Frustrated by racism and political favoritism in his native Hawai’i, Benjamin Jerome Cayetano used proceeds from illegal gambling to move his family to California in 1963. Those are some of the revelations in his soon-to-be published biography, Ben: A Memoir, from Street Kid to Governor.

He fills his book with gritty tales from his Kalihi youth when he nearly flunked out of Farrington High School and political stories from his later years as the country’s first Filipino-American governor.

‘I swore I would never come back to Hawai’i,’ Cayetano says, when he moved with his first wife and children to Los Angeles in 1963. He had been disappointed by racially- and politically-motivated hiring practices at Hawai’i’s state Department of Transportation, where he was a draftsman.

He said he ranked first on a promotion exam, but the DOT supervisor who interviewed him told him he planned to give the job to a military veteran. Cayetano, who was 23, later found out the guy who got the position was just 19 years old. And he had had no military service, just like Cayetano.

In his book, Cayetano does not reveal the ethnicities of either his DOT supervisor or the young man who got the job because the subject is ’sensitive and I felt that the readers could figure it out for themselves.’ When pressed for an answer, he reluctantly says both men were Japanese Americans.

‘I didn’t get the job because I wasn’t connected. A lot of these guys were trying to take care of their own, but that didn’t make it right. I was pissed off,’ Cayetano says.

But he says some of his Japanese American co-workers, including engineers at the DOT, urged him to go to the mainland, where he could work during the day and get a college degree at night.

He went home to his wife and told her ‘We’re getting out of here.’ But he didn’t have the money to move to California until he won two illegal football pools, taking in $2,000. ‘I couldn’t tell you that during my campaigns,’ he jokes.

In 1968, Cayetano earned an undergraduate degree from UCLA, where he majored in political science and minored in American history. In 1971, he graduated from Loyola Law School. Prominent Honolulu attorney Frank Padgett hired him to work at his law firm for $15,000 a year, giving Cayetano an advance on his salary so he could move his family back to the Islands.

Cayetano was elected to the Legislature in 1974, beginning 28 years in elected office as a state senator, lieutenant governor and then governor, until term limits brought his career in state government to a close in 2002.

Unlike other recent Hawai’i governors, Cayetano, who’s 67, is not co-authoring his life story with an established writer like Tom Coffman or Dan Boylan. With his characteristic independence, he has written it himself, noting ‘fortunately, I write better than I speak.’

He never came off as a great public speaker on television or at the podium and often appeared gruff or even arrogant. That’s what his second wife Vicki told him when they first met, admitting she did not vote for him in the 1994 governor’s race.

But during an interview in his living room, he is engaging, self-effacing and occasionally funny. ‘Everyone writes biographies now, even the janitor.’

Politicians tend to ’self censor’ their memoirs, Cayetano says, leaving out embarrassing episodes and blunders from their life stories. But readers of his book ‘will be able to see my warts, the mistakes that I made,’ as well as the high points.

Cayetano serves up all kinds of juicy details, proving this is not your grandfather’s biography. A few examples:

•At age 17, he and some friends were arrested after a fight at a Ke’eaumoku Street drive-in, and he landed in the main cellblock at the former police station on Bethel Street.

•An irate state legislator punched a fellow lawmaker in the stomach and terrorized another legislator by overturning his desk and messing up his office. Cayetano won’t tell me the culprit’s identity, but he names names in his book.

•As governor, he was angered when a student protesting University of Hawai’i budget cuts displayed a sign at the capitol in which ‘Ben’ had been substituted for ‘Tom’ in ‘Uncle Tom.’ ‘And he was a Filipino kid, which made me even more irritated,’ he says. And what did the governor do? ‘I told him: ‘Kiss my ass.”

Cayetano also discloses secrets about his family that he says influenced his political opinions. He writes that his mother was addicted to prescription drugs and died from an overdose of Seconal or ‘reds’ in 1978, the year he was elected to the state Senate. Her official cause of death was listed as ‘cardiac arrest.’

Years later, after he became governor, he submitted a bill to the Legislature that required treatment rather than prison time for first-time non-violent drug offenders. ‘I felt strongly that just throwing addicts in jail was not the answer,’ Cayetano writes. The Legislature eventually approved the measure in 2001, and Cayetano ‘felt great satisfaction and pride’ when he signed it into law.

With his brother’s consent, Cayetano reveals that his brother Ken is gay and spent 30 years in the closet, including a career in the U.S. Air Force. ‘My kid brother was a bigger man than I could ever hope to be,’ Cayetano writes. As governor, Ben Cayetano supported same-sex partnerships while he faced a close challenge from Republican Linda Lingle in 1998, even as a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was approved by voters.

His book chronicles what Cayetano considers to be some of his greatest accomplishments: starting the state’s A+ after school program, creating the state art museum across from the capitol, building the new U.H. Medical School in Kaka’ako and carrying out the largest income tax cut in the state’s history.

His biggest regret was cutting social programs in 1995 to pay for public union pay raises, after which he vowed ‘never to do that again.’ Cayetano stuck to his promise, resulting in the crippling educators’ strike, which shut down public schools and all U.H. campuses statewide for three weeks in 2001.

It is clear Cayetano longs for the daily give and take of politics. ‘When I first got out, that took an adjustment,’ he says. ‘I missed not being able to influence what’s going on.’

At a speech during last month’s book and music festival, he admitted he was the only author making a presentation whose book wasn’t published yet. Cayetano has spent more than two years researching and writing his biography, which is 300 pages and counting. After several delays, it’s now due out at the end of the summer or in the fall.

His wife Vicki is bracing for some social fallout from his memoirs. ‘Ben told me we’re going to have to leave town for a year after the book is published,’ she says.

And when his publisher, George Engebretson of Watermark Publishing, e-mailed Cayetano asking him if he’ll appear at book signings this fall, Cayetano wrote back: ‘Yes, but I may need security!’

The Cayetanos’ Wai’alae Iki home sits at the top of a ridge, beyond a guardhouse where you have to show your ID to a security officer who also records your license plate. It offers an expansive view of the ocean, Koko Head and Diamond Head.

He is writing his book in his koa-paneled library, which he calls his den. That’s where he sometimes has ‘writer’s block,’ because ‘I’m looking out there [at the view] and I write something and I end up erasing it because I’m not satisfied, you know?’

When his wife leaves for work every morning, the former governor is left alone in their empty house. The man who was used to being at the center of the action and in the public spotlight for so many years, now in solitude, sifts through the memories of his public and private lives, trying to put them down on paper.