From 50 years and 3,000 miles away, Larry King can laugh about how South Florida nearly ended his broadcasting career before it really began, but it didn't seem that funny at the time. He was working the overnight shift at a little Miami Beach radio station when the phone rang.

''I really want you,'' cooed the breathy female listener on the other end. ''And I'm only 11 blocks from the station.'' King promptly slapped a Harry Belafonte album on the turntable and raced out the door -- only, when he arrived at his wannabe paramour's house, to hear Belafonte on the radio: Down the way where the nights are . . . where the nights are . . . where the nights are. . . .

Reporting for work the next day, King was petrified, but the station manager never said a thing. Possibly, he didn't even know what had happened -- ''The truth is, management never listens; the suits make decisions, but they never listen,'' says King -- and possibly he knew but understood that in South Florida, hormones rule. ''Miami,'' muses King wistfully, ``is the sexually loosest place I've ever lived.''

As a tourism marketing slogan, that may not have quite the ring of I(heart)NY,

but King's new autobiography My Remarkable Journey isn't exactly chamber-of-commerce-brochure stuff. He dishes plenty of dirt -- on himself, and on South Florida, where he broke into broadcasting and for two decades led an often seamy rags-to-riches-to-rags life.

King gambled. He wrote bad checks. He was arrested on charges of stealing $5,000 from financier Louis Wolfson. He slept around with married women. (A lot of them married to him: The majority of King's eight marriages took place in Miami.) He got in an auto wreck with one president, and came perilously close to offering a bribe to another. His life was such a mess that he even gave away a daughter for adoption.

NO OTHER WAY

It seems odd that, at age 75, being a millionaire many times over and with his nightly CNN show a television institution, King would want to monger his own old scandals. But, speaking from his home in Los Angeles, he says there was no other way.

''If you're gonna write an autobiography, you might as well tell it all, because people are gonna find out anyway,'' King says. ``In the age of blogs and the Internet, if you try to hide something, you're going to get crucified: `He wrote about Miami and didn't tell about this?'

``And, anyway, what's the difference? It's like some kid who breaks a window with a baseball -- just get it over with; just admit it. So I did it. What are they gonna do, hit me?''

Not that King means to sound blase about his years here. He regrets a lot of what happened, particularly his involvement with the freewheeling millionaire Wolfson. What started as a friendship devolved into a twisted, lurid codependency as King helped Wolfson shuttle clandestine money to favored politicians and causes, then assisted in the financier's increasingly frantic (and ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to avoid prison on charges of selling unregistered stock.

King says he even agreed to carry Wolfson's offer of a $4 million campaign contribution to Richard Nixon just as Nixon was about to enter the White House -- an unspoken plea for a presidential pardon. But as he talked with Nixon, King flinched.

''I sure am glad I didn't make the proposition to Nixon -- which, to be honest, I almost did,'' King says. ``If I had done it, we would have had the King hearings right along with the Watergate hearings. This would inevitably have come out during the Watergate investigation, and Nixon would have called it a bribe, even though it wasn't intended as a bribe.''

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