by Willie Drye
Three banks in Palm Beach County had failed in June 1926, the Times reported. The continued slump in real estate, an upheaval in local politics, and the recent failure of another bank “have created a feeling of unrest and lack of confidence resulting in persistent and continual withdrawals on the part of depositors,” the Times said.
The First American Bank and Trust Company, one of the banks teetering on the brink of failure in March 1927, had been hemorrhaging deposits, losing more than $10.5 million in withdrawals in less than a year.
“Consistent withdrawals averaging $1 million a month brought deposits in The First American Bank and Trust Company from $13.5 million down to less than $3 million in ten months’ time and was responsible for its failure to open this morning,” the Times reported.
The slumping real estate market also caused problems for smaller investors, including a star Major League baseball player.
On March 16 at the Boston Braves’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, first baseman Jacques Fournier—who had a reputation for being as quick with his fists as he was with his bat—punched out a man who tried to talk to him after an exhibition game against the New York Giants. Unfortunately for Fournier, the man he clipped on the jaw was a deputy sheriff trying to serve him with a court summons.
“The version I got was that [the man] didn’t announce himself nor his intentions but proceeded to get in an argument with Fournier,” Braves manager Dave Bancroft told reporters. “My first baseman resented his manner and punched him.”
Fournier was being sued for $5,000 by a real estate firm in Sarasota. Fournier had put down a binder on some real estate in Sarasota, Bancroft said. “Later he decided to call the deal off, and my understanding is that both parties agreed,” he said. “I suppose the other party figured he could hold him to the contract.”
“Fournier did not know he was socking an officer, and furthermore, he thought the whole matter was settled long ago,” Bancroft said. “A hearing on the charges has been set for next week in Sarasota, but we hope to fix it up before that.”
Bancroft kept his slugger out of jail by posting a $1,000 bond and guaranteeing that Fournier would show up in court.
One Florida commodity whose demand and prices had not been affected by the real estate downturn was whiskey. Fierce—and sometimes deadly—battles still were being fought between bootleggers and the Coast Guard off the Florida coast.
On August 7, 1927, Horace Alderman and his partner Robert Weech took on a load of booze at Bimini, the westernmost island of the Bahamas, and headed back to Florida in broad daylight. They were spotted by a Coast Guard patrol about thirty-four miles off Fort Lauderdale. The two bootleggers were captured, but three Coast Guard crewmen were killed in a struggle with Alderman.
Alderman would be convicted of murder and, in keeping with the maritime tradition of execution, hanged, but the jury that convicted him also rebuked the Coast Guard for the tactics it was using against rumrunners.
Florida boosters, including Edwin Menninger, were looking for ways to reassure themselves about their stumbling economy. In late September 1927, Menninger met briefly with Solomon Davies Warfield in New York, and on October 3 he had a longer meeting with Warfield in Baltimore. Warfield told Menninger he’d try to stop by Stuart during a trip to Florida he’d planned for mid-October.
But Warfield had to cancel his trip. He was feeling a lot of discomfort because of a double hernia, and on October 12 he was admitted to Union Hospital in Baltimore for surgery.
On October 21, while Warfield was still in the hospital, Menninger’s South Florida Developer reported that the Seaboard Air Line Railroad’s plans were going to be a major boost to Martin County and Florida. Warfield’s railroad had moved its Florida headquarters from West Palm Beach to Indiantown. The company also transferred its maintenance and repair crews from Wildwood to Indiantown.
The Developer said that Eugene Kifer, vice president of the Land Company of Florida and a land agent for Seaboard, told an audience in nearby West Palm Beach that Stuart and other cities would “reap great benefits from the development of Indiantown and its farm lands.”
Kifer said that Seaboard had already spent about $1.9 million—more than $25 million in twenty-first-century dollars—on its plans for Indiantown, and they were just getting started. Seaboard’s work in and around Indiantown already had prompted construction of housing, a school, and a hotel, the Developer said.
Seaboard also sent agents to large cities in the Northeast and Midwest to speak to audiences about the company’s plans for Florida, and those lectures had prompted hundreds of people to move to Indiantown, Kifer said. The company would spend $500,000—about $6.6 million today—advertising its efforts in a national advertising campaign, he said.
“Mr. Kifer urged the abandonment of any doubt as to the successful future of the state,” the Developer said.
Only a week after the Developer’s confident prediction of prosperity in Martin County and Florida, however, came stunning news. Solomon Davies Warfield was dead.
Warfield’s doctor told the New York Times that Warfield’s recovery from hernia surgery had been “uneventful,” and that around 6:30 p.m. on October 24, he’d been sitting up in bed, chatting with a nurse and a vice president of Seaboard.
Suddenly, Warfield lost consciousness. Physicians rushed to his bedside, but there was nothing they could do. A blood clot had formed in Warfield’s heart, and he was dead.
Edwin Menninger looked for optimism in the face of what he realized could be a disaster for Martin County.
“Stuart as a community will feel this blow, coming as it does when it was known to be Mr. Warfield’s policy to extend the Seaboard into this city,” Menninger wrote on the South Florida Developer’s editorial page on October 28. “But doubtless the policies already outlined will be carried out and other men will be raised up to continue the great work of this mastermind in railroad building.”
The Seaboard Air Line Railroad had sunk too much money into its plans for Florida and Martin County to walk away after Warfield’s death, Menninger wrote.
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Brown in Paradise
SUNSETS ARE ROUTINELY SPECTACULAR IN THE EVERGLADES.
As the sun descends, its slanting rays splash colors across the western horizon that span the visible spectrum, from reds and yellows and oranges and pinks nearest the horizon to greens and shades of blue higher in the sky. The departing sun’s rays also touch the clouds, lighting their undersides with flaming reds.
There’s usually an expanse of water somewhere that reflects the sky, so that heaven and Earth become, for a few minutes, a riot of color.
Maybe the Everglades sunset lifted the spirits of the Boston Braves on March 27, 1928. The Braves had absorbed an 11–2 drubbing from the Philadelphia Athletics in a spring-training exhibition game in Fort Myers. After the game, the Braves players boarded a bus for a historic trip to Miami, where they would play an exhibition game the following day against the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Their bus would be one of the first vehicles to make the trip over the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades from Florida’s Gulf Coast to its Atlantic coast. The general public wouldn’t be able to use the Trail until late April, so the Braves’ management had to get special permission.
Although the Tamiami Trail supposedly was going to open in less than a month, it was far from completed. In some places, large boulders still lay on the road. Potholes and rough spots were a problem. Still, the Braves arrived in Miami late that night and squared off against the Dodgers at three p.m. the following day at Miami’s Tatum Field.
The Boston-Brooklyn matchup was only an exhibition game, but Miami’s boosters were confident that a large crowd at the ballpark might prompt the Braves and the Dodgers to move their spring-training camp from Florida’s west coast to Miami or a nearby city on the peninsula’s east coast.
“The attendance at the exhibition games is a big item toward defraying the expenses, and the ball cl
ub owners realize that in the well-populated east coast the crowds will be better, because of the fact that this coast is a drawing card for the sporting element of the nation,” the Miami Daily News said on the day of the game. “It is here that the vacationists flock, and it is here that the big leaguers receive the proper attention from the sporting element.”
Brooklyn won the game, 9–0, but intermittent rain held down attendance.
Despite the untimely death of Solomon Davies Warfield a few months earlier, Edwin Menninger was still bullish on Florida’s future. Menninger and many other Florida boosters were convinced that the good times would return when the Tamiami Trail opened.
“If Adam and Eve could have seen Florida, they might not have mourned the loss of Eden,” Menninger wrote in the January 13, 1928, edition of the South Florida Developer.
Menninger said he’d been registering at a hotel in Philadelphia recently when a woman standing near him overheard that he was from Florida. “Oh, I am so sorry for you folks down there in Florida,” the woman said to him. “You are having such a hard time. People are selling their automobiles to get money to come back north.”
Menninger told the woman he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Florida people are not so ‘hard up’ as many northern people seem to think they are,” he wrote in the Developer. “There has been a depression, to be sure, but not anything like the extent that is imagined over the country.”
Menninger said Florida residents probably lived better than residents of any other state. “This is a wonderfully good country for moneymaking—more so than outsiders yet realize—and the majority of the people here are accustomed to good incomes,” he wrote. “What would be called hard times here would be called good times in some other sections of the country.”
And better times were coming for Stuart, Martin County, and Florida. Menninger also reported that the Brown-Cummer Company, a bond house in Wichita, Kansas, had agreed to buy $1 million worth of bonds from the St. Lucie Inlet Commission to pay for deepening the channel of the St. Lucie Inlet. Deepening the channel to allow oceangoing ships would be a major step in Stuart’s ambitions to surpass Miami and Savannah as a deepwater port. The contract for the work was awarded to United Dredging Company of New York City in January 1928. Plans called for the channel to be two hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep.
But bad news came on the heels of the announcement about the dredging work. The great industrial city in western Martin County would not happen. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad closed its offices and railroad shops in Indiantown on February 3 and moved its operations to Tampa.
Still, the 1927–28 tourist season was getting off to a roaring start. The Stuart Daily News reported on January 5, 1928, that about ninety thousand visitors had entered Florida since November, and two months later Edwin Menninger reported in the South Florida Developer that a tourist camp in Stuart was doing a booming business. “There are more tourists in Stuart this winter than ever before,” he noted.
Shrewd observers outside Florida also thought they perceived a return to better times.
In January 1928, humorist Will Rogers said he’d been avoiding jokes at Florida’s expense for more than two years because of the state’s difficulties.
“But I have just seen the state and noticed conditions down here now, and my sympathy is getting back to the old envy again,” he wrote in his nationally syndicated column. “With this climate Florida needs the sympathy of no one, and the jokes of no one can hurt it.”
Those improving conditions had drawn a shady but charismatic winter visitor to Miami, and he was becoming pals with the son of a former mayor of Miami. Their friendship would cause quite a stir in the city during the 1927–28 season.
Parker Henderson, who was mayor of Miami in 1917, probably had high hopes for his teenage son’s future when he enrolled young Parker Jr. at Georgia Military Academy. The school advertised itself as “The South’s Most Splendidly Equipped Prep School” where “careful, individual attention is given to each student.”
The school, in the Blue Ridge foothills just outside Atlanta, boasted that it could prepare young men for careers in business, engineering, and other professions. And it offered “an ideal social and moral atmosphere” to shape the character of its students.
But a few years after Parker Henderson Jr. finished his studies, there were indications that maybe he hadn’t fully absorbed the benefits of the academy’s salubrious environment.
In August 1927, shortly after his father’s death, the junior Henderson, at the age of twenty-four, signed a five-year lease to operate the Ponce de Leon Hotel in downtown Miami.
Henderson told the Miami Daily News that the hotel would open under his management in time for the 1927–28 tourist season, and that he intended to run a “first-class commercial house.”
Henderson pledged “not to rob the public.” But he said nothing about not deceiving them.
Not long after Henderson took over management of the Ponce de Leon, a businessman who’d apparently done very well selling secondhand furniture came to him to negotiate a deal for renting a suite of rooms on the top floor of the hotel. Henderson was fascinated by the swarthy, affable tenant who loved wearing colorful suits and was known to hand out $100 bills like they were after-dinner mints.
When he first arrived in Miami, the so-called furniture dealer had said his name was Al Brown, but by January 1928 he’d decided to drop the alias. His name was Al Capone, known in some circles as “Scarface,” and his business was, as he put it, providing the public with what it wanted.
What the public wanted—what they still wanted after eight years of Prohibition—was booze, and lots of it. Capone provided it for them, and he was rewarded handsomely. In 1928 he was making money like he had a license to print it.
Only a handful of people in the United States could dole out cash like Capone. His income in 1927 alone has been estimated at $105 million—nearly $1.4 billion in twenty-first-century dollars. He did have a sizable overhead—everyone from truck drivers and warehouse workers to cops and judges were on his payroll—but his income was, after all, tax-free.
Capone boldly dropped his alias on the morning of January 10. Accompanied by a friend that the Miami Daily News couldn’t or wouldn’t identify, Capone walked into the lobby of the Miami Police Department and asked to see police chief Leslie Quigg. After he was shown into Quigg’s office, word raced around the neighborhood that Al Capone was having a sit-down with the cops. When Capone came out of Quigg’s office a few minutes later, he was surrounded by reporters and police officers.
Capone “stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his neatly creased blue serge trousers and beamed affectionately at the welcoming committee of blue-coats and newspapermen,” the Daily News reported. He was at his genial best as he talked to the crowd.
He sidestepped questions about whether he’d left Chicago because gangland warfare had erupted in that city. “I’m down here for a rest and here I’m going to stay,” he said.
He was asked about a recent quick trip to—and hasty exit from—Los Angeles.
“When I got in, a bunch of the boys met me at the train,” Capone said. “Some of them must have had guns on their hips and the police didn’t like that, so they thought I was a bad moral influence or something. They had me all wrong there, and I’m glad to say my reception here has been quite different.”
Noting that Miami’s climate was “more healthful than Chicago’s and warmer than California,” Capone said he’d sought a meeting with Quigg to assure the city’s top cop that he was in town only for a vacation and had no intention of setting up shop.
He also threw a bouquet to the city’s cash-starved real estate brokers.
“I like Miami so well that I’m going to vacation here all winter,” Capone said. “In fact, I expect my wife, mother, and child in on the train this afternoon, and we plan to buy a home either in Coral Gables or Miami Beach.”
Capone had been study
ing the Florida real estate market, and he let it be known that he intended to make a few investments.
“I believe now is the time to buy down here, and I’m thinking of going into the market rather heavily,” he said. “I don’t believe there will be any sensational climb in values for five years, but I’m contented to wait that long.”
Police chief Quigg told reporters he saw no reason why Capone should not be treated the same as any other winter visitor, the Daily News said.
Eyeing the large crowd that had gathered outside the police station, Capone and his friend slipped quietly out a side door and left.
Capone made quite an impression on Miami. But his presence there stirred deeply mixed feelings among the city’s business and tourism boosters.
His name had become a household word, and the fact that a man as famous as Al Capone was spending the winter in Miami would be an indicator that maybe things were getting a little better in Florida. And his declaration that he intended to invest heavily in Florida real estate undoubtedly sent a surge of joy through some of the city’s businessmen.
But Capone also linked Miami with Chicago’s notorious organized crime syndicate. In 1928, Chicago’s gangsters—including those who worked for Capone—were getting mentioned in newspapers quite often because the lives of so many of them were being suddenly and violently ended in gangland warfare. And when the newspapers wrote about the violence in Chicago, they inevitably noted that Capone had left the city and was spending the winter in Miami.
To some readers, that may have added to Miami’s mystique. To others, it only confirmed their conviction that Miami was the capital of sin and corruption.
There was, of course, obvious irony and no small amount of hypocrisy in Miami’s indignity over Capone’s winter residence. He was, hands down, the nation’s most famous bootlegger. He had made his immense wealth by flaunting laws and tapping into the bottomless market for booze created by Prohibition.