Poinciana Park was to be the jewel of a revitalized Liberty City.

It was billed as a $250 million retail and office complex rising from the barren landscape of a distressed area that smoldered during the 1980 riots.

Poinciana Park was to house biopharmaceutical powerhouses, like Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and brainy researchers from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. The park, on 15 acres then owned by Miami-Dade at Northwest 74th Street and 27th Avenue, would be a hub for 3,500 jobs.

Today it's mostly 15 empty acres in a still distressed area. No new jobs, just the same old poverty and decades of missed opportunities.

The county lost the land to a bank after Boston developer Dennis Stackhouse charmed the Miami-Dade County Commission into paying him to build the biotech park and never delivered.

Stackhouse was arrested Thursday after a 2-year investigation following the Herald's Poverty Peddlers 2007 series that exposed the failed project. Prosecutors accuse him of using double billings and fake invoices to siphon almost $1 million from the public-private partnership.

As Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández-Rundle points out, Stackhouse ``stole more than just money from our community. He stole the promise of jobs, hope and revitalization from one of our most needy communities.''

Stackhouse, 67, maintains he's innocent. A court will decide, of course, but surely his case offers lessons Miami-Dade officials must heed: Check, double check, triple check the bonafides of anyone who wants to feed off the government trough. Then, follow up every detail.

Had county officials checked Stackhouse's record on past projects in Boston they would have found he has a history of financial problems. Bankruptcy for one project, which included $20 million in defaulted loans and debts.

Questionable deals on the failed building that involved selling it after bankruptcy for cut-rate prices to a company owned partly by his wife.

Stackhouse's Liberty City deal was worked out by the now defunct Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust, which was supposed to spruce up 10 poor areas in the county. The Trust essentially squandered $68 million that was meant for those poor communities before the county cut the cord.

Along the way, Stackhouse greased the deal with illegal campaign contributions, for which he pleaded no contest. Prosecutors say he used some of the county's loan to donate $10,000 to the James E. Scott Community Association, then run by Miami-Dade Commissioner Dorrin Rolle.

The Trust's loan to Stackhouse is in default for almost $3 million, and the county has lost the land. The Herald investigation found that many of Poinciana Park's supposed future tenants had no plans to move there and in some cases never even spoke with Stackhouse.

The lessons are many, but for Liberty City residents, it's one more broken promise in a series too long to list for another generation lost to the streets.

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