by Willie Drye
Capone backed candidates who were part of Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson’s political machine. Thompson had won the mayor’s office a year earlier by campaigning on a platform that essentially promised to ignore Prohibition. Capone reportedly contributed $250,000—more than $3.4 million in twenty-first-century dollars, a staggering amount of money in 1927—to Thompson’s campaign.
The Republican primary campaign of 1928 would go down in infamy as the “Pineapple Primary.” The nickname was derived from the appearance of a US Army hand grenade, which soldiers often referred to as a “pineapple.” Capone wasn’t willing to rely on the persuasive appeal of candidates’ stump speeches to make up voters’ minds. Instead, he decided that lobbing explosives at candidates and various underworld figures would be more effective in determining the outcome of the election.
More than sixty politically related bombings happened in the months before Election Day, and there were several murders as well. Capone lost some of his aides, and he eliminated some of his enemies.
The campaign was so violent that a Chicago journalist parodied “The Star-Spangled Banner” to describe it: “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that Chicago’s still there.”
The violence leading up to the Chicago election received national attention, and Al Capone’s name was frequently mentioned in those stories.
The candidates backed by Capone won the election. With politics behind him for a while, Capone turned his mind to other projects.
As the summer of 1928 approached, George Merrick, the genius behind Coral Gables, was having both financial and health problems. He had also been elected to the town’s governing body, the Coral Gables Board of Commissioners. He had been recuperating for some time in Atlanta and was unable to attend meetings. But Merrick had tabulated more votes than any other candidate in the last election, and it was clear that Coral Gables voters wanted him on the board of commissioners.
Still, Merrick had enemies on the board, and on June 5 the other commissioners voted to expel him. The move set off a controversy in the town that Merrick built.
In early July, three creditor companies asked that the Coral Gables Corporation be placed in receivership. George Merrick owed an estimated $29 million, and he had no assets available. Only a few years earlier, Merrick had sometimes brought in that much money in just a few days.
By mid-June, Al Capone was back in Miami Beach. And he was annoyed. His toady Parker Henderson had a message for him from Dade County solicitor Robert Taylor: Stay out of Dade County.
On Monday, June 18, accompanied by three bodyguards, Capone walked into the headquarters of the Miami Police Department and insisted on meeting with the new police chief, Guy C. Reeve.
Capone made his usual show of disarming affability. But the Miami Daily News reported that the reception Capone received was quite different from his meeting a few months earlier with then-chief Leslie Quigg.
Capone told Reeve he was in town “for an indefinite stay,” and that he had no intention of leaving until he was ready.
“Coldly impersonal, Chief Reeve advised Capone that if he had returned ‘for his health,’ as reported, he probably would find Miami ‘very unhealthful,’” the Daily News reported.
“I informed Capone that he was considered an undesirable character by a majority of the citizens, and that many thought he was here to gain control of the liquor and gambling activities,” Reeve told the Daily News. “He denied this, stating that his business was in Chicago.”
Later that day, county solicitor Robert Taylor told Capone to come to his office in the Dade County Courthouse. Around 5:30 p.m., accompanied by an attorney and a bodyguard, Capone sat down with Taylor, Miami city manager Welton Snow, public safety director H. H. Arnold, police chief Reeve, and state’s attorney Vernon Hawthorne.
The meeting didn’t last long. Capone was asked to leave Miami and not come back. Capone said he hadn’t done anything wrong, didn’t intend to do anything wrong, and wasn’t going anywhere. And he’d fight all the way to the US Supreme Court before he’d allow himself to be forced out of town. Capone and his entourage left the building around six p.m.
The day after the terse meeting, the Daily News sent a reporter to try to pry a statement out of county solicitor Taylor about what he intended to do about Capone’s unwanted presence.
Taylor told the reporter he wasn’t planning on doing anything.
There followed an increasingly acrimonious conversation between Taylor and the Daily News reporter, who had to chase the county attorney up and down an elevator to talk to him.
The reporter reminded Taylor that during his recent campaign in the Democratic primary, he’d said that he was determined that Capone would not live in Miami as long as he was in office, and had written a letter to the editor of the Daily News saying Capone “cannot and will not live, operate, or make his headquarters in Dade County.”
A half-dozen times the reporter asked Taylor if he’d changed his mind about Capone’s residency in Dade County. Each time, with increasing vehemence, Taylor denied that he’d changed his mind but said he did not want to make a statement.
The following day, the Miami Daily News escalated its campaign against the gangster’s presence in the city.
“Capone in Summer ‘White House’” blared the front page of the Daily News on Wednesday, June 20. A subhead read, “Miami Is Made Gang Capital for Chicagoan.”
The Daily News also reported on an “indignation meeting” of prominent Miami residents who wanted Capone banished.
“The gangster chief, who has established himself in a walled estate at Palm Island and never leaves without a bodyguard, appeared unperturbed Wednesday by threats to move him,” the Daily News said. “He was quoted as having adopted the famous Coolidge phrase that he does not ‘choose to run,’ and to have suggested nothing less than the Supreme Court of the United States can change that decision. Apparently his chief concern was centered in the latest dispatches from Chicago, where a new outbreak of gang warfare had taken three lives.”
Miami Beach mayor J. Newton Lummus Jr. did not attend any of the meetings with Capone, nor did he attend the so-called “indignation meeting.” But he did issue a statement to the Daily News saying that he didn’t know of any legal method to force Capone to leave town.
“If Al Capone does anything to warrant his arrest, he will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Lummus said in his statement. “This matter has been brought up several times and I have given it serious consideration. I believe that if Capone attempts to establish himself in an illegal business here, or becomes a public nuisance in any way, it will be my privilege and pleasure to see that he is prosecuted. As long as he resides here as a respectable citizen, however, I don’t believe we have any right to question his constitutional right as an American citizen to live wherever he chooses.”
The Daily News kept digging. The following day, the newspaper lowered the boom on Lummus.
“Capone Deal Involves Lummus,” was the headline for the Daily News of Friday, June 22.
The story reminded readers that Lummus had asked Capone to leave town in January, and then asked the mayor why, after asking the gangster to leave, he’d sold him a house two months later.
Lummus did not answer that question.
“I don’t think Capone is half as bad as some people picture him, not half as bad as some other characters who have been at the Beach for a long time unmolested,” Lummus said. “I am acting on the advice of attorneys, and I do not see how I can legally do anything about his living at the Beach.”
Lummus noted that, unlike some other local government officials, he hadn’t bragged about what he’d do if Capone returned to Miami, and he didn’t think it was up to him to do anything.
“I’m not afraid of Capone,” Lummus said. “He’s a better citizen than a lot we have down here now.”
That same day, Parker Henderson gave up the lease to operate the Pon
ce de Leon Hotel. Knowing that he would be taking heat from local newspapers—because his participation in the complicated transaction that conveyed the Palm Island house to Al Capone’s wife would soon be discovered—Henderson decided it would be a good time to take a long vacation in the cool mountains of North Carolina. He immediately left for Asheville.
The hotel’s owners didn’t explain why he’d given up the lease. When reporters tried to contact Henderson for an explanation, friends told the newspaper that he’d left town and they didn’t know where he was or when he’d return.
On Thursday, June 28, the Miami Beach City Council called a special meeting to discuss Al Capone. It was a stormy session. The council members vented their anger at Mayor Lummus for condoning the presence of the nation’s most notorious gangster. They also passed a resolution calling on every cop in the county to arrest Capone for the slightest infraction.
While Al Capone was tussling with local leaders in Dade County, four of his most trusted associates boarded a southbound train in Chicago for a long trip. When they arrived in Miami they slipped across the causeway to Capone’s walled estate. While they were in town, two of them—dark, well-dressed, immaculately groomed young men with impeccable manners—hit the Miami Beach night-life scene with two young women they’d met when they had visited town a few months earlier. The young men, who called themselves “Mike” and “George,” had been introduced to the women by Parker Henderson. But Mike and George didn’t see Henderson on this trip.
On June 29, Capone’s four friends went to the Miami train station and bought tickets back to Chicago. As they were about to board the train, the men made an excessive show of pointing out to bystanders and the train crew that they were headed for Chicago.
Only they weren’t. The train made a scheduled stop in Atlanta, and when it left the four men weren’t aboard. With much less fanfare, they had quietly boarded a different train for a short trip to Knoxville, Tennessee.
In Knoxville, two of the men went to a Nash car dealership. They found a big, roomy, low-mileage black sedan, and one of the men, who said his name was Charles Cox, peeled off $1,035 from a roll of cash. They put a Tennessee license plate on the car and drove away.
On Sunday, July 1, around three p.m., Frank Uale was having a drink at a speakeasy in Brooklyn. Uale, known on the street as “Frankie Yale,” had once been a friend and business partner of Al Capone’s, but he and Capone had had a disagreement about how profits should be divided, and their partnership was dissolved. Even worse, Uale had formed a partnership with Capone’s enemies in New York.
Exactly one year earlier, on July 1, 1927, gunmen had tried to assassinate Frankie Yale on the street in Brooklyn, but missed. Uale’s forces retaliated by killing Capone ally James DeAmoto. Capone swore vengeance.
Uale did a good business running a speakeasy cabaret on Coney Island known as the Harvard Inn, where Al Capone got his start in the business. It was here that Capone, only eighteen at the time, had made an insulting remark to a mobster’s girlfriend and the thug had pulled a razor, sliced his face, and left the scars that prompted his nickname.
Like his former friend, Uale loved to dress well and display his success. On that Sunday, he was wearing a light-gray, summer-weight suit and a Panama hat. He also was flashing a diamond stickpin, two diamond rings, and a diamond-studded belt buckle.
Uale tried to spread his wealth around the neighborhood. He had given thousands of dollars to a Catholic church in Flatbush, and he was willing to help the less fortunate with cash. That included loans to cops.
The phone rang, and the bartender called Uale to the receiver. Whatever he heard sent him running to his car. A few minutes later, he was cruising slowly down Forty-Fourth Street, a residential street in Brooklyn, in his Lincoln.
A big, black Nash sedan pulled in behind Uale’s Lincoln. For a few moments, the Nash followed at a distance of about 150 feet. Then the driver of the Nash gunned the engine, and the big car overtook Uale.
Suddenly gunfire erupted from the Nash, shattering the quiet of the Sunday afternoon. The rear window of Uale’s Lincoln exploded. He pushed the accelerator to the floor, trying to escape, but the Nash had drawn abreast of him and was forcing him toward the curb. And guns were blazing. Bullets narrowly missed a seven-year-old girl who was sitting in her father’s car parked at the curb.
But most of the bullets found their mark, and Uale was dead before his car stopped rolling. It lurched onto the sidewalk. Terrified mothers snatched their children from its path as it pushed through a hedge and slammed into the stone steps of an apartment building at 923 Forty-Fourth Street.
The big black Nash sped away and disappeared. Police found it the next day. The killers hadn’t driven far, abandoning the car near the Green-Wood Cemetery, only a few blocks from where Uale was killed.
The cops found a few clues in the car. One of the most ominous was a Thompson submachine gun. It was the first time the weapon had been used in a gangland assassination in New York. At that time, there was only one place where this expensive, rapid-fire weapon was used by gangsters—Chicago.
They also found a pistol. It was less exotic than the tommy gun, but it would reveal even more about who was behind Uale’s murder.
Slowly, New York cops began to piece together the plot to kill Frankie Yale.
Meanwhile, the gang war continued. On July 4, the body of a bookie was found in a sand pit in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. His head had nearly been blown off by gunfire. Police suspected he’d been shot with a Thompson.
Two days later, the Miami Daily News reported that Uale had been laid to rest in a $15,000 coffin trimmed with silver, and that New York gunmen might be coming to Miami to avenge his death.
On July 8, New York police announced that they’d linked the Uale murder to Al Capone. The New York Times reported that Frankie Yale’s death was part of Capone’s plot to create an “alcohol empire” that stretched from New York to Chicago and from Canada to Florida.
It turned out that Capone had been quite busy when he left Miami earlier in the year.
“His campaign called for the smuggling of liquors of all varieties, not only through New York, but through Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans,” the Times said.
After printing the stories linking Capone to Uale’s death and explaining his plans for a massive expansion of his bootlegging operation, the newspapers became quiet for a few days. But police in Miami and New York were very busy.
A week or so later, Parker Henderson boarded a train in Asheville. Police in Miami wanted to talk to him.
It’s a long train ride from the mountains of western North Carolina to the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. Henderson had a lot of time to stare out a window and think about what he was going to tell the cops when he got to Miami.
Henderson met first with Miami police chief Guy Reeve, and then with New York police detective Tom Daly and Dade County solicitor Robert Taylor. At first, Henderson said he didn’t know anything about Uale’s death or whether Al Capone was involved in some way. But New York police had traced one of the pistols found in the big black Nash to Miami. It was unquestionably one of the guns that Henderson had bought for Capone six months earlier.
Finally, Henderson signed an affidavit saying that he had bought the gun and delivered it to Capone’s hotel room. Detective Daly asked him to come to New York to talk to police there. Henderson didn’t like that suggestion, but he talked it over with some friends and agreed to do it.
On Saturday, July 29, Henderson boarded a train in Miami, bound for New York. By this time, his name had been in newspapers across the country linking him to Al Capone and one of the weapons used to kill Frank Uale. So Henderson had a traveling companion—Miami police chief Guy Reeve.
Henderson stayed out of sight between meetings with police and the Kings County District Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. On August 7, he appeared before a grand jury in Brooklyn. The jurors had already heard testimony from the two young women—des
cribed as “cabaret performers” in newspapers—that Henderson had introduced to “George” and “Mike” in Miami.
Henderson explained his relationship with Al Capone for the jurors. He admitted that he’d bought a dozen guns for Capone as a favor. He hadn’t asked Capone why he wanted the guns.
The grand jury and district attorney were satisfied with Henderson’s story. He would not have to testify before the grand jury again, nor would he be charged with anything. He was free to return to Miami.
Late in the evening of August 7, Miami police chief Reeve and a greatly relieved Parker Henderson got aboard the southbound Havana Special at Pennsylvania Station. As the train chugged southward through the Carolinas and into Georgia, it ran into heavy rains and gusting winds.
The 1928 hurricane season had been quiet through July. But on August 3, a tropical storm formed at the northeast edge of the Caribbean Sea. It didn’t amount to much as it moved northwestward across the Bahamas, but as it was about to leave the islands, it suddenly intensified. As it neared landfall, its strongest winds were blowing at about 105 miles an hour.
The storm was coming ashore as the train carrying Henderson and Reeve crossed into Florida. The train had to stop several times and wait for workers to remove downed trees and debris from the tracks. It rolled into Miami about three hours late.
The storm’s eye made landfall just before dawn between Fort Pierce and Vero Beach. Reporter Cecil Warren of the Miami Daily News said at least two-thirds of the buildings in Fort Pierce had their roofs ripped off. The hurricane then tore into the ripening citrus groves of the famous Indian River region. No fatalities were reported, however.
But the hurricane of August 8, 1928, was just a warm-up. The worst—far worse—was yet to come.