For Sale —American Paradise

by Willie Drye

  Fisher’s wife Jane said that her husband was “practically down to his last dollar” when he opened the magnificent Flamingo Hotel in Miami Beach in 1920.

  But Fisher, the tenacious opportunist, managed to get the ultimate VIP to stay at his hotel soon after it opened. President-elect Warren G. Harding decided to take a Florida vacation after winning the nation’s highest office in November 1920. When Fisher learned Harding was coming to Miami, he was determined to get him into the Flamingo.

  Jane Fisher said her husband “shanghaied” Harding “right out from under the nose” of a Miami reception committee. Fisher hustled Harding aboard his own yacht, the Shadow VI, and took him to the Flamingo’s penthouse, “where a poker game and plenty of scotch were waiting,” she wrote.

  Fisher installed Harding in one of the luxurious villas he’d built on the grounds of the Flamingo. The four-bedroom house, specially decorated for Harding, included a fireplace and a porch overlooking Biscayne Bay. Fisher even obtained several days’ worth of newspapers from Marion, Ohio, so the president-elect could catch up on news from his hometown.

  The Miami Daily Metropolis reported that Harding was “carefully guarded against annoyances at Miami Beach” while he played golf, took a dip in the ocean, and toured the city.

  Harding was delighted with the villa. “It’s just an ideal little place,” he said.

  Meanwhile, Fisher masterfully played the herd of newsmen trailing Harding, knowing that Miami Beach and his new hotel would be mentioned in news stories being sent around the world.

  The Metropolis reported that the hospitality shown the reporters and photographers was “of a different character than anywhere else in Florida,” and had brought “the highest praise” from the newsmen.

  Harding—minus the reporters and photographers—spent a night at Fisher’s exclusive fishing camp, Cocolobo Key, in Biscayne Bay. He returned with a sunburned face and blistered hands from hauling in a sailfish, an amberjack, and a wahoo.

  The president-elect also dropped in for a visit with William Jennings Bryan, now a full-time Miami resident. The Metropolis didn’t report what Harding and Bryan discussed, but it’s likely that Bryan told Harding of his frustrations at how casually Prohibition was being violated in Miami.

  But if forbidding the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages was an impediment to Fisher and other movers and shakers in Florida, it was a golden opportunity for the Ashley Gang.

  For years, John Ashley and his felonious family had been operating three moonshine stills from the safety of their Everglades hideouts, so they were already on the wrong side of the nation’s alcoholic beverage laws when Prohibition went into effect. But when booze was outlawed everywhere, they saw a chance to increase their income by getting into the business of bootlegging.

  And with typical Ashley ruthlessness, they figured they could increase their income even more by eliminating the competition and taking their profits as well.

  By 1921, when the president-elect was vacationing just down the coast from their hideout, the Ashleys were making a regular seventy-mile run across the Straits of Florida between Palm Beach County and West End in the British-owned Bahamas. There, they were loading up their small skiff with booze and hauling it back across open water to their lair.

  The most obvious—and probably most popular—indication of Florida’s indifference to the restrictions of the rest of the world was the state’s unofficial attitude toward enforcing Prohibition. Supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment—including Miami’s most famous resident, Bryan—had hailed it as a noble measure that would save the nation from perdition, but millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans paid no attention to it. They bought their booze from bootleggers at outrageous prices, and the fact that they’d broken the law to get it only seemed to enhance their pleasure as they hoisted their glasses.

  In Miami, Prohibition was regarded more as a challenging inconvenience than the law of the land. Every day, bootleggers in small, speedy boats—many of them powered by military airplane engines left over from the war—left Miami and other towns on the state’s southeast coast and made the run to the Bahamas to buy whiskey. They could make their choices and have a free lunch while their purchases were loaded. By nightfall, the whiskey was being poured into glasses and sold for huge profits in Florida.

  Selling booze to Florida bootleggers was such an economic boon to the Bahamas that in 1920 the islands’ governor brought some unexpected good news to his legislature. Their worries about an expected $150,000 budget shortfall had been completely erased. So much whiskey was being hauled over to Florida that sales taxes had created a $500,000 surplus in the Bahamian treasury.

  Bryan was horrified when he learned that the Bahamian government had no intention of helping the United States enforce Prohibition, and actually was almost gleeful that income from American bootleggers had erased their government’s debt.

  Rum-running between Florida and the Bahamas was becoming such an annoyance to Bryan that he made a dramatic proposal to end it: The United States should buy the Bahamas from Great Britain, or insist that Great Britain hand them over to pay off its debt to the United States from World War I.

  The traffic of seagoing bootleggers had prompted the Ashley Gang to expand its illegal operations. They’d gone into piracy. Armed to the teeth, John Ashley, brothers Ed and Frank, and Kid Lowe would stop small boats loaded with booze from the Bahamas. The gang would force the unlucky bootleggers to hand over their liquor and any cash they might be carrying.

  Sometimes, the gang would surprise unlucky bootleggers as they were coming ashore after completing their run. The rum piracy proved to be a lucrative sideline business for the Ashleys.

  On June 1, 1921, DeSoto County Sheriff John Poucher got a tip that bootleggers were unloading a shipment of booze at a garage just outside the small town of Wauchula, Florida. When Poucher and a deputy arrived, they searched a car parked outside the garage and found two pistols. Then two men came out of the garage. Unarmed and seeing that they were confronting cops, the men surrendered peacefully and were taken to the county jail.

  One of the bootleggers said his name was Davis. He was put into a holding cell.

  But the man’s face was familiar to one of the other prisoners in the DeSoto County Jail, who asked for a private word with Sheriff Poucher.

  That man’s name is not Davis, the prisoner said. That’s John Ashley. The John Ashley.

  Three days later, Ashley was behind bars again in the Florida State Prison in Raiford. Eventually, he was moved to a prison in Holmes County in the Florida Panhandle between Tallahassee and Pensacola. It had been a sizable stretch of freedom—nearly three years—for Ashley. But he did not intend to stay in jail to serve out the remainder of his long term.

  The loss of their most slippery member didn’t curtail the rest of the gang members from their profitable activities on the seas between Florida and West End. But greed or perhaps the fury of other bootleggers tired of losing their profits to the Ashleys proved fatal to two gang members.

  Just after dark on Wednesday, October 19, 1921, Ed and Frank Ashley climbed into a small skiff. The presence of a Coast Guard cutter just off the St. Lucie Inlet near Stuart didn’t deter them in the slightest. They ran without lights, and they muffled their small engine so that it was practically noiseless.

  Their tactics worked. They slipped past the cutter undetected and began their journey to West End.

  The following day, the brothers insisted that their boat be loaded with as much booze as it could possibly carry. Although the Bahamian liquor dealers had no compunctions about selling booze to American bootleggers, they warned Ed and Frank that their boat was too heavily loaded. With typical Ashley bravado, the brothers laughed off the warning and insisted that more booze be loaded.

  Still, the sky was threatening and it looked like rough weather was coming. Despite their indifference to the dangers of carrying such a heavy load, the brothers decided to wait a day before lea
ving.

  On Friday, October 21, 1921, the skies were overcast and the seas were choppy—so choppy that the scant freeboard caused by the Ashleys’ load of liquor would make for a very dangerous return to Florida in their small boat.

  They were advised to wait another day, but Ed and Frank were itching to get their hands on the cash that their haul would bring. With choppy seas licking at their gunwales, the brothers set out for home.

  They were never seen again.

  John Ashley would later say that the same night his brothers had set out on the choppy seas, he’d had a dream about their fate.

  Author Hix Stuart, who claimed to have had the only interview John Ashley ever granted to a writer, later wrote about Ashley’s dream.

  “He seemed to hover right over the liquor-laden skiff as it plowed through the moonlit sea,” Stuart wrote. “Suddenly out of the night appeared another craft, larger and faster, skimming directly toward his brothers’ boat. . . . To Ed and Frank the contour of the boat placed it as just another rum boat going to the island for a load. But John, in his eerie vantage, recognized its crew of three as Jim White, Bo Stokes, and Alton Davis—hijackers on land and liquor pirates at sea. A fusillade of shots and John awoke, weak and frightened, convinced that something had happened to his brothers.”

  Stuart said that Joe Ashley visited his son in prison, and John Ashley told his father about his dream. Not long after, Jim White, Bo Stokes, and Alton Davis disappeared at sea.

  Bootleggers mysteriously vanishing on the high seas didn’t have the slightest deterrence on the availability of booze in Florida, however. In one of his stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Kenneth Roberts reported that prices for bootleg liquor in Miami were low compared to the prices in larger northern cities, where tipplers “have been paying $120 a case for stuff that is only fit for cleaning the nicotine out of pipe stems.”

  A case of twelve bottles of scotch whisky that cost $24 in the Bahamas could be bought in Miami for $50—about $690 in twenty-first-century dollars. Taxi drivers then were selling the booze for $10 a bottle to hotel guests, pocketing $70 in profits in the process, Roberts wrote.

  Some cigar stores and newsstands operated punchboards, offering as their top prizes bottles of expensive scotch and rye.

  Roberts warned tourists who wanted “to bring back a wee nip of Scotch with them from Florida” to be cautious about how they concealed the booze. All trunks were searched, he said. They were more likely to get away with it if they kept the liquor in hand-carried luggage.

  But Miami’s bootleggers had become so sophisticated that they’d devised ways to move large shipments of liquor out of the city right under the noses of federal agents. They’d load a train car with booze, then buy grapefruit or tomatoes or other perishable fruit to cover the whiskey for shipment by rail to wherever it was wanted.

  Some of the smugglers owned schooners and made night runs to the Bahamas, where, because of the larger quantity they bought, they paid $18 a case for liquor.

  The easy availability of liquor in Miami was infuriating federal agents, who were determined to stop it. By early 1922 they’d been watching bootleg traffic long enough to devise a plan. On March 20, shortly after William Jennings Bryan had proposed that the United States acquire the Bahamas, federal lawmen under Colonel L. G. Nutt, the acting federal Prohibition director, executed raids. Among those hauled in by the federal dragnet was a vice president of a Miami bank, who was charged with conspiracy for allegedly agreeing to be the bagman for a bootlegging transaction. He’d apparently agreed to hold four $1,000 bills and a $50 bill until a shipment of booze was delivered.

  The raid was a brief embarrassment for a few Miami officials, but soon the liquor was flowing freely again.

  Handford Mobley didn’t look like a tough guy. In 1922, Mobley was seventeen years old, small and slender, with delicate, almost effeminate facial features.

  But Handford Mobley was John Ashley’s nephew, and he greatly admired and looked up to his uncle. And while Uncle John was in jail, Mobley made his bones, so to speak, with the family.

  Business was usually quiet in the mid-afternoons at the Bank of Stuart, so when two people walked into the lobby at that time on May 22, 1922, the only others in the bank were the cashiers.

  E. P. Hyer was in a teller’s cage filing checks when the pair walked in. He was absorbed in his task and didn’t notice them until he heard someone order him to “throw up my hands.”

  “I was too busy to pay much attention to the first order, but when someone repeated it and shoved a .45 caliber revolver in my face through the bars of the cage, I realized it was a holdup and complied,” Hyer told the Palm Beach Post.

  The young man who shoved the gun in Hyer’s face was J. Clarence Middleton. He was nattily attired in what was referred to as a Palm Beach suit—a lightweight white suit with a double-breasted jacket. With him was “a young fellow disguised as a woman wearing a heavy black veil,” Hyer said.

  The young man in drag was Handford Mobley. He also carried a revolver.

  Mobley started shoving cash into a pillowcase, then ordered cashier Percy Fuge to open the bank vault. Fuge fiddled with the vault’s locking mechanism, but instead of opening it, he activated the time lock so that the vault could not be opened.

  An unfortunate customer came into the bank to make a deposit. Apparently, the gang had finally realized that it was best to bring their own driver when they pulled a stickup, and the customer was followed into the bank by Roy Matthews, who was driving the getaway car. Matthews had blackened his face with soot or burnt cork as a disguise.

  In his haste to cram as much cash as possible into the pillowcase, Middleton spilled trays of silver coins onto the floor. He ordered the customer to pick up the silver.

  Meanwhile, Mobley was getting impatient with Fuge for not opening the vault. Brandishing his pistol, Mobley sneered, “Open that vault or I’ll blow your brains out.”

  “It’s too late now, boys,” Fuge replied. “I’ve already set the time lock on it.”

  Mobley was infuriated, but did not carry out his threat to kill Fuge. The robbers left with about $8,100. The vault had contained another $20,000.

  The robbers drove around Stuart a few times to confuse anyone trying to follow them, then crossed the St. Lucie River and headed north toward Fort Pierce.

  But Palm Beach County Sheriff Robert Baker—the former jailer who had succeeded his father as sheriff—wasn’t thrown off by the trick, and set off after them.

  Baker chased the fugitives for more than two hundred miles. The gang eluded Baker near the town of Sebring, but Baker telephoned a description of the gang to police in nearby towns.

  Mobley and Middleton checked into a hotel in Plant City, but the clerk became suspicious, and when the two went to their room, he called the cops.

  When the police arrived, the two men had left. But an alert motorcycle cop arrested the pair at a nearby train station. They each had a ticket to Savannah, Georgia.

  A man thought to have been the third robber managed to slip aboard the northbound Seaboard Air Line train. The train’s conductor told police a passenger said he’d lost his ticket and paid for his fare in cash.

  Mobley and Middleton—who told the police his name was J. Clarence Jones—had about $2,300 on them when they were captured. Mobley seemed to enjoy bantering with lawmen after he’d been arrested. He said he didn’t have the rest of the money. He told the cops an imaginative tale about being forced at gunpoint to rob the bank by two threatening accomplices they’d just met in a nearby park. Those two men had the rest of the money from the robbery, Mobley said.

  “Mobley gave every outward evidence of being very chipper and rather pleased with himself,” the Palm Beach Post reported. “He had not needed the money, he said, always had plenty of money, one or two thousand dollars, but he liked the excitement.”

  A few days later, police in Griffin, Georgia—about forty miles south of Atlanta—arrested Roy Matthews and charged him with
being one of the bank robbers.

  In October, the three were in the Palm Beach County Jail in West Palm Beach awaiting trial. But on October 25, 1922, a judge ordered their trial postponed because several witnesses for the defense weren’t available to testify. Defense attorneys said they hadn’t had enough time to summon these key witnesses, who would swear under oath that these young men hadn’t been anywhere near Stuart on the day of the robbery.

  The three accused robbers did not seem at all concerned about the trial. “They seemed altogether at ease and during the intervals in the court procedure chatted and laughed with relatives and friends,” the Palm Beach Post reported.

  The judge agreed to postpone the trial until February 1923, and signed an order allowing Mobley, Matthews, and Middleton to be temporarily transferred to a jail in Fort Lauderdale because repairs and renovations were being made to the Palm Beach County Jail.

  Mobley and Matthews would not be around for the new trial date, however. On December 14, the young daredevils forced open a skylight in the Fort Lauderdale jail. They went through the opening and, using sheets and blankets tied together as a rope, lowered themselves out of the jail and made straight for the Everglades.

  Mobley was off for more excitement.

  It was starting to seem unlikely that construction crews would ever be able to push a road through the Ashley Gang’s hideout. By early 1923, it was clear that Lee County was not going to be able to pay for its stretch of the Tamiami Trail. But Barron Collier, the young advertising millionaire from Cincinnati, was buying hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Lee County, and he was determined to make his investments pay.

  He couldn’t get a return on his huge investment, however, if no one could get to the land. And completing the Tamiami Trail would be the best way—the only way, really—to open his land for development.

  So if Lee County couldn’t pay for building the Trail, Collier would. But first he wanted his own county.

  In February 1923, Collier bought a dredge that had been used on the construction of the Florida East Coast Railway. The dredge’s one-cubic-yard bucket could move about one-quarter of a ton of dirt with every bucketful. Collier moved the dredge to the Gulf Coast to go to work on the Tamiami Trail.