Peter Franceschina did not so much live by his own rules as relish breaking the rules of others.

His problem with authority was colossal. His appetite for mischief, insatiable. The qualities combined might easily have landed him in trouble had he not found a useful outlet for them -- as a journalist in Florida, where he became one of the most dogged and creative investigative reporters of his generation.

Across thousands of stories filed from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, Peter, who died of liver failure last week at 60, was a relentless challenger of conventional wisdom, a devoted tormenter of crooked officials and a vivid chronicler of the serial killings, hurricanes, scandals, Ponzi schemes and abuses of power that shaped life in Florida at the turn of the 21st century.

He was also, more quietly, a generous mentor to younger reporters, a loving son and brother and a loyal and caring friend.

On or off the job, he was stubborn, profane, contrarian and fiercely principled, with zero patience for the dishonest, the petty, the puffed-up or the unkind.

Screaming around turns in his red Alfa Romeo Spider, top down, hair flying, cigarette dangling from his mouth, he could cut a dashing if sometimes lopsided figure, the result of a hip gone bad after too many days spent windsurfing on the choppy waters of southwest Florida.

It gave him the rolling gait of a pirate as he moved through the newsroom or down the halls of the county courthouse, armed with a notepad and a red Bic Flair, always in pursuit of his next big story. It rarely took him long to find it.

Once, he elicited a murder confession while drinking beer in a buddy's kitchen, cradling the phone in one hand and a bottle of Heineken in the other.

On another occasion, he was subpoenaed by prosecutors who were furious over his refusal to disclose the whereabouts of an itinerant victim of police corruption.

Not long after that, they subpoenaed him again over a different story, about the illegal phone tapping of public officials, and he chose to risk jail time rather than give up the name of a confidential source.

A judge ruled in his favor both times.

Peter John Franceschina was born in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 3, 1964, the son of Louis Franceschina, a manager for Giant Foods, and his wife Helen, a public health nurse.

He attended Centennial High School in Columbia, Md., where he was a standout on the lacrosse team, and studied engineering and English literature at the University of Pittsburgh.

He began his newspaper career at the lowest rung, as a clerk in a remote bureau of the Fort Myers News-Press, in 1987.

His first story was about politicians smoking pot. Within three years, he was the paper's star courthouse reporter and on his way to becoming one of its most formidable diggers.

He avoided press conferences, making no effort to ingratiate himself with the elected leaders, developers and moneymen in power. Instead, he wrote about a former dean of the state legislature who let drug smugglers land planes on his ranch in Glades County; documented the plight of migrant workers in the tomato fields of Immokalee; and penned a series on the wanderings of a serial killer who reached out from jail.

His trademark was the tight, unadorned sentence, and even his workaday cops items had the power to stop the reader short.

"Crawl inside the mind of Robert Cline Clay," began one story about a murder suspect in April 1992. "His passions are aroused by an obsession with young boys, images of violence, torn emotions. He writes breathlessly of handcuffs and love. His desires, he reminds himself, are powerful enough to kill for."

When not on deadline or windsurfing, he was usually in the garage. A believer in buying cars he couldn't afford - at least two Alfa Romeos, a handful of BMWs, including one M3 in striking Estoril Blue - he made up the difference by doing the repairs himself, no matter how complex or intensive.

His fluency in wrenches, bolts and gaskets and his utter lack of pretension belied an intellect of frightening power. He might have been the only person his friends knew who could change a clutch slave cylinder in the afternoon and then, over stiff drinks, riff on Bukowski, Pynchon and Gaddis late into the night.

He was also a skilled cook, and his seafood gumbo, pan-seared snapper and expertly sauced scallopini were often better than any restaurant's around.

In the early 2000s, he was recruited to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, one of the largest newspapers in the state, where he covered courts in Palm Beach County.

When The Boston Globe broke the Catholic Church abuse scandal soon after, he was among the first reporters to document its reach into Florida, and into the Archdiocese of Miami in particular.

But it was after he was promoted to the paper's investigations team that he made his biggest mark.

A master of finding and parsing stacks of arcane records, he worked with other reporters to expose inequities within the cloistered world of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and abuses stemming from the state's lax regulation of daycares and nursing homes.

Still, he kept a hand in breaking news, dominating coverage of the $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme perpetrated by a former Florida lawyer, Scott Rothstein.

Then one day in 2012, as the local news industry was imploding, he became fed up with the endless cuts and the constant more-with-lessisms. He used his company's generous health plan to get his busted hip fixed and then politely gave it the finger, moving back to Mattapoisett, Mass., where he is survived today by his father, Lou, and brother, Paul. A private service will be held in the future.

He cashed out his 401k and, after months spent scouring business filings and other records, decided to dump a big chunk of it into shares of a company he thought might do well for itself - Nvidia.

Before long he had taken up the lifestyle of one of his favorite literary characters, the antihero Travis McGee from the novels of John D. MacDonald. Mornings he would don his threadbare T-shirts, old cargo shorts and beat-up loafers, light a Marlboro and spend time wandering the local beaches.

He painted yachts and historical buildings. Pulled blue crabs from the marshes and ate them. Flirted with the waitresses at Turk's Seafood around the corner.

And, without heed to town regulations, he went to war with several stands of white poplar, an invasive species that had cropped up in his backyard to block his views of Buzzards Bay, felling one after another with a whisper-quiet electric chainsaw.

Seeing the trees come down, one especially testy neighbor turned him in to the conservation commission, leading to a protracted battle and the specter of hefty fines.

Outraged at the injustice of it all, at the idea of an environmental board punishing the removal of a harmful invader, Peter marshaled his resources. He put in hundreds of hours of botanical research and tracked down an expert witness, an arborist, to testify on his behalf.

In the end, as always, he prevailed.