BETTY CORTINA Herald Staff Writer

Six months from now, Hialeah's Raul Martinez could be back atop City Hall, sitting in front of his bronze eagle statues, pounding his carved wooden desk, running Dade's second-largest city with an iron fist.

Or he could be peering through the iron bars of the federal penitentiary.

That's not even the strangest thing about Hialeah politics this year.

The strangest thing is that the next mayor of Hialeah may not be any of the five men now running for the office. If Martinez wins, as the polls say he will, the governor of Florida may decide it would be unseemly to have a convicted felon in the mayor's chair.

So the governor might overturn the voters and throw Martinez out again. The council president would become the mayor.

Welcome to politics, Hialeah-style.

The city that grew from a small outpost of 60,000 people to Florida's fifth largest municipality, the city that moved into the big leagues of industrial growth, is still a city clinging to its tradition of unusual politics.

It's a place where the mayor is really just a phone call away. A place where people hold politicians directly accountable for the pothole in their neighborhood street. A city where the most powerful politicians are known by their first names -- Raul, Julio, Herman.

Politics here are personal.

"If someone calls the mayor to complain about a service and nothing gets done," said Armando Gutierrez, a political consultant, "people will try to make sure that mayor won't be around the next time."

That's highly possible come Nov. 2, when acting Mayor Julio Martinez faces a stiff challenge against the man he replaced, longtime mayor Raul Martinez.

Hanging over Raul Martinez's head is his conviction on charges that he used his powers as mayor to shake down developers. If the conviction is ultimately upheld by the appeals courts, Martinez will likely go to prison. So his hopes of a political comeback are pegged to his appeal.

Also running for mayor is former State Rep. Nilo Juri, Councilman for a decade Salvatore D'Angelo and political novice Juan Miguel Alfonso.

The battle among the candidates has gotten so personal and so ugly that one candidate alleges Raul Martinez spat in his face, another says he doesn't want to share the ballot with a convicted felon and an editorial in a small paper owned by one candidate criticized another on the ground that he "lacked manhood."

"These guys should really try to stay clean," said Andres Del Valle, a 67-year-old Raul Martinez campaign worker. "They should just try to win their votes and whoever doesn't get enough should accept the loss."

At the center of this heated campaign is the man who has been the dominant figure in Hialeah politics for more than a decade. He's trying to duplicate a feat accomplished only once before, by the legendary former Mayor Henry Milander, who re- took the post after his grand theft conviction in 1970.

In this city filled with troubles -- zoning, flooding, crime -- the biggest campaign issue is whether Raul Martinez can repeat history and make a Milander-style comeback.

Though other mayoral candidates have vowed to keep their campaigns clean and concentrate on the issues, they keep straying.

Juri, for example, paid hundreds of dollars for 30-second Spanish-radio spots, but the ads are all about Raul Martinez. In the ad, he asserts that the appeals court has never overturned an indictment with as many charges as in Raul Martinez's case.

"Don't waste your vote," Juri urges.

Julio Martinez is also talking about his predecessor. During a court battle attempting to remove Raul Martinez from the ballot, Julio Martinez offered to testify that he did not want to run against a convicted felon.

"How can we have civic pride in Hialeah if we have a felon running for office?" Julio Martinez said. "It would be a disaster."

Others aren't so direct.

D'Angelo warns people they should make sure the person they vote for can stay in office.

"We don't want to have another acting mayor in the city," he said.

Two residents claiming to be uninvolved in city politics recently filed separate lawsuits to get Raul Martinez's name off the ballot. They didn't succeed because a circuit judge said he had the right to run. The second resident is appealing the last decision.

Elected in 1981 at age 32, Raul Martinez became the first Cuban exile mayor of a major American city and was re-elected five times. In 1985 he ran unopposed -- something even Milander never did.

Raul Martinez was a popular and unique politician -- a Democrat firmly in control of a staunchly Republican city, a politician who wore guayaberas and played dominoes at home, but who spoke the language of Tallahassee and Washington.

"You could just walk into Raul Martinez's office anytime," Del Valle said. "You never had to deal with a secretary or anyone else. That's what a politician should be."

Hialeah is the only major city in Dade where the mayor has real power. Hialeah's "strong mayor" drafts the budget, hires and fires department heads and runs the city on a day-to-day basis. It's like Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez and City Manager Cesar Odio rolled into one. Unlike Suarez, Martinez did not vote on issues.

But he did persuade.

In Hialeah, for the mayor to pass policies, he needs a majority vote on the seven-member council. And as mayor, Raul Martinez was in the position of being able to grant favors and make friends.

Most of the time, Martinez garnered enough votes on the council. That was his reputation. It's also what later got him in trouble.

Martinez became known for paying attention to the small details: He placed additional street lights down main thorough- fares, repainted the cobblestone street markers on corners, built a fountain at the southeastern entrance to the city that proudly announced Hialeah's border. He was an image-builder.

And he earned kudos for ushering the city through its boom years, ensuring fiscal stability by bringing in federal dollars for projects.

But his opponents say Raul Martinez isn't all that he makes himself out to be. They say he wasn't really a whiz with city money, that instead he came into office on the coattails of his predecessor, who took a political fall after raising taxes 70 percent to ease a potential city deficit.

"Who couldn't run a city with an extra $14 million?" Juri told Raul Martinez recently at a radio debate. "And where is all that money now?"

Beyond the issue of his administrative skills, Raul Martinez opponents also point to a much shadier side of the suspended mayor -- the side chronicled by U.S. prosecutors in a somber courtroom, before a judge and jury.

They contended that the charismatic mayor, once apparently destined to go to Congress, was actually a political thug muscling votes out of council members and shaking down developers.

In 1991, Martinez was charged with extorting money and land from developers in exchange for zoning favors. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He is out on bail awaiting appeal.

Raul Martinez would not comment for this story.

If there is anything that has worked against Julio Martinez's image, it is Raul Martinez's reputation of iron control. In the hands of Julio Martinez, council control died. For the last two years the acting mayor has had to work without support from the council, the majority of whom are Raul Martinez backers.

One council member refuses to step into Julio Martinez's office. And when the acting mayor has wanted to make major changes, the council has blocked him.

"I'm here to do what is best for the city," Julio Martinez said. "If they can't vote for something on its merits, then there is a problem."

At one recent debate, he said the first thing he would do if he is elected is change the city's form of government from strong-mayor to city manager. That way, he says, politics wouldn't hinder the daily operation of the city.

Others don't buy that.

"Everyone is running a victim campaign," said Robert Julia, 24, a Juri campaign worker. "Raul because of his problems and Julio because he says no one supports him. The fact is that Julio has failed to be persuasive and to get the support of the council."

Raul Martinez may not be able to hold office, even if he earns the votes.

If Raul Martinez wins, it will be up to Gov. Lawton Chiles whether to remove him.

Even after Raul Martinez's conviction, Chiles did not permanently remove him from office, saying his civil rights -- including the right to vote and run for office -- are not taken away until his appeals are exhausted.

Until now, the governor has not said how he will deal with the issue if Martinez is elected again. But Florida's attorney general has said Raul Martinez not only has the right to run, he has the right to sit in office because he was only suspended for the duration of his last mayoral term. So Chiles would have to decide whether to suspend him again.

The uncertainty has raised the stakes in the City Council race. The highest vote getter -- who traditionally becomes the president of the council -- may be the city's next acting mayor if Raul Martinez wins and is suspended, or if he loses his appeal.

Council President Herman Echevarria, who in the last two years said he might run for mayor, may be the likeliest to come in first in the council race. Echevarria didn't announce he was running for council instead of mayor until just days before the deadline to file. Since then, he has raised more than $97,000 -- three times as much as the next highest collector.

Echevarria has said his decision to run for council had little to do with Raul Martinez's decision to run for mayor. He said it was based on what he wants to do with his own political career.

Still, anonymous fliers beg people not to vote for Echevarria because "all he wants is to become mayor."