by T. S. O'Neil
Block managed to make a fortune with the ship as fuel was cheap, cruising in those days was a novelty, and he had little competition. Simon purchased other ships and made money shipping Florida oranges north and commercial goods south. His ships plied the waters of the gulf hauling new and used automobiles to Mexico and Central America for payment in hard currency.
In 1942, a well-known venture capitalist developed a shipyard at Hookers Point in Tampa. The yard had thirteen building ways, for the construction of concrete ships of the C1-S-D1 design: the U.S. Maritime Commission provided seven million dollars towards its development. Although not unsuccessful at building concrete ships, it later switched to building steel ships, but closed after the war. The company was acquired by Simon Block for 1.2 million in 1953 and was renamed Tampa Bay Shipbuilding. The shipyard handled all vessel needs and requirements from the smallest topside jobs to dry dockings. If it were floating or even if it wasn’t, they could repair it.
In 1973, Simon Block, still a relatively young man at age fifty one, traveled to Macau for a Shipping Convention. He marveled at the glamor of the casinos and the lucrative nature of their business. Since Cuba was now under the iron fist of Fidel, Cuba’s casinos had been nationalized and closed, the only gambling venue for U.S. citizens was the still relatively modest gambling meccas of Las Vegas or Reno. This gave Simon an idea for the next use of the Star of Tampa: a floating casino.
Upon return from Macau, he dispatched the ship to his shipyard for conversion into a casino boat. The gaming tables and slot machines would be located in the converted car well of the ocean going ferry. He knew of some gaming tables for sale from a casino operation that went bankrupt in Reno and after a few phone calls, he dispatched his logistics director with instructions to “buy it all and ship it.”
Chapter 3 – Tommy
Emma Finnegan taught young Tommy of his family’s history and Tommy would later recount to his friends and fellow inmates that the Finnegan family came to the United States in the 1890s, long after the hordes that were driven from Ireland by the great famine of the 1840's.
His mother’s parents sailed first to Liverpool from Dublin, where Tommy’s grandfather found work as a dock hand until he saved enough to book passage to America. While the Irish filled up the port cities of America from the Northeast of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, for some reason lost to time, Tommy’s grandfather, booked passage to the balmy Southern port of New Orleans.
Tommy was born there in 1950, the result of a tryst between his mother Emma, and one of the teenage heirs of her employer, Pierre De Sandoval. The elder was a city father and trade attorney from one of the oldest families in New Orleans, who could trace their lineage back to Desoto’s discovery of the Mississippi River in 1541. They lived in a grand brownstone mansion on the west side of Esplanade Avenue. It was said that De Sandoval’s direct ancestor was a junior officer on Desoto’s voyage.
Pierre Junior was a spoiled and surly mutt of a young man, whose longing for sexual adventure was such that continuous trysts with the prostitutes in the whore houses of Bourbon Street could not satisfy. He viewed the new maid, at seventeen as a worthy addition to his stable of concubines, willing or not. One night, he simply got drunk on the old man’s whiskey burst into her room, pinned her to the bed, threw her nightclothes over her head and raped her repeatedly while his parents were at the theater.
His visits became a recurring event and she simply resigned herself to it as work was hard to come by for unskilled females and being raped was known to be a common hazard of the job. Eventually, he got her pregnant and she was almost fired when she could no longer hide her condition, but an impassioned plea from her rapist saved her job. It was uncertain whether he felt guilt for the crime or thought that she would reveal him as the father if she were let go.
Tommy was born in Emma’s quarters under the care of the family doctor, which was better care than she had dared to hope for. The family otherwise turned a blind eye toward the child. Pierre Jr. ignored him and soon after left for college at Yale and retuned only infrequently.
Tommy grew up slight and frail like his mother. He had blond hair like his father—if he inherited anything else, it could be argued that it was his soon to be demonstrated lack of propriety. At the age of twelve, Tommy found a pack of matches and experimenting, managed to set Emma’s drapes on fire.
The fire was quickly doused by an observant handy man and little damage was done. Regardless, Tommy was speedily ejected from the De Sandoval’s home and sent off to live with Emma’s sister, Mary, in the Irish Channel, a notorious working class neighborhood settled primarily by Irish immigrants in the early 19th century.
Mary O’Brien lived with her hard drinking husband, two sons and one daughter in a shotgun house on Sixth Street. Shotgun houses consisted of multiple rooms all in a row with no hallways. The nickname came into being as it was said that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the lead shot would fly cleanly through the house and out the back door.
Under the influence, if not active tutelage of Jimmy O’Brien, age fourteen and Sean, a year younger, Tommy learned how things were done in the Irish Channel. The boys were freelance sneak thieves, robbing fruit carts and doing smash and grab robberies along Canal Street when something caught their eyes.
In a few years, after numerous police beatings and various stays in detention halls, the trio graduated to breaking into the storehouses in the Warehouse District. They stole beer and liquor by the caseload; selling their ill-gotten booty to the bars and restaurants in the French Quarter at a nice discount.
Jimmy, Tommy and Sean became a thriving, albeit minor, criminal organization, spending their spoils on whatever they wanted. In 1966, Jimmy bought his first car; a two year old Cadillac El Dorado, painted a cool light blue with a white ragtop, just a few weeks after he was old enough to legally drive.
Alcohol was free, but girls were not and the boys spent freely, buying them whatever they wanted or just paying them outright for their sexual favors.
The boys continued their burglaries, but had since adopted an eye for the finer things in life. Their modus operandi was to drive up to an unoccupied house dressed as workmen in a rented moving van and simply loot the house of anything determined to be of value. They bought their own shotgun house less than a mile away from the family home and furnished it with whatever fine furniture they couldn’t sell.
For two years, the boys operated with seeming impunity. They committed burglaries, robberies of small businesses and hijacked a truck or two when the opportunity provided. Since he was the only one to master reading, Tommy read his cousins pulp novels of the bank Robberies of Bonnie and Clyde Borrows, killed about thirty years ago in their own state. No doubt Clyde was having her, imagined Tommy.
John Dillinger and Charles Pretty Boy Floyd also figured predominantly in the boy’s fantasies. The boys decided that they needed to start robbing banks because as one of their heroes, Willie Sutton was said to remark—“That’s where the money is.”
They were successful at it for a while, hitting banks in and around New Orleans until they decided to cross Lake Pontchartrain to try their luck in the territory north of the city. It was this decision that ultimately led to the gang’s demise. Tommy arrived at Angola in January 1970, sentenced to four years for being the unarmed getaway driver in an ill-conceived plan the boys contrived to rob the Savings & Loan in the small town of Cut-off, just off the north shore of the lake.
The robbery seemed to go off without a hitch, Jimmy and Sean ran into the bank, scared the shit out of the patrons and employees and emerged a short time later with two bags, presumably full of cash. Tommy sped away and was soon being chased by two local patrol cars.
“They must have tripped an alarm,” said Sean.
Trouble was, while Tommy did not know the area, the local cops most assuredly did—He took a turn at high speed off the blacktop onto hard packed dirt roads around the marshes off the north shore of the lake hopi
ng to allude the cops. He laughed hysterically as he no longer saw the flashing red lights filling his rear view mirror. When the road came to a sharp dead end at the edge of a canal, Tommy realized that they had probably just slowed down in order to keep from bottoming out their patrol cars on the deeply rutted road. Three cruisers pulled up about a hundred yards away, in range of the long rifles the cops carried but well out of range of the pistols Sean and Jimmy carried.
There was really no place to run, but Sean was a hard one to stop if he thought he had a chance at escape and he bolted for the edge of the canal. Jimmy leaped from the stolen car, shouting obscenities and shooting wildly at the cops, as he imagined Clyde Borrows had done in his final moments.
A second later, Tommy witnessed a spray of blood from the back of Sean’s head as a high powered rifle bullet smashed it like a dropped watermelon. Shit, they weren’t aiming to wound, thought Tommy as he quickly raised his hands above his head and dropped to his knees, praying that the cops wouldn’t decide to just kill him in the heat of the moment.
A moment later, another shot rang out and Tommy heard Jimmy scream in agony. He heard a splash and imagined that Jimmy had fallen into the canal and thought that he would probably drown, since Jimmy had never learned to swim.
Tommy closed his eyes and quietly began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. He wondered what the bullet would feel like as it smashed into his body and he shuddered, fully expecting to be next. Instead, he was roughly handcuffed, dragged to his feet and shoved in the back of a patrol car; “cuffed and stuffed” as the saying went.
Angola was named America’s worst prison by Colliers magazine in 1951. The periodical detailed a story about thirty-one inmates who chose to cut their own heel tendons to protest conditions.
Luckily, Tommy was there in the reform years when a new Governor pledged to clean up the prison and add rehabilitation programs to help train convicts in trade skills necessary for a successful transition to life outside the prison walls.
Tommy found work in the auto shop where prison vehicles were serviced by the inmates for everything from an oil change to engine rebuilds. He had an affinity for the work in general and was able to increase his level of knowledge by working closely with the more senior inmates.
The shop boss was a convicted murderer, named Jacques Defray, a seventh generation Creole gator hunter and a giant of a man, who killed a poacher caught stealing one of his gators from a trap. Defray shot him dead with a .22 caliber Remington and then hung the body over the site with a gator hook through his neck, just to make a point.
It did not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Jacques was the killer. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life, but he was not viewed as a criminal as his one crime was one of rage and he was eventually made a trustee who tolerated little nonsense.
When angered at the actions of another Con he would say “I kill you just like a gator, boy” and that was usually enough to straighten the man out, lest he get a dull screwdriver in the back of his neck.
Tommy worked on everything from the Warden’s family car to tractors that supported the prison farm to boat engines on the guard’s personal pleasure boats. He mostly kept out of trouble, earned ten cents a day, and was able to learn a marketable skill.
His only indulgence was gambling on cards and an occasional bout of drinking the local prison brew. These two vices led him to trouble when a convict he owed money to suggested with a smile that Tommy could pay him in trade, indicating that he should bend over and spread his ass cheeks for the other con to mount.
The con’s name was Boyd; he was a pimp in for the murder of his partner, who was said to be a male who dressed as a female and prostituted himself in the French Quarter. Boyd was about six foot two and worked out with weights constantly.
He was also known to rape other inmates while holding a shive to their throats, drawing just enough blood to make them understand that he would have his way with them or they would not breathe another breath.
Tommy feigned interest in the offer, but claimed that he wanted some time to think it over. He told Defray of the encounter, leaving out the part about the gambling debt.
Tommy’s good labor as a mechanic earned Defray privileges from the guards: an occasional six pack of beer, a few dollars after a particularly tricky repair, even a stroke magazine that one of the guards bought new.
Defray lived relatively well, because Tommy was a genius with a wrench and he wanted Tommy to be content. Defray rightly
surmised that Tommy getting ass fucked by a Bull Queer would negatively affect this arrangement.
Defray told Tommy he would talk to Boyd, with a look in his eye that said talk was the last thing on his mind. The following day Defray summoned Boyd to the garage under the guise of interviewing him for a job that Boyd had inquired about.
According to Defray, he was going to interview Boyd for the job, but he never showed up for the interview, which was scheduled for right before the dinner meal at four forty five. Defray waited until just before five and then left for dinner, thinking that Boyd had blown off the interview.
After he failed to show up for evening count, a search ensued and Boyd’s body was discovered behind three Shell oil drums in the garage. The doctor would subsequently find a small bloody jagged eighth inch hole at the point in the back of the neck where it joins the head causing him to write in the post mortem report: the probable cause of death was that parties unknown brutally forced a sharply pointed narrow object into the back of the neck and head causing traumatic brain injury. Time of death was estimated to be between five to six p.m., but it was hot in the garage and so he couldn’t be totally accurate. Defray was questioned about the murder, but had an alibi—he was in the mess hall with Tommy when Boyd was killed.
Tommy received his parole in June 1973 with six months off his original sentence for good behavior. The Parole Department got him a job as a junior apprentice at A & B Boat Works in New Orleans and Tommy began working on being a rehabilitated citizen. He was paid two twenty five an hour to start and was originally happy with the wages, but that didn’t last long. The shift supervisor kept him working hard and threatened him with a return to prison when he was found slacking off. He longed for the day when his probation was over.
In January 1974, Tommy’s wish was granted and he stayed at his job only with an eye towards finding something better as quickly as possible. As fortune would have it, about a week later, Tommy met a mechanic from Olsen’s Boatyard when Olsen purchased a nearly new 1973 Chris Craft Constellation. The wooden boat was just what Olsen needed to showcase his business.
The mechanic, Frank Bruener, was sent along to check out the engine and sail it back to Tampa. Frank had been a mate and engineer on lots of different ships, mostly around the east coast, Caribbean, and the Gulf. But, a time or two, he had crewed on a ship to Hong Kong; passing through the Panama Canal on both occasions. He remembered the whore houses of Panama City more than anything else. Lots of Latin beauties there to service the sailors and soldiers of the U.S. forces stationed there to protect the canal.
Bruener remembered being drunk most of the time ashore and catching a nasty case of gonorrhea that made it feel like he was pissing razor blades―he was never one for the caution of a rubber. Life had changed and he had “matured.” Now a family man, with a young wife with a bun in the oven he liked to say. He needed more than Olsen could offer him, so he would go back to working on as an engineer on a Panmax class ship, so named as it was built with just enough clearance to squeeze through the narrowest part of the Panama Canal.
The engine was solid―Tommy had checked it out himself prior to taking it under consignment from an Orleans attorney who had grown bored with it. Frank was impressed enough with Tommy’s skills to invite him out for dinner. They took a cab to Bourbon Street and found a restaurant called Brennan’s located in an old Absinthe House that looked to be as old as the city herself.
Tommy had been by the place many times while
growing up, but going inside as a patron seemed like an alien experience to him. They were dressed in work clothes, so the thin, gaunt looking maître d’ quickly ushered them into the bar, after all it was a week night and he could not afford to turn up his mustachioed nose at paying customers, even if they were dressed like dockworkers.
The rich dark wood paneled interior of the bar still felt too good for Tommy, but Frank made himself right at home by plopping himself down into the deep leather recesses of a high backed bar chair. He ordered a Highball of Basil Hayden’s up and when Tommy seemed mystified by the order, Frank ordered him a Heineken beer, telling him it was imported from Holland.
Over drinks, Frank confided in Tommy the fact that he was moving on as Frank’s wife wanted more security than a job at Olsen’s could provide. Bruener was impressed with Tommy’s skill and said he could recommend Tommy as his replacement, thinking that it would make Olsen happy and assuage his own guilt at leaving what had been a good job.
Tommy was initially skeptical; good things usually came with strings attached, in his experience anyways. He warmed to the idea over a dinner of Creole Onion Soup, salad of iceberg lettuce and beefsteak tomatoes covered in real blue cheese and a twelve ounce Filet Mignon accompanied by a good bottle of French Bordeaux. After dinner, they ordered brandy and cigars.
While smoking a good Dominican Chateau Fuente cigar and savoring a glass of Carlos I, the silky smooth brandy of Pedro Domecq, Frank conspiratorially leaned forward, touched Tommy on the back of his hand, “Sail back to St. Pete with me.”