Fourteen long miles from Main Street, 1365 Sanctuary Rd. stands squat, ragged and rusty, its front door ajar, its screen and window smashed.

On the surface, it appears to be just another shack in this tough town 110 miles from Miami. But it was here that the dark side of Florida's agricultural industry took root.

The man who controlled 1365 Sanctuary is one of 12 Florida farm contractors, smugglers and henchmen to land in prison in recent years for crimes against farmworkers, including slavery. The convictions helped lift the veil on the often hidden, often brutal world of Florida farm work.

While the cases reveal the industry's worst abuses, they provide just a glimpse of them. Since 1996, there have been just five such cases, the most recent last year, but the prosecutions have never gone beyond the crew chiefs to include the growers who hired them, records show.

By contrast, more than 200 Florida farm labor bosses and their assistants are barred from the industry, a richer sign of the rough culture.

And a Herald investigation in North Florida has exposed other abuses in a pocket of the state that historically has seen little investigative attention. Laborers there were recruited from homeless shelters and vagabond parks to work in the hot farm country, but they encountered low pay, long hours, slum housing - a world some liken to modern-day slavery.

The criminal prosecutions to date have largely been focused south, in courthouses from Fort Pierce on the east coast to Fort Myers on the Gulf. Investigators confirm, however, that they are now scrutinizing North Florida as well.

``Obviously, we're strongly opposed to that kind of activity,'' said Walter Kates, director of the Division of Labor Relations for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a nonprofit trade group.

``But how can you hold anybody accountable outside of the work environment, where you have no control?'' Kates asked. ``I think it's awfully hard to hold any employer, whether it's a farmer or owner of a newspaper, responsible for activity that happens outside of a working hour.''

Abel Cuello Jr., operator of the Immokalee shack, was one of the criminals, employed by one of the state's growers.

Antonio Martinez was one of the slaves. He knew that, he said, when he saw Cuello pay the ``coyote,'' or smuggler, who transported him from an Arizona border town to Florida.

``At that point,'' Martinez said in an interview, ``I realized I had been sold.''

Two dozen people were crammed into the Cuello mobile home at 1365 Sanctuary Rd. in 1999, court papers show. There were mattresses on the floor and just four or five dishes to share. The water, supplied from a well, was foul. The floor had holes, snakes and reptiles in plain view. Roaches crawled everywhere.

Workers found no relief in the fields, with crew boss Cuello docking their pay for their travel from Arizona to Florida.

The trek was tortuous, with 18 Mexican immigrants ordered to sit on a van floor so they wouldn't be detected during the nearly four-day journey. They shared two bags of chips as sustenance. For this, each was billed $700, to be worked off.

``During the trip, the men in the group were made to urinate in plastic jugs, and the woman . . . did not urinate until two days into the trip, when the van had to stop to repair a flat tire, because she was unable to use the jug,'' senior patrol agent Jose M. Lopez of the U.S. immigration agency wrote in a criminal complaint, citing testimony from travelers.

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