettes and money. Boquete said he went along for
the ride to prison, but others in the car balked at going inside, so
he did. "I told the guard that everyone else was afraid to see her, I
don't have ID, but I am her cousin," Boquete said. "They took the
clothes." He relished the audacity of that visit. From the first
moments of his escape, when he doubled back toward the prison, hiding
in plain sight had proved both tactically shrewd and psychically satisfying.

One of the people who helped him get by -- the man who led Boquete to
the boom box on his first day back -- went on to prosper in the drug
trade. On the condition that he be identified only as Ulises because
of his own legal problems, the man spoke with wonder at Boquete's
stamina, the new homes every few weeks. "He was not really involved
in our group," Ulises told me. Still, there were many groups and
plenty of mundane, if risky, work.

"This guy, Kiki, asked me to hold a package for this guy who would
come to my apartment that night," Boquete said, recalling one
incident. Though he did not open it, he guessed that it was a
kilogram of cocaine. That evening he heard a car pull up. From the
window, he saw a uniformed police officer. In a panic, Boquete dialed
his contact. "I tell him, 'The police are here!' " he said. "He said,
'That's right, just give him the package.' "

Even innocent moments could turn harrowing. One night, he stayed at a
friend's apartment after a party. In the morning, he washed dishes
with the front door open. A figure appeared in the corner of his eye.

"Hey, Boquete!" said the man.

Boquete did not lift his gaze from the suds. The man -- a uniformed
police officer -- stood in the doorway calling his name, and finally,
Boquete asked what he wanted. A team of officers was on the scene,
apparently tipped off to the presence of a fugitive. In a few
minutes, all the Mexicans and Cubans in the building were lined up outside.

"If you're looking for this Boquete, why don't you bring a picture of
him?" Boquete said he demanded.

Another man grumbled loudly about suing for some indeterminate civil
rights violation, Boquete recalled, and the officers eventually withdrew.

The encounter rattled him. To find some peace, he flew to Illinois in
1990 and got work in a Weber grill factory. He called himself Antonio
Orlando Moralez, a real Marielito who was killed while Boquete was in
prison. (The company, Weber-Stephen, does not have payroll records
from that time and could not confirm his employment.) A cousin of
Moralez's, who did not want to be named because of immigration
concerns, said of Boquete, "He didn't do anything wrong, and he
needed help, so I gave him my cousin's Social Security number for him
to work under."

The change relaxed Boquete; he did not feel himself under direct
police scrutiny. After a year or so, though, worried about how long
the Moralez identity would hold up, he moved again, back to Miami for
a while, and then to Arizona. It was 1991; he'd been on the run for
six years. He was starting to wear down. He returned to Miami,
apathetic about being recaptured.

"I was hanging out on the street," he said, meaning his living came
from activities outside the law. One day, he and two other men broke
into a clothing store. As they drove off with the loot, a police car
followed. They tried to speed away and heaved stolen clothes out of
the car, but were quickly caught. In the back of the car was the
sledgehammer they used to enter the store. Boquete gave his name as
Eduardo Jeres, and a judge put him on probation.

At 37 years old, he had no checkbook, credit cards or bank accounts;
he lived with his money, the cash hidden under the kitchen floor of
an apartment on 27th Avenue. He welded bars on the windows and doors.

For all that caution, he had not broken out of one prison just to
live in another. He often dropped in on his family, went swimming
with the children and doted on Danay Rodriguez, his half-brother's
daughter. "He watched us when our parents went out," said Rodriguez,
now 24, recalling that he would bring her the White Diamonds perfume
she loved as a girl. To visit them was a heart splurge. They lived
aboveground. He could not.

In the summer of 1992, hungry for a quieter, more domestic life, he
sent for a nephew, Jose Boquete, 12, then living in California, to
stay with him in Miami while school was out. "I love him from when he
was a baby, when he first came from Cuba," Boquete said. He had a son
back in Cuba, not much older. The family trusted him, Boquete said.

For Jose, it was a thrilling summer. He made friends in the apartment
complex. His uncle indulged him and charmed the neighbors. "I made a
best friend right away," Jose said. "My uncle had these parties, just
barbecues, and people came to hang out. It was the greatest."

One day in August, young Jose watched the canaries his uncle kept in
a cage flapping their wings in agitation. The birds had detected the
approach of Hurricane Andrew, soon to become the
second-most-destructive storm in United States history.

"I asked my uncle, 'What's happening?' He said, 'Don't worry about
it, everything's O.K.,' " Jose recalled. "He just stayed there on the sofa."

Behind his barred door, Boquete was content, unwilling to fight a
storm. Afterward, with electricity knocked out for days, he rigged a
line from a car battery into the apartment and even scavenged contraband ice.

At the summer's end, Jose returned to California. His uncle looked
for work: the hurricane was a boon to the construction trades, and
Boquete found odd jobs at a small company, Fantasy Cabinets, which
had contracts with police stations and jails, said Mercy Fleitas, who
ran the business with her husband, Serafin.

The Fleitas household knew Boquete as Loquito, the little crazy one,
for the high-speed pace he kept at work and play. They did not
realize that the wiry man was a fugitive. But Mercy Fleitas had a
vivid memory of his anxiety about going into a correctional facility
where they were doing work. And nearly 15 years later, hearing about
his true identity and exoneration, Fleitas remembered a strong streak
of decency.

"You know what about him?" she said. "My husband's brother had died,
and he couldn't do enough for the kids. He was always bringing them food."

His life was far from tranquil. Tipped off by a trailer-park neighbor
that he was "hot," Boquete drifted to North Carolina, settling in a
rural area before returning again to Florida. At times, Boquete said,
he craved to sleep with both eyes closed. To answer to his own name.
Instead, over the next four years, he landed in police custody again and again.

In March 1995, acting on a tip about a wanted man, the police came to
an apartment where Boquete was staying under the name Hilberto
Rodriguez. A gun was found, and he was sentenced to a year. He was
assigned to a work crew to clean up around apartments for the elderly
across from the Orange Bowl. When he spotted a pay phone in front of
the stadium, he could not resist. He called Ulises, the friend who
met him when he first returned to Little Havana -- now a successful
drug dealer -- and when Ulises pulled up in a van, Boquete dropped
his rake and got in.

He stayed with Ulises and his wife in south Miami. Very early one
morning in July 1995, Boquete left for his usual exercise routine in
a local park: running and 600 sit-ups, beginning at 6 a.m., before
the heat of the day. On the way, he was stopped by a drug-enforcement
agent, who asked him if he lived there.

No, he said, "I'm just visiting for a few days from Key West." The
agents searched the house and found two pounds of marijuana. Ulises
was away, on a trip to New Orleans with a girlfriend. That left his
wife to answer for the pot. Suddenly, Boquete's status as a fugitive
took on a high value. She did not know his real name but knew that he
was on the run.

As the officers sorted through his tangle of identities, they decided
to process him as Hilberto Rodriguez, the fugitive who had walked
away from the Orange Bowl work detail.

"In the police station, the cops say, 'Let's go,' " Boquete recalled.
"I am walking to the door. Then a lady sitting at a computer says:
'Hold on. Palm Beach has something on him, too.' " The Glades prison
was in the jurisdiction of Palm Beach County. After 10 1/2 years, his
fingerprints were linked to Orlando Boquete.

Sentenced under the Hilberto Rodriguez pseudonym for escaping from
the county jail, he was returned to the state prison system as
Rodriguez, with "Orlando Bosquete" listed as an alias.

After years of running from his true identity, it would turn out that
proving who he really was would not be bad at all for Orlando
Boquete. That, however, took another decade.

During the 1990s, many prosecutors in Florida, and elsewhere,
fiercely resisted DNA testing for people already in prison. Such
tests often poked embarrassing holes in the original investigations.
After an innocent man died on death row -- the prosecutors opposed
testing until the man, Frank Lee Smith, was terminally ill -- the
State Legislature passed a law that explicitly permitted convicts to
seek DNA testing, as long as they asked by Oct. 1, 2003. More than
800 prisoners wrote to the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N.
Cardozo School of Law in New York, which set up the Florida Innocence
Initiative to manage the requests. As the deadline approached, Nina
Morrison of the Innocence Project sent forms to Boquete and others,
so that they could start the process without an attorney.

With help from another inmate fluent in English, Boquete filed the
paperwork. One day in the spring of 2006, Morrison called him: the
test results proved he was not the man who had attacked the woman in
Key West. He flushed his parole rejection papers down the toilet.
Boquete now had a lawyer in Key West, Hal Schuhmacher, representing
him, along with the Innocence Project's Morrison and Barry Scheck
(with whom I wrote a book about wrongful convictions in 2000).

Last May 23, Boquete was delivered in shackles to the county
courthouse in Marathon for a hearing. At his request, Morrison
brought him a white jacket and pants, 30 waist, for his appearance.
His family gathered in the courtroom. The moment swelled with
uncommon forces: liberation, vindication, resurrection, humility. "I
could sit here and talk for as much time as anybody wanted to give
me," the state's attorney, Mark Kohl, told the judge, "but every
minute that I spend talking to you is another minute that an innocent
man sits in jail on this charge."

The judge, Richard Payne, made the same point. "No words spoken by
this court today . . . would do justice to the penalty that you have
been required to pay for offenses that now we know conclusively that
you were not guilty of committing," he said. "You are hereby ordered
to be immediately released from the custody of Florida."

The state had measured the system against the case of Boquete and
recognized its failure. Still, that would not be the end. The federal
government, through the United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, also took its measure of Boquete. While he had been
legally admitted to the United States in 1980, he had never completed
the application to gain permanent status. So instead of being freed
at the moment he was declared innocent, Boquete was taken in
handcuffs by immigration agents to a federal detention center.

Yes, Boquete was cleared of the 1982 case. But had he proved himself
a menace to society while on the run? Faced with a large question,
immigration authorities seemed to use a microscope to answer it. The
burglary of the clothing store and a gun found where he had been
staying were "a concern with regard to his potential danger to the
community," wrote Michael Rozes, the field office director for
immigration enforcement in Miami. "An escape for which he was
eventually convicted, regardless of the fact that this conviction has
since been overturned, shows your client's propensity toward absconding."

Prosecutors in two counties, Miami-Dade and Monroe, weighed in to
urge that the immigration officials look beyond a rap sheet that, in
Boquete's case, was singularly unilluminating.

"Public employees exist to serve the public," Mark Kohl wrote. "If
you cannot conclusively determine that he is a dangerous person, I
urge you to release him at once so as to not compound the mistakes
made 23 years ago."

Finally, immigration officials released Boquete on Aug. 21, only
after he signed papers conceding that he could be deported for his
crimes as a fugitive.

That night, he ate two croquetas and drank a batido de mamey at a
quiet dinner with family members, his immigration lawyer, John Pratt,
and another innocent Florida man, Luis Diaz, who served 26 years. He
corrected what he said were misspellings of his name in official
records as Bosquette or Bosquete. The next morning, he went for a run
on the beach at 6 a.m. Through Hal Schuhmacher, he got a job doing
landscape work for two real-estate agents in the Florida Keys, Morgan
Hill and Paula Nardone, who gave him a place to stay. Once a month,
he makes a four-hour trek by bus and train from Marathon to Miami, to
report to immigration.

A few weeks after his release, Boquete agreed to go with me on a trip
back to the prison town of Belle Glade, along with his nephew Jose,
now a musician living in Miami. In the prison parking lot, he
squinted at the new buildings. He pointed out the perimeter road and
the high fence. An officer told us to move.

As we drove along Main Street in Belle Glade, he spotted Avenue L.
"Turn here, this is where I saw the Mexicans," he commanded. We got
out. Not surprisingly, no one remembered an ant-eaten hobo who
suddenly appeared on a winter day 21 years earlier.

Yet here were the simple landmarks of his story. He darted along
Avenue L, running from one spot to the next. The railroad tracks that
he followed away from the prison. A square patch of ground of faintly
different hue than the surrounding area. "This is where the pay phone
was," he shouted. He found the lot where he stayed with the Mexicans,
but the migrants and their shacks were gone. In front of a deserted,
sun-bleached wooden building, he said, "I think this might have been
where the trucks were."

Charged with memory, he looked back from age 52 on the 30-year-old
who crawled out of canal waters and sugar cane to reclaim his life.
The places were faded; the decades were mapped in the gullies and
ravines that run through his face.

What if he had not gone out for beer on that June night in 1982, at
the very moment the police were looking for the man with the buzz cut?

What would have come of his life?

"Oh," Boquete said. "Oh. That's a real question. Too many beautiful
things to do, I believe. Exactly what would have happened, I don't
know. I believe I'd have gotten married, I'd have a little business,
property, boat. I'm not talking only about material things.

"Maybe I pass away already. I believe, if I am still alive, like I am
now, I'd be much better. "

His words, while true, suddenly ring in his ears as impolitic. "I've
got people around me," he said, citing lawyers, benefactors, family.

Then he paused. "In reality, I don't have nothing," he said. It has
been 21 years since he last saw the spot where the railroad tracks
met Avenue L -- the crossroads of his life, the point where he passed
from captivity to, well, what? Did he know actual freedom on the run?

"Sometimes," he said, instantly. "Sometimes. When I have a party,
when I have made money, when I feel good, when I got a nice place. It
doesn't have to be a nice place -- my own place. When I'm cold --
when the police don't look for me.

"I feel free many, many times. Why did I escape from prison? Because
I want to be free. I want to feel free. I see the police, I don't be scared."

We turn back toward the car. Then we see it: a sign on the wall of
the abandoned wood building, paint-dimmed, the words still legible.
"Glades Logistics, Truck Broker." All those years before, he might
have jumped one of their trucks and gone wherever it took him.
Instead, step by step, he made his own road, finally circling back.
Orlando Boquete: walking, not running.