BY DAVID GREEN

  Longtime anti-Castro crusader Jorge Villaverde -- gunned down last week as he took out his trash -- was being looked at as a possible suspect in a
  recent double homicide, law enforcement sources said.

  Villaverde died Tuesday morning after a gunman in a car ambushed him outside the gate of his Redland house. He had two 9mm pistols tucked into the
  back of his pants -- suggesting he expected an attack.

  Nearly two months earlier, someone shot and killed Francisco Alberto Lazo and Feliciano ''Felo'' Verona in front of Lazo's Redland ranch. It was just a few
  miles from Villaverde's rural street.

  At the time of that killing, investigators received a tip that Villaverde was behind it, a law enforcement source said. They were looking into that possibility
  when Villaverde was killed.

  Miami-Dade County police would not discuss this development.

  ''It would be premature to comment about specifics of the investigation at this point,'' said Detective Lupo Jimenez, a spokesman for the department.

  It was not clear whether the victims knew each other. But their killings are strikingly similar: Both property owners were slain in front of their entrance
  gates by gunmen who ambushed them from cars.

  As for Villaverde, he spent 18 years in Cuban prisons as a political prisoner. The 67-year-old's slaying prompted some anti-Castro activists to pin the crime
  on Fidel Castro.

  The day of the shooting, Villaverde's groundskeeper recalled that a Castro agent once pointed at Villaverde during a human rights convention in Geneva
  and essentially said, ``You're going to pay for this back in Miami.''

  On the afternoon of April 21, Lazo -- a horse trainer and owner of Rancho Valparaiso -- was taking handyman Verona to the back of his property in a golf
  cart. Verona had been hired to build an exercise area for horses.

  The pair stopped at the entrance gate. Lazo stepped out to lock it when a gunman jumped out of a dark-colored sport utility vehicle and opened fire,
  shooting Lazo in the head and Verona as he sat in the cart.

  The handyman's relatives were convinced he was killed because he was a witness to Lazo's death.

  ''We think he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time and it got him killed,'' a nephew said.

  At the time, police acknowledged that was a possibility.

  Roughly seven weeks later, as detectives were still investigating the shootings, Villaverde was ambushed in similar style -- a car pulled up as he stood in
  front of his entrance gate, and a gunman opened fire.

  Both crimes occurred in the rural Redland, a far-flung patchwork of ranches, nurseries and homes zoned to allow farm animals -- an unlikely destination
  for homicide detectives. Both involved men who owned horses.

  Lazo trained and stabled paso fino horses on his ranch. Villaverde owned several horses -- including a paso fino, according to those who knew him -- and
  kept them stabled behind his house.

  In recent months he had traded some of his animals.

  ''He had the most gorgeous Arabian [horse] but he sold it,'' said neighbor Suzanne Miller. ``It was the prettiest horse I've ever seen, and I know
  animals.''

  Villaverde's wife, Regina, declined to comment.

  Several other prominent members of the Cuban exile community refused to talk to The Herald.

  The motives behind the killings remain unclear.

  In Lazo's case, neighbors reported finding nails scattered across the road in the weeks leading up to his death -- puncturing tires and threatening to
  keep customers from the stables and nurseries. Those who lived and worked on the street felt it was part of a feud.

  With Villaverde, those who knew him acknowledge his list of possible enemies was long.

  He served decades in Cuban prisons, and at one time said he had been trained by the CIA. He and brother Rafael, who once ran the Little Havana
  Activities Center, were indicted in the early 1980s in connection with a drug-smuggling ring. The charges were eventually dropped.

  But Jorge Villaverde eventually spent two years in federal prison after prosecutors charged him and a man living in his house with possession of machine
  guns and unregistered silencers. Villaverde insisted he kept the cache of weapons for the revolution he planned to liberate Cuba.

  Some in Miami's anti-Castro circles remain convinced this caused his death.

  ''He was against Castro, simple as that,'' said Juan Pérez Franco, president of Brigade 2506, a veterans' group for those involved in the the ill-fated
  invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs, which included Rafael Villaverde.

  ``He was a political prisoner, and then continued his cause after coming here.''