(FORTUNE Magazine) – In the theater, third acts are often marked by some sort of comeuppance or denouement. That being the case, H. Wayne Huizenga, the 58-year-old Florida billionaire dealmaker, is hoping life doesn't imitate art. His first act, Waste Management, was a hit; his second, Blockbuster Entertainment, a smash. Now the curtain is going up on Huizenga's third production, an unlikely conglomerate called Republic Industries, which is on the way to becoming his third billion-dollar company. It's doubtful any other U.S. businessman can lay claim to such a record.

Because of his remarkable success running Waste and Blockbuster, Republic's shares have already blasted into orbit, climbing some 1,200% in the 14 months since Huizenga announced he was buying what was an unremarkable garbage company. Waste Management Technologies--now called WMX--and Blockbuster went on similar runs, but it took Huizenga years to convince Wall Street that consolidating the garbage industry (in the case of Waste) and betting on the video rental market (Blockbuster) were valid concepts. With Republic, all it took was a press release that effectively read, "I just bought it."

In May of last year Huizenga invested $64 million and raised an additional $168 million in equity to buy the Atlanta-based trash company, then doing $260 million in sales. Huizenga moved Republic's headquarters to Fort Lauderdale--where he also runs his three pro sports teams, the Miami Dolphins, the Florida Marlins, and the Panthers--and began to convert Republic into a diversified holding company.

Why did Huizenga buy a garbage company? Hadn't he been there, done that? "Even after all the consolidating we did at Waste, there are still dozens of independent garbage companies," says Huizenga, seated at a broad cherry table in the boardroom of Huizenga Holdings in downtown Fort Lauderdale, surrounded by trophies and mementos of his companies and teams. "Plus, it's a business we know well."

Within a matter of months, Huizenga moved into several other businesses. He began snapping up security-alarm companies, highlighted by the pending $4.5 billion acquisition of industry giant ADT ($1.5 billion in sales last year), announced in early July. Some have speculated that a minority shareholder of ADT may scotch the transaction, but Huizenga swears it will happen. "The deal is absolutely, positively, 100% going through," he says in a voice that sounds a bit like Gene Hackman's. This from a man who has made a mind-boggling 1,000 acquisitions or so over the past three decades.

Investors are most excited, however, by Republic's AutoNation, a company still in development that will sell used cars from nationally branded lots the size of football fields, each holding thousands of vehicles for sale at fixed prices. The lots will feature video screens for browsing the inventory, lounges with facilities for kids, and golf carts to whisk customers around. Buyers will be able to close a deal in an hour, with a salesperson who isn't working on commission. Some Wall Streeters are looking for AutoNation to generate $1 billion in revenue in 1997. Republic has also bought a tiny billboard business expected to do about $10 million in sales this year.

Garbage, home security, used cars, and billboards. Kind of an ugly combination of businesses, isn't it? Yet Huizenga insists there are swanlike synergies waiting to take wing. Perhaps they will. Strangely enough, Huizenga isn't the first to pair home security with used cars. ADT already has. The company has a $433-million-a-year business refurbishing and auctioning off used cars. That business will be "tucked in," a favorite phrase of Huizenga's, with AutoNation. A more typical, less plausible idea about synergy: "We could offer AutoNation customers an ADT alarm tracking system, like Lojack, in the used cars," says a Huizenga insider.

Another reason for putting all those businesses under one roof: "Rather than spread myself too thin with different companies, we decided that it would be more efficient if they were under one corporate umbrella," Huizenga says. "Anyway, down the road, who knows what we may spin off?" Still, it's indisputable that while the rest of corporate America is breaking up companies with disparate businesses, Huizenga is now cobbling one together. What type of Wall Street analyst will cover the company? "That's a good question," responds Huizenga.

Whether or not Republic sounds as if it makes sense, investors may be buying into Huizenga's next act simply because in retrospect it seems foolish to bet against him. Wall Street turned up its nose when Huizenga explained how Waste Management would swallow up hundreds of mom-and-pop garbage companies. At the time of its IPO in 1971, Waste had a market cap of $5 million. When Huizenga departed in 1984, its market value was $3 billion. Though it's hard to fathom today, Huizenga got the same initial reception when he took control of Blockbuster in 1987. What happened there? Blockbuster's market cap climbed from $32 million to $8.4 billion in September 1994, when he sold the company to cable giant Viacom.

Are there any common precepts underlying this mishmash of ventures? Actually, yes, though they are discernible at first only to Huizenga's eye. He sticks to service businesses. He loves high margins and is enamored of fragmented industries ripe for consolidation. He also looks for companies in the business of renting. Not all his companies meet every criterion--AutoNation won't have high margins--but most do.

As rich as these business principles have made him, Huizenga owes his high profile less to his dealmaking than to his sports teams--which are the least successful of his businesses and clear examples of unrealized synergies. In the early 1990s, Huizenga bought the Dolphins, along with Joe Robbie Stadium, as well as the rights to the expansion Marlins and Panthers, becoming the only man ever to own three professional sports franchises. Sure, Huizenga loves sports--a fair athlete himself, he has water-skied on a rocking chair, a stepladder, and most fittingly, a garbage can lid--but the real plan was to bundle the teams with Blockbuster as part of an entertainment empire. Blockbuster, you may remember, also owned mini-studio Republic Pictures as well as Spelling Entertainment, creator of Melrose Place. Broadcasts of the Dolphins, Marlins, and Panthers were, to use industry parlance, "content" that would be distributed through an undetermined pipeline.

Today Blockbuster is no longer his, and while Huizenga makes money at Joe Robbie Stadium and the Dolphins break even, he says the Marlins lose $12 million a year. As for the Panthers, Huizenga plans to take the hockey team public, though his usual Merrill Lynch investment banking team passed on the deal. As of mid-July, the National Hockey League was ready to sign off on the IPO; next up is the SEC. A glance at the Panthers' not-yet-public prospectus shows the team lost $15 million last year. Now Huizenga sounds like every other team owner: "I'm very disappointed. I thought we could run these teams like businesses, but we can't. They're runaway ships."

Even if his sports teams have so far failed Huizenga as businesses (though don't be surprised if new coach Jimmy Johnson puts the Dolphins in the Super Bowl in a couple of years), they've helped make him the most prominent businessman in Florida, with a net worth approaching $2 billion. He and his wife, Marti, live in a grand, hacienda-style house on the New River in Fort Lauderdale that was used in the Burt Reynolds movie Stick. The couple has an 18-hole golf course for two--they are the only members.

Huizenga, a third-generation garbage man of Dutch descent, started life in Chicago. After dropping out of college, he began his career in 1962 with a single garbage truck in Fort Lauderdale. "My only business secret was just working harder than everybody else," he insists. Early on Huizenga got into an altercation with a customer over nonpayment of an account. In court the plaintiff claimed Huizenga grabbed him by the testicles. "That's not true, son of a bitch," snorts Huizenga, "I never did that. The guy was a deputy cop. It was his word against mine, a young kid." Maybe so. But over the years, others who have come up against Huizenga have felt the pain that deputy said he felt--in a metaphorical sense, of course.

Given Huizenga's organic inclination to expand, he was soon picking up one garbage company after another. He came to realize that renting dumpsters was the most profitable end of the business. In the late 1960s he teamed up with Dean Buntrock, then husband of a cousin and still chairman of WMX, and the curtain rose on Act I. For a time Huizenga and company averaged 100 deals a year as they built Waste.

Tired of, but greatly enriched by, garbage, Huizenga struck out on his own in 1984, and came upon Act II, Blockbuster, three years later. At first Huizenga was less than lukewarm about the idea, but a visit to a Chicago store changed his mind. "Blockbuster was perfect, a rental business with tremendous margins, in a business we could consolidate," he says. Huizenga and his partners initially plunked down $18.5 million, and the concept took off. But even as Blockbuster grew from $43 million in sales to over $2 billion, it was continually dogged by the "imminent" arrival of video-on-demand. "We could never get away from that. The cable companies kept plugging it. But even today they don't have dick."

Frustrated by the specter of video-on-demand, Huizenga began discussing a deal with Viacom's Sumner Redstone three summers ago at Herb Allen's Sun Valley, Idaho, entertainment conference. After a tangled and protracted mating dance, Blockbuster was merged into Viacom in September 1994. Many Blockbuster shareholders were angry with Huizenga for pushing the deal through, since Viacom's stock dropped prior to the deal's consummation. Clearly Huizenga has mixed feelings about selling out. His plan to build a grandiose theme park near Fort Lauderdale, Blockbuster Park--invariably known as Wayne's World--was terminated by Viacom. Huizenga's company, Huizenga Holdings, has yet to move out of the Blockbuster building, and he still sports a Blockbuster watch. "Sure, I have regrets. I loved Blockbuster," he says.

Huizenga is a natural-born dealmaker. Bald, with a craggy face, hypnotic baby-blue eyes, and laserlike intensity, he would make a convincing villain in a James Bond movie, though he's actually a pretty friendly guy. A confirmed workaholic, Huizenga once suggested to an associate that they fly to England for business. The colleague pointed out it was the Fourth of July weekend. What's the problem, Huizenga asked, the Brits don't celebrate it. "I've tried to figure out what makes Wayne tick for years," says Chuck Lewis, a Merrill Lynch banker who's been doing deals with Huizenga since 1972. "He's a man who has a certain talent, and the drive to exercise that talent is beyond his control. Mozart had to write music." Says Huizenga's long-standing No. 2, Steve Berrard: "People sell Wayne short when they say he just buys companies. We grew Blockbuster internally too. He gets great pleasure from that."

Tremendously loyal, Huizenga's been doing business with the same retinue of friends and family for decades. But he's also not without an ego. When asked about deals that have gone awry, like the Discovery Zone--a chain of children's play centers now in Chapter 11--a failed S&L, and a loser of a tanker deal, he simply responds, "They weren't my deals." (He means they were ideas brought to him by associates.) When asked about his height, Huizenga says he's five-nine, but he appears shorter than that.

But, hey, you need chutzpah to build businesses from scratch. Huizenga plans to open five AutoNation lots this year and 13 more in 1997. "New cars average $20,000 nowadays, so demand for used cars is up," he says. "Plus all that leasing going on provides us with tons of quality used vehicles." There's already competition, most notably from CarMax, a similar company owned by Circuit City.

In the case of ADT, the deal could be held up by Western Resources, a Kansas electric utility that owns 24% of the security-alarm company. Huizenga may have made a mistake by not calling Western President David Wittig, a former Salomon Brothers managing director. Wittig may be looking for ways to horn in on the deal--Western has an alarm business too--but he doesn't have much leverage. With the price Huizenga is offering, Western stands to reap a profit of nearly $275 million on a $443 million investment made seven months ago.

As with most of Huizenga's deals, ADT is to be purchased with his company's stock. That's smart because Huizenga is in effect trading his stock, which is expensive relative to earnings, for stock that is cheaper relative to earnings. Even with Republic shares down five points recently from their all-time high, the stock still carries a P/E of 66 on 1996 estimated earnings. None of the companies he buys have P/Es anywhere near that. Therefore the new earnings Huizenga is buying are accretive, as opposed to dilutive. What's in it for the guy selling out to Huizenga? Well, he's trading his poky stock for shares in the starship Republic, Wayne Huizenga's Act III. He's bound to be happy. As long as life doesn't imitate art.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE Melanie Warner