While shooting at police in Palm Beach County from the passenger window of a speeding get-away car, the last thing on Bill Van Poyck's mind was the consequences. But after 16 years on Death Row, the Miami native has had plenty of time to think.

And think he has -- in a gripping 324-page memoir filled with Miami nostalgia, South Florida crime tales and regret.

Bill Van Poyck, a muscular, good-looking man with a mind that Florida criminal defense attorneys call ''brilliant,'' was raised in the well-to-do South Miami neighborhood of Pinecrest. In 1988, Van Poyck, now 48, was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death -- not for killing anyone but for shooting at police from a speeding getaway car, after his friend, Frank Valdes, shot and killed Fred Griffis, a state prison guard in West Palm Beach.

Now, Valdes is dead, killed by Florida prison guards, and Van Poyck is near the end of the line -- hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will hear his appeal.

In Sept. 2000, he was moved from Florida to Virginia Death Row for his protection. There, he wrote about his life in and out of prison. The book, A Checkered Past, was published by 1stBooks and funded by The Puffin Foundation, a New Jersey-based group that helps the underprivileged.

Van Poyck's story begins in 1956, when he was 2: His mother went next door to have coffee with neighbors on a January morning, while his father, an Eastern Airlines executive, fixed pancakes in their Pinecrest home.

His mother, along with the family of five next door, was asphyxiated by a faulty gas heating system.

LIFE CHANGED

''On this cold raw day our family stepped into another life,'' Van Poyck writes.

By the age of 6, being raised by housekeepers, he was constantly in trouble. Desperate for thrills and attention, he became adept at ''roofing'' -- jumping from roof to roof -- in the affluent Palmetto area of South Miami. He also repeatedly stuck paper clips in electric sockets to scare his father. At 7, a straight-A student at Palmetto Elementary, he walked across hot ashes and spent weeks in Baptist Hospital getting skin grafts.

At 8 years old, he went back to the hospital with bullet wounds, after throwing live bullets into a neighborhood bonfire.

While other children sold mangoes and avocados from homemade stands, he caught poisonous snakes in Rock Lake near Pinecrest and sold them to the Serpentarium. At 10, he entered a tented Pinecrest house, removing the fumigation containers, then returning to snoop.

By the end of the summer, he was an accomplished 11-year-old burglar, preying on big homes around Old Cutler. Caught and charged with more than 100 burglaries, he was sent to Kendall Children's Home.

Thirty-seven years later, he assesses his actions: ``Impulsive and spontaneous, I was caught in my own web of toxic stupidity.''

At 12, he escaped from the children's home and hid at a construction site, where Dadeland Mall was being built.

When caught, he was sent to the Okeechobee Boy's School for habitual juvenile offenders in Central Florida.

At 13, he returned to his home in Pinecrest and to Palmetto Junior High. In no time, he and his brother were hanging out at King's Bay Yacht Club off Old Cutler, stealing cars.

He describes his recalcitrance this way: ``I grow in the role I feel most comfortable in -- reckless maverick and fearless juvenile delinquent extraordinaire.''

In 1970, at the age of 16, he returned home from Okeechobee and went to Palmetto High. His father, a WWII hero, took him to Washington, D.C., to spend time with his 82nd Airborne pal, the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.

In the summer of 1971, his father took him to North Africa and Europe. Van Poyck says he vowed never to commit another crime.

''But I lacked the vision, strength and will to believe in my better half, in my ability to hold on to my destiny. . .'' he writes. ``A large part of me wished to, but in the end that part does not prevail. It is a profound failure of imagination.''

ARMED ROBBERY

Six months later, wearing a hat and sunglasses out of gangster central casting, he walked into the New England Oyster House on U.S. 1 in South Miami. While customers watched, he pointed a .38-caliber Saturday night special at the cashier and took $750. A few months later, he committed another armed robbery, this time at Junior's Restaurant on U.S. 1 across from the University of Miami. Police officers showed up and fired at him. As he drove away in a stolen Volkswagen Beetle, he fired back, hitting no one.

When he was caught, his assistant public defender -- a young man named Roy Black -- advised him to take a plea deal for 10 years. Instead, his father hired criminal lawyers to defend him before Judge Alfonso Sepe.

In 1972, a year after hobnobbing with a legendary U.S. senator, traveling to Europe and Africa and vowing never to commit another crime, Van Poyck, 17, was sentenced to life in prison.

A year later, his father died.

At Florida State Prison in Starke, the toughest prison in the state and home to the electric chair, he entertained himself by making primitive guns with copper tubing he peeled off windows. To this day, the warden keeps a couple of Van Poyck's more ingenious weapons in a Plexiglas display case in his office.

In 1977, Van Poyck was sent down the road from Starke to ''The Rock,'' a now-destroyed state prison so nicknamed because of its damp darkness and extreme security. Van Poyck is one of the few inmates ever to escape by making a key he used to open a security door and then cutting through fences.

A month later, in March 1978, he was caught and described in The Herald as ''a desperate hardened criminal.'' By this time, he says, his life consisted of ``countless levels of built-up fury, laid down stroke by stroke like layers of a rotten onion.''

In 1986, after 14 years, he was released from a state prison near Ocala -- a free man.

He returned to Miami. Within a year, he was selling cocaine and marijuana at dance clubs, drinking $100 bottles of champagne and driving a new Lincoln.

''Blinded by my own self-importance, I was unable to discern my life circling down the drain,'' he says in his book.

Next, he robbed banks all over South Florida. Then, he and Valdes decided to help a friend in prison escape while he was being transported in a prison van. It is this decision that landed Van Poyck on Death Row. Two guards in the van got out to escort the prisoner to a medical appointment. Valdes shot and killed one. Van Poyck forced the other under the van, at gun point.

The two gunmen then jumped into their car and tore through downtown West Palm Beach with squad cars chasing them. Valdes was driving. Van Poyck fired out of the window, hitting no one. The chase ended when the car rammed into a palm tree.

On Dec. 22, 1988, Bill Van Poyck was sentenced to death and put in a small, high security cell at Florida State Prison, where he remained for years.

In July 2000, after Valdes was killed by prison guards, Van Poyck was transferred for safety reasons to Virginia's Death Row, where he wrote the book about his life.

LOOKING BACK

At the end, he says: ``I've squandered away my entire life. . . . I could have spent my life doing good and helping others. And yet I chose this. . . . How did I lose the good I once had? Slowly day by day. What do I have to show for my life at the end of the day? Nothing.''

Van Poyck gives all proceeds from the book -- about 150 copies have sold for $14.50 each -- to the prison ministry of Bernie DeCastro, who lives in Ocala and runs a 60-bed halfway house for convicts just out of prison.

''If you don't reach these guys and support them right away, they're likely to go back,'' DeCastro said. ``No one knows this better than Billy Van Poyck.''