During the 2005 legislative session, Bush began having doubts about Villalobos' loyalty to the party that had paved the state senator's political path. After all, it was Bush who placed the first signature on Villalobos' petition to get on the ballot 13 years earlier. Now Villalobos had risen to the rank of Senate majority leader and had gathered enough pledge cards from his colleagues to become that chamber's president in 2008.

Bush was on a mission to undo a 2002 constitutional amendment limiting the number of students in a public school classroom to 28. Though the measure had been overwhelmingly approved by state voters, Bush wanted it gone."He was like, 'We can't afford it, the sky is going to fall, and the state is going to sink,'?" Villalobos recalls. "When the session started, Jeb told us: 'We're going to undo it.'?"

Villalobos refused to go along. For one, his wife is a public-school teacher. Second, a majority of voters in his district had cast ballots in favor of the small-class amendment. "I am the man I am today because of public school education," he says. "Why we have to pick on teachers is something no one has ever explained to me."

Bush requested the House and Senate put a measure on the 2006 ballot to repeal the mandate. In the months leading up to the Senate's vote, Bush badgered Villalobos. During one conversation, Villalobos recollects, he asked the governor how placing 50 kids in a classroom was better than limiting the number to 28. "Conservative principles," Bush allegedly replied. "You are the majority leader. You have to vote with me."

Villalobos said he reminded Bush that he lived in Miami, where most of the overcrowding occurs. "Yeah, but I represent the entire state," the governor allegedly said.

"Well, I represent Kendall, where voters want the small-class-size amendment," Villalobos said. "And Jim King once told me I would never have to vote against my district."

He and Bush went back and forth several times on the issue, Villalobos says. "He kept telling me that I didn't understand," Villalobos remembers. "Jeb told me that I had to vote his way."

In early May 2005, Villalobos voted against putting the repeal on the ballot. He was the swing vote. The measure died.

As revenge, Villalobos contends, Bush vetoed nearly $1 million for spinal cord research at the University of Miami, which the senator had championed. Instead, the governor granted the project only $500,000. Bush slashed the funding even though he had included the money in the proposed budget at the beginning of the session. In prior years, he had authorized nearly $4 million for UM's spinal cord research.

Villalobos said Bush didn't have a valid reason for cutting the funds.

Later that summer, Villalobos traveled to New York City to attend a state Senate fundraiser. George Steinbrenner, then owner of the New York Yankees, hosted the fete in his Yankee Stadium suite.

At the party, Ken Pruitt, a Fort Pierce Republican who at the time chaired the Senate rules committee, pulled aside Villalobos, who remembers the conversation this way: "The governor is really mad at you," Pruitt said. "You took on the governor, and nobody has beaten him."

"I don't look at it as I beat the governor," Villalobos replied.

"Well, that is how he looks at it," said Pruitt, who left office in 2009. He did not respond to three phone messages over one week, as well as an emailed list of questions, seeking comment for this story.

A few minutes later, Jim King, the outgoing Senate president, approached Villalobos. King, who passed away in 2009, issued another warning: "Alex, you are David, and he is Goliath. You should think about changing your vote."

"Jim, what happened to 'Don't vote against your district?'?" Villalobos shot back. "You're the one who told me that."

"The governor is very vindictive," King replied. "He doesn't like to lose."

"I said, 'What can he do to me?'?" Villalobos recalls. "Famous last words."

Fast-forward to the final days of the 2006 legislative session, when both state bodies were considering the vote on repeal of the class-size amendment as well as making school vouchers part of the state constitution.

Villalobos, who opposed both measures, says Bush called him into a face-to-face meeting. He doesn't remember specifics, only that it didn't end well. "Unless you change the funding formula to make it fair for Miami-Dade, I am not voting against my district," Villalobos recalls telling Bush. "He had a conniption. We exchanged words."

On April 29, 2006, Villalobos and five moderate Republicans teamed up with Senate Democrats to defeat the class-size amendment vote. A few days later, Villalobos was in the Senate chamber for the scheduled vote on the vouchers when Senate President Tom Lee, a Bush acolyte who rarely questioned the governor, called Villalobos to the front.

"The governor is on the phone," Lee allegedly said. "He wants to talk to you."

Villalobos took the call in the Senate president's stately office, which was connected to the Senate chamber. Lying next to the phone was a copy of Christine Todd Whitman's 2005 book, It's My Party Too. Whitman was the Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 whose memoir warns about her party being hijacked by right-wing fundamentalists.

"I thought, This has got to be an omen," Villalobos says. "We had a very animated conversation. He yelled at me and said I was going to regret my decision. I actually hung up on him."

When he returned to the Senate floor, Villalobos voted no.

"I don't know why you did this," Lee allegedly told Villalobos. "The governor is livid. This is going to be terrible for your career." Like so many others, Lee repeatedly declined to comment about Villalobos. Lee's spokeswoman, Jennifer Wilson, said he was too busy to answer questions.

The morning after the Senate vote against vouchers, Villalobos fished his office keys from his pants pocket to open the door. But the key didn't work. "I called up the sergeant at arms and asked him what's up," Villalobos recalls. "He apologized that he was just following orders and took me to my new office."

The sergeant led him to another, much smaller room on the same floor. Unlike his majority leader suite, the new space didn't have a separate room for his legislative aide. But it had a broom closet. "I'm not going to put my aide there," Villalobos said. "So I took the closet. My desk was a little folding TV table."

A few hours later, Bush told him he would run a candidate against him in the upcoming primary. Seeing Villalobos stripped of his majority leadership, ending his Senate presidency bid, and exiling him to the lower rungs of the Senate chamber wasn't enough. Running him out of elected office was Bush's ultimate goal.

To do his dirty work, the governor enlisted Frank Bolaños — a BellSouth employee whom Bush had appointed to the Miami-Dade County School Board in 2001 — to run in the 2006 Republican primary. According to a May 2006 Tampa Bay Times article, Bush flew from Tallahassee to Miami to meet with Bolaños for a 30-minute powwow less than a week after the school board member announced he was running. Bush's then-press secretary Alia Faraj told Times reporters that her boss' get-together with Bolaños had nothing to do with the election. She claimed the two men were simply having a general conversation about "education."

But Bush followed up the meeting by sending a fundraising letter in June to donors hailing Bolaños as "a conservative who believes in lower taxes and smaller government" and "a true Republican we can trust." He closed the missive by noting that his candidate's opponent — whom Bush identified only as the "incumbent" — had "abandoned our party's principles and lost his way."

Bush, of course, was referring to Villalobos. "I was livid," Villalobos says. "I couldn't believed I was being punished for voting against him once out of 99 times."

Bolaños' campaign raised more than $200,000 three weeks into his candidacy, compared to $80,000 Villalobos had collected in three months. The names on Bolaños' finance committee read like a who's who of Bush apostles: real-estate developer Sergio Pino, former Florida Republican Party Chairman Al Cardenas, Fort Lauderdale cardiologist Zachariah Zachariah, and Jason Unger, a Tallahassee lobbyist whose wife had served as a Bush campaign manager in 2002.

Outside groups also bankrolled campaign attacks against Villalobos. Two of Pino's development firms gave $130,000 to the governor's Foundation for Florida's Future, a nonprofit think tank that employed staffers from Bush's 1994 and 1998 gubernatorial races. The foundation produced mailers depicting Villalobos morphing into Hillary Clinton and placing him side-by-side with serial killer Ted Bundy.

On September 5, 2006, Villalobos eked out a win over his opponent by 426 votes. "Winning was very sweet," he says.

Bush not only failed to defeat his nemesis but also lost some Republican voters who did not appreciate the onslaught. In thousands of emails Bush released prior to officially announcing his presidential bid in June, New Times found messages from constituents who denounced his involvement in Villalobos' race.

The day after the primary election, Kendall resident Robert Mende wrote, "Sad day for Florida Republicans that you tried to punish a fellow Republican just because he did not vote with you 100 percent. You took a swing and missed!"

Another message, from a Miami man named Alfonso, read, "Mr. Jeb Bush... I find your actions very, very unprofessional, unethical, and certainly not one befitting a governor and brother of the US pres. You are the one dividing the Republican Party."

More than 100 demonstrators, including white and black Democratic legislators, stood vigil outside the governor's office while Meek and Hill were inside. Twenty-four hours later, the pair ended their sit-in when Bush agreed to hold public hearings to gather input and recommendations before the state Board of Regents voted on key parts of the university portion of One Florida.

The sit-in provided an early glimpse into Bush's volatile temper and uncooperative governing style, says Les Miller, the Hillsborough County Democrat who was part of Villalobos' freshman class. "It's his way or no way," Miller recalls. "His retaliation always came during the budgetary process. If you were a Democrat and black, you can bet your bottom dollar he was going to veto anything you put in the budget."

For instance, Bush killed $500,000 that Miller had requested in 2000 for a job-training program for underprivileged residents of Sarasota, Polk, Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Manatee counties. The governor also vetoed $200,000 that Miller requested for a health clinic serving impoverished rural residents in Manatee and for an Alzheimer's facility in Ybor City.

"There was no rhyme or reason for it other than (the requests were) coming from Democrats who went against him on One Florida... the voucher system, and small class size," Miller says. "We opposed him, and he retaliated against us."

Bush was equally dismissive of dissenting Republicans. Consider the case of Nancy Argenziano, a former state representative and senator from Crystal River (who left the GOP in 2011). In 2003, Argenziano, along with 11 other Republicans, voted against a bill that gave Bush the power to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a St. Petersburg woman with irreparable brain damage whose husband, Michael, had fought for seven years to take her off life support. The bill nevertheless passed into law, and Bush ordered Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted, keeping her alive for close to another two years. The Florida Supreme Court ultimately struck down the law as unconstitutional.

"There were times he raised his voice at me," Argenziano says. "I raised my voice right back at him. I once asked him if he ever got tired of people telling him yes all the time."

In 2006, Argenziano again drew Bush's ire when she publicly admonished him for urging Republican constituents to ask state senators to support a bill that dramatically limited damages in medical malpractice lawsuits. "Anybody on the inside knew Jeb had a temperament that could be vindictive," Argenziano says. "If you didn't agree with Jeb, you were on his shit list."

An undertone of this animosity surfaced in an email Bush sent to Argenziano in May 2006 when she inquired about $50,000 he vetoed for a Citrus County organization that teaches blind people to build furniture. When she claimed a Bush staffer said her sponsorship of the bill would make it less likely he would rescind the veto, the governor responded, "The fact that you sponsored the line item won't matter to me. None of your comments in the press will matter. None of your votes will matter."