Richard Gerstein

Richard E. Gerstein (September 5, 1923, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – April 26, 1992, Miami, Florida) was an American lawyer and six-term State Attorney for Miami-Dade County. He obtained the first conviction in the Watergate scandal, of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, and uncovered the first connections between the botched burglary and President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign.

Early life Gerstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1923. He graduated from the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1947 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1949 and the first Jew elected to a countywide office in Florida.

In 1963, anti-semite Donald Branch was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for bombing the home of Don Shoemaker, editor of the Miami Herald, and plotting to assassinate several Jewish Miami community leaders, among them Gerstein.

Gerstein launched a month-long inquiry into the controversial first Liston-Clay (Muhammad Ali) fight in Miami Beach in 1964, which found no evidence that the boxing match had been fixed; Sonny Liston had a sore shoulder during the fight that handicapped him.

That same year, he lost a high-profile case against incestuous lovers Candace Mossler and her nephew Melvin Powers, charged with murdering Mossler's millionaire husband. However, the grand jury was not convinced; it indicted the alleged bribe giver and another accuser on the charge of perjury and also rebuked the Herald. A check for $25,000 had recently been deposited in Barker's account. Gerstein launched an investigation, suspecting the operation was based in Key Biscayne, a village in his county; the money linked the burglars to Nixon's reelection campaign.

Honors Gerstein received the Rockefeller Public Service Award in 1979.

In 1992, Miami's courthouse was renamed the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building.