by Willie Drye
Florida’s tourism boosters made a selling point of the fact that the state’s law enforcement officials—especially in Miami—didn’t trouble themselves too much with enforcing Prohibition. That was the Coast Guard’s worry. Coast Guard patrol boats made occasional arrests on the high seas, and occasionally a bootlegger trying to come ashore up the coast from Miami was unlucky enough to be spotted by a local sheriff who was eyeing the next election. And there had been the Coast Guard’s spectacular sundown shoot-out with bootlegger Red Shannon during a Flamingo Hotel tea dance two years earlier.
But it was obvious that bootleggers making runs from the Bahamas to Florida almost always got through.
Capone’s presence in Miami marked a turning point in South Florida’s criminal element and was a milestone in its growth and the public image it was projecting. In the early days of the wild real estate speculation and remarkable population growth, when an unprecedented amount of money was flowing into South Florida, the criminals—such as the ill-fated Ashley Gang—were home-grown crackers who used their resourcefulness, skills, and knowledge of the local terrain to outwit and outrun local cops.
Those criminals were daring opportunists who often acted on the spur of the moment, robbing a bank, running a still, and selling moonshine whiskey, or hijacking a bootlegger on the high seas making a run from the Bahamas back to Florida. When the cops chased them, they melted into the Everglades.
And while their crimes netted them impressive profits by the standards of the day, they were pickpockets compared to Al Capone and his ruthless, highly organized, and efficient criminal machine. Miami police undoubtedly realized that when Al Capone showed up, their days of chasing clever moonshiners and rowdy stickup artists were over. Now they were facing a shrewd, sophisticated, and tough opponent who had more resources, more weapons, and more manpower at his command than they could ever squeeze out of a harried city council always worried about property tax rates and the next election. And the new criminal also was represented by skillful, well-paid attorneys.
Despite Miami’s pride in its reputation as a city untroubled by the annoying rules that restricted the rest of the country, much of Miami’s officialdom was piqued that Al Capone was enjoying their wonderful winter weather. And Parker Henderson Jr., educated in old-fashioned morals and manners at Georgia Military Academy, was enthralled by the dapper gangster’s blend of magnetic personal charm and ice-cold calculation. He loved being on the periphery of Capone’s dark, violent world and perhaps being allowed to call Capone by the nickname “Snorky,” a reference to his stylish, expensive wardrobe and a privilege reserved for only his closest friends. Since Capone wanted to maintain a low profile in Miami, Henderson was glad to help him avoid public scrutiny by doing small favors, such as running errands and some occasional shopping.
When Capone’s associates in Chicago wired money to him, Henderson went to the Western Union office in Miami Beach. There, he would accept a money transfer for “Albert Costa,” disguising his handwriting to sign for the telegram.
Henderson made a lot of trips to the Western Union office in the winter of 1927–28. During Capone’s six-month stay, he received wire transfers from Chicago totaling $73,800, or just under $1 million in twenty-first-century dollars. Henderson duly collected Capone’s walking-around money and delivered it to him.
Around mid-January, Capone called Henderson to his room and asked him to do a favor. He handed him a wad of cash and asked him to buy a dozen guns and bring them to his room. Henderson dutifully trotted off to a hardware store, bought a dozen pistols, and brought them back to Capone’s room. But the room was empty.
Henderson put the guns on the bed and left. When he checked back a little later, the guns were gone. Concerned, he mentioned it to Capone later, but Capone told him not to worry about it.
Capone’s presence in the Ponce de Leon turned into a financial bonanza for Henderson and his staff. Every night, Capone would order the hotel dining room to prepare enough food for a banquet.
“He would order food for about fifty people, and probably there would be only about seven or eight at the table,” Henderson said later. “When we would present the check, Capone would refuse to pay it unless we doubled it. When we would abide by his wishes, he would pull out a large bill and the waiters would keep the change.”
The dining room had been losing money until Capone moved in. During his stay, it became highly profitable.
There were other benefits for Henderson. The New York Times later noted that Henderson had “a liking for the company of celebrities and . . . was keen for racing or other sports with a percentage of uncertainty in them.” His new friendship with Capone gave him plenty of opportunities to indulge in those interests.
Capone showed his appreciation for Henderson’s friendship with lavish presents, including a diamond-studded belt buckle.
Henderson was also occasionally called upon to host Capone’s friends from Chicago and show them the town.
Around the same time of Capone’s lavish spending at the Ponce de Leon, the US Coast Guard began assembling patrol craft at nearby Fort Lauderdale and tightened its blockade of bootleggers trying to slip into Miami with whiskey from the Bahamas. The enforcement was so effective that no booze entered Miami during the week of January 9 through January 13, and prices of bootlegged whiskey skyrocketed.
“Since the first patrol craft of the coast guard forces departed from the concentration base at Fort Lauderdale for duty along the coast, no rum runners have been able to slip by the line of the dry navy, according to information,” the Miami Daily News reported. “Six liquor boats were known to have started away from Bimini in the Bahamas Tuesday night with cargoes for delivery in and around Biscayne Bay. Five of those craft are said to have been captured.”
But the crackdown had nothing to do with any renewed, long-term commitment to stopping the flow of alcohol into Miami. The Coast Guard was cracking the whip because President Calvin Coolidge’s train was going to stop in Miami for an hour or so on Friday, January 14. The president was en route to Key West, where he would board a US warship to sail to Cuba for the Pan-American Conference in Havana. The Coast Guard didn’t want any rumrunners dashing across Biscayne Bay while the president of the United States was watching.
About one hundred thousand spectators had gathered along the eight-mile route followed by Coolidge’s motorcade. For a taciturn man sometimes called “Silent Cal,” Coolidge was effusive in his praise of Miami.
A reporter duly jotted down the president’s comments as Coolidge noted that Miami’s skyline “greatly resembles the Battery of New York.” The president was impressed by the city’s many fine hotels, and amazed that the luxuriant foliage in Bayfront Park had been grown in less than eighteen months since the 1926 hurricane had denuded the park. He also commented on the many steamships and speedboats in Biscayne Bay.
“And Miami is only thirty-one years old!” he exclaimed near the end of his brief tour. “I understand why you call it the ‘Magic City.’ I cannot imagine a more beautiful climate than we have enjoyed this afternoon.”
Not long after Coolidge’s train headed south for Key West, the bootleggers’ business was back to normal.
On January 17, Al Capone moved from the Ponce de Leon Hotel to a rented villa on North Pine Tree Drive in Miami Beach. About that same time, Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane was on an eastbound train that had just left Chicago. Brisbane had learned of the gangland war in that city.
As the train rattled through rain near Elkhart, Indiana, Brisbane worked on his “Today” column.
“This morning attention turns to the Chicago gangster war, going on while ‘Scarface Al’ Capone is resting in Florida,” Brisbane wrote.
Brisbane told the story of Harry Fuller, a foolish young man who tried to take advantage of Capone’s absence by organizing a robbery of one of Capone’s trucks carrying illegal booze. Capone’s crew retaliated by kidnapping and killing Fuller and two of his assistants.
The grim story of gangland killings was seen by Brisbane’s readers—estimated to be at least twenty million—on January 19, 1928. Those same readers also learned that the powerful man heading the crime syndicate that committed those murders was vacationing in Florida.
Miami-area residents and leaders—at least some of them—were aghast that, thanks to Brisbane, their city was seen as harboring the nation’s most notorious criminal. It was one thing to have Capone’s name mentioned occasionally in local newspapers. It was quite another thing when the man considered by many to be the leading journalist of that era mentioned Florida, Chicago gangland violence, and Al Capone in the same sentence.
Two days after Brisbane’s column, J. Newton Lummus Jr., the real estate agent who was now mayor of Miami Beach, and city manager C. A. Renshaw met with Capone at city hall to discuss how Capone’s presence was harming the public image of their fair city.
After the brief meeting, Capone brushed past reporters, went straight to his car, and left. But His Honor, the mayor, had a few words for the scribes.
“Mr. Capone was one of the fairest men I have ever been in conference with,” Lummus said. “He was not ordered to leave Miami Beach, but after our conference we decided it would be to the best interests of all concerned if he left.”
The following day, Capone told reporters that he would indeed leave Miami Beach, but he didn’t say where he intended to go. A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department said the cops in his city were very concerned about how the bitter Chicago winter might affect Capone’s “frail health,” and they hoped that, for his own good, he would stay in the warm, sunny South.
Capone left town briefly. A few days later, Capone and his brother Ralph—also known as “Bottles”—were registered at a hotel in New Orleans under the names of James Brown and Albert Ross. But police in the Crescent City got a tip about the real identities of Brown and Ross and arrested the brothers “under suspicion of being dangerous characters.”
They were kept in custody briefly, then New Orleans police released them and told them to move on.
By early March, Al Capone was back in Florida. This time he had no intention of leaving, and he launched a new publicity campaign to try to become a part of the community.
Capone was fond of telling people that he’d served in the US Army in World War I and that the scar on his left cheek was from an injury he’d sustained fighting the Germans in France. There’s no record of Capone serving in the military, but he tried to join the Coral Gables post of the American Legion anyway, even though military service is a requirement for membership. Legion officials dutifully sent a letter to Chicago police asking if Capone had ever been convicted of a felony, which would disqualify him from joining. On March 8, newspapers around the nation reported that Chicago police lieutenant William Rohan told the Coral Gables Legionnaires that Capone had been arrested many times, but had never been convicted of anything.
Miami Beach’s most infamous resident also was maneuvering behind the scenes to buy a house there. And his eager gopher, Parker Henderson, was helping him conduct the purchase in such a way as to keep the gangster’s name off public records.
On March 27, James and Modesta Popham sold their 10,000-square-foot waterfront mansion on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay to Henderson for $40,000—around $550,000 in twenty-first-century dollars. The transaction took place in the office of the real estate firm of Lummus & Young, and the deed transfer was witnessed by one of the firm’s partners, Miami Beach mayor J. Newton Lummus Jr., who had asked Capone to leave town only two months earlier.
Henderson, in turn, quietly sold the property to Mae Capone, Al’s wife. The intricate maneuvering kept the transaction out of the newspapers—for a few months, at least.
Soon I’m gonna leave all my cares behind
For I’ve made, yes, I’ve made up my mind
Soon I’ll wander down the Tamiami Trail
Where it leads down to the sea.
By the spring of 1928, Gene Austin’s recording of the pop song “Tamiami Trail,” written by Cliff Friend and Joseph Santly, had been in music stores for almost two years, and so the road had achieved a measure of fame well before it opened.
With the opening of the Trail only days away, the Reo Motor Car Company of Lansing, Michigan, saw an opportunity to link the name of one of its most popular automobiles with the event.
The Reo Wolverine was advertised as “A Car for the Ends of the Roads.” What better way to demonstrate that advertising slogan than for a Wolverine to be the first passenger car to drive through the Everglades—the wild, mysterious Everglades—on the Tamiami Trail.
As the manufacturers of the Wolverine hoped, the stunt got into the newspapers.
The big sedan made the trip with only a few scratches and a dent from hitting a rock, the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, reported on April 1, 1928.
“At times, large boulders that blocked progress had to be removed, and many other obstacles overcome, but the Wolverine fought its way through, much after the manner of the wolverine of the woods from which the Reo Wolverine gets its name—the strongest and most fearless animal of its size known to man,” said the Capital Times news story, which probably was written by an advertising agency.
Not only did the publicity gimmick get the name of the Wolverine into the public’s consciousness, but it also was a reminder that the Tamiami Trail was about to open.
Edwin Menninger described the Trail as “one of the world’s most notable achievements.” He also was bullishly optimistic about Florida’s future, and said the downturn of real estate prices during the past two years was merely a “readjustment period.”
“Indications are not wanting that Florida is to have an unusually good summer,” he wrote in the South Florida Developer on April 13. “All in all, Florida’s outlook for the coming summer is very bright. And this will be only the beginning of a great, new outlook of prosperity which will presage not only a return to normalcy, but better times than Florida has ever yet enjoyed.”
Predictions that the opening of the Tamiami Trail would mark the return of good times for Florida had spread beyond the state.
“This magnificent Tamiami Trail will open millions of acres of land to cultivation and settlement,” said an editorial in the San Antonio Light. “It will make it easy for children to reach their schools. It will provide fertile acres for good workers. And, you may be sure, it will not be made a pretext for more reckless real estate booming and misrepresentation.”
On April 24, 1928, Governor John Martin—who was campaigning for the June Democratic primary nomination for one of Florida’s seats in the US Senate—looked out over a crowd of thousands gathered in Tampa and proclaimed that the Tamiami Trail was open to traffic.
Florida newspapers were ecstatic. The Fort Myers Tropical News said the Trail was “the great highway of our dreams,” and the Sarasota Herald said the opening of the Trail marked the dawn of “a new era of prosperity for the west coast of Florida.
“The tremendous influx of visitors, who will travel the route, will stimulate the building of fine hotels on the west coast, particularly in view of the fact that the west coast has bathing beaches more superior to those of the east coast and enjoys a more salubrious climate,” the Herald said.
Meanwhile, a caravan that eventually would include more than one thousand cars assembled in Lake City, about 170 miles north of Tampa. The caravan, carrying thousands of people, would drive to Tampa, join others, and make the 274-mile trek over the Tamiami Trail from Tampa to Miami.
The caravan reached Fort Myers on the evening of April 25. The opening of the Trail was such a momentous event that even the famously busy Thomas Edison opened the grounds of his winter home in Fort Myers to the public. But not his lab. Visitors were warned in advance that the brilliant inventor wouldn’t have time to chat.
From Fort Myers, the procession passed through Naples and entered the newest segment of the road that pierced the heart of the Everglades.
> Years later author Florence Fritz described the scene as the caravan of noisy revelers penetrated the unique solemnity of the Everglades.
“Approaching autos caused countless flocks of egrets, wood ibis, blue herons, and gray herons to rise in clouds and settle down again as the flag-flying cortege passed on through the Everglades for the first time in history,” Fritz wrote.
From that moment forward, the perception of the Everglades was forever changed.
“No longer was it the unconquerable domain of blistering sun and blood-thirsty mosquitoes,” Jeffrey Kahn wrote for the Palm Beach Post in 1981. “It had become Florida real estate.”
Bob DeGross, chief of interpretation and public affairs for the Big Cypress National Preserve near Miami, said the Tamiami Trail was “an amazing engineering feat” that changed South Florida forever.
“The Tamiami Trail and the Lincoln Highway opened up the whole country to the average person,” DeGross said. “Today we think nothing of doing a long road trip, but back then it was a life-changing experience.”
The day after the Trail opened, as if on cue from a natural force furious at the violation of the Glades, an unusually violent thunderstorm tore across the state from St. Augustine to Bartow, killing four people, drenching the area with rain, and ripping off roofs with winds approaching hurricane force.
Al Capone returned to Chicago while Parker Henderson quietly dealt with the negotiations and paperwork needed to buy the house on Palm Island. Capone had important business to attend to in the Windy City. It was election season, and Capone had a slate of candidates that he was determined would win. He needed to be at his battle station while the campaign was waged.
And the Chicago Republican primary campaign of 1928 would be a battle in the truest sense of the word.
The campaign leading up to election day on April 10, 1928, included the usual pledges from candidates to throw out the incompetent incumbents and set the city onto a new course of prosperity for all. But the outcome of the election also would determine how strictly Prohibition laws would be enforced.