Although the weather has been blissfully non-eventful this hurricane season, the same cannot be said for the quagmire that is Florida's current property insurance market.

Florida is engulfed in a whirlwind of negative homeowners' insurance news. The latest contretemps revolves around a little-noted start-up in Ponte Vedra Beach called American Keystone Insurance Co. Licensed in 2007, the company was recently ordered into receivership for the purpose of liquidation. All policies were ordered cancelled effective Nov. 8, 2009. American Keystone primarily wrote homeowners', condominium unit owners', personal inland marine, and residential condominium association policies in Florida. It had approximately 7,800 policies in force at the time the order was issued.

Small potatoes, as The Godfather's Hyman Roth might say. Except for one thing. The man behind the curtain at American Keystone was Bill Griffin of Riscorp fame. The spectacular rise and fall of Riscorp in the early 1990s — the second-largest failure of an insurance company in Florida's history — left Griffin a multi-millionaire but also sent him to federal prison for orchestrating illegal campaign contributions at the company he founded. That felony conviction carried a lifetime ban on active participation in the insurance industry.