Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Charles could make out other men in the shadows, including Reuben Hatcher, the fifty-three-year-old jailer with a big ring of cell keys, but still he was shocked when they grabbed his arms and dragged him down to the basement. The room was clammy, with exposed water pipes and a dirt floor. One of the men handcuffed him to an overhead pipe so that his feet just barely touched the ground. Charles, still shirtless, hung from the pipe as Deputy Campbell loosened the sixteen-year-old’s pants and pulled them, along with his undershorts, to the floor.

  Charles looked Deputy Campbell in the eyes, and he knew how and where the two men in the bullpen had been beaten swollen and bloody. Campbell picked up what looked to be a piece of rubber hose about a foot and a half long; he inserted his meaty hand through a cord on one end so that it wouldn’t slip from his grasp. Without saying a word, the deputy started whipping the boy hard across the chest. After three or four blows, Campbell asked again if Charles was lying. “Were you one of the boys?” he snarled.

  “No,” Charles answered, just as Deputy James Yates stepped out from behind Campbell and reared back with another piece of leaded hose. He slashed across the boy’s pelvis. Then twice; and again. Charles could see that Yates was “trying to hit me in my privates,” and he’d tried to keep his legs crossed, but when Campbell set to whipping the hose across his arms and face, the boy, stunned, let his legs drop, giving Yates some clean shots to his groin.

  “Are you one of the boys that raped the woman?” Campbell asked repeatedly, each time punctuating the question with another swing of the hose.

  “No!” Charles screamed.

  Blood began to pour from Charles’s nose and mouth. He felt his eye swelling shut. He felt something sharp stinging the soles of his feet; Yates had smashed a Coca-Cola bottle and scattered the broken glass in the dirt beneath the boy’s bare feet. The stocky deputy was doing most of the questioning, except for a few interjections from Yates when Campbell paused between blows, catching his breath. Behind the two deputies stood a third man, Charles noticed; he seemed to be “directing the traffic.”

  The interrogation of Charles Greenlee continued for about forty-five minutes, with the teen slipping in and out of consciousness. Campbell, his voice rising as the force of his blows increased, was unrelenting. “Did you rape that woman?” he snapped at the beaten boy yet again.

  There was only one way to stop it: “Yeah,” Charles answered.

  The men behind him stirred and mumbled. Deputy Campbell let his arms drop slowly to his sides. Without blows, he asked a few more questions: Was he with those other boys? Did they rob that man? Did they pull a gun on the girl?

  “Yes,” Charles said. To all of it.

  Campbell let the hose fall to the floor. He stared a long minute at the boy, then pulled the gun from his holster and pointed it at Charles’s belly. “Better start saying your prayers,” he advised.

  The jailer, Reuben Hatcher, wanted Campbell to show some mercy. “Shoot him in the stomach and he will die quickly,” he said.

  Charles Greenlee—one eye puffed shut, blood pouring down his face, broken glass imbedded in his feet—finally broke. He began sobbing like his tortured mother, who all summer long suffered the unbearable pain of losing her two daughters on the railroad tracks. Quivering between gasps for air, he begged Campbell not to kill him.

  Savoring the moment, the deputy took his time before he shoved the gun back into his holster. But Charles could not escape the menace in his gaze even as Hatcher uncuffed him from the pipe. His wrists burning and bloody, Charles was bending over to pull up his pants when a hard kick from behind knocked him to his knees. He fell forward and lay, a crumbled heap, in the dirt. That’s when he recognized one of the men in the shadows staring down at him. It was the Big Hat Man, Sheriff Willis McCall.

  Crowding around him now, the men led Charles to the elevator. McCall was all business. Like Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, the young boy from Santa Fe had confessed to raping a white woman—and he’d catch up with Ernest Thomas yet. Just as the elevator was about to ascend, Charles was treated to a hard kick “in the privates”; he doubled up on the floor, unable to move or breathe. The elevator rose to the fourth floor. Campbell dragged the boy to a cell and locked the confessed rapist in.

  WILLIS V. MCCALL was Lake County born and bred, and like Charles Greenlee, he knew the anguish families endured after the death of children. His parents had seen a daughter and two sons die before Willis was born, and as a boy living at his father’s “heart yellow pine house,” he’d experienced the tragedy of his younger brother’s drowning in a nearby lake. The son of a dirt farmer, McCall had spent his “scratch-hard childhood” working long hours in the fields, plowing, and chopping and picking cotton, often barefoot. Those Bay Lake men riding through Groveland weren’t much different from his father, McCall knew, but he had also determined early on, perhaps because of a deep-set fear of poverty, that he wasn’t going to walk in his father’s shoes. For he also had smarts and ambition. By the age of twenty-one, he had not only acquired a wife—he’d married his girlfriend, Doris Daley, a local Umatilla girl—but also accumulated some cows, and he soon turned a small-time milking operation into the Bluebird Dairy, a business venture complete with state-of-the-art pasteurizing machinery, the first in Lake County.

  In the mid-1930s, at the age of twenty-six, McCall had sold his dairy and taken a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a fruit and vegetable inspector, in an industry that had been taking more than its share of lumps. Aside from countless bank failures at a time when citrus prices hit record lows during the Great Depression, central Florida was also devastated by hurricanes, a Mediterranean fruit fly outbreak, and the coldest winter freeze in the state’s history. Yet over the next nine years, McCall would witness a remarkable rebound in central Florida’s citrus industry—one that would enable the state to overtake California as the largest harvester of citrus, thanks to a series of government programs, contracts, and interventions.

  The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s work relief programs, built railways and highways in Florida that, once completed, made it easier and faster for growers to ship fruit to other parts of the country. Then, in 1945, the National Research Corporation developed a new method of concentrating orange juice and won a $750,000 government contract to prepare more nutritious and better-tasting food products for U.S. soldiers overseas. The company created the Florida Foods Corporation to fulfill the contract, but the war ended shortly thereafter, and the army canceled its order; so the corporation, its research and development completed, shifted its focus to the consumer market, setting up a new entity that would ultimately become Minute Maid Company. It wasn’t long before America’s freezers had the six-ounce tins that brought Florida orange juice to their kitchen tables just by adding water, and Willis McCall couldn’t drive anywhere in Lake County without passing a roadside sign that read “This Is a Minute Maid Grove.” That same year, too, the federal government allowed farmers to begin spraying crops with DDT; the toxic synthetic pesticide, used during World War II to control typhus and malaria, proved to be extremely effective against citrus insects that had long menaced Florida orange groves.

  With Lake County on its way to becoming one of the richest counties in the nation, USDA inspector Willis McCall was able to foster relationships with the powerful citrus barons of central Florida. In the mid-1940s, the issue most crucial to citrus growers was labor. More groves were sprouting up everywhere in the region; the trees were healthier, the crops more bountiful. Business was good, especially for growers large enough to do their own packing, shipping, and processing. But profits depended on keeping the cost of labor down, because labor represented by far the largest proportion of costs. Since the 1920s, black migrant workers had been coming to Florida from two directions: Georgia to the north, and the Bahamas to the south. Poor whites, too, streamed south into Florida for seasonal jobs picking and packing in the citrus groves. As the industry began to len
gthen the production period, however, migrants, both black and white, started settling in the area. Still, in the early to mid-1940s with the country at war, even the combination of an influx of workers and new settlements of permanent workers could not offset the chronic labor shortage in the area.

  Imposing, gruff, intelligent, and focused, Willis McCall, in his country boots and wide-brimmed Stetson, caught the eye of some local bankers and citrus barons as the kind of man who understood their needs as businessmen—a man with a “tough reputation in the groves.” Before the citrus boom, Lake County was rife with lumber mills and turpentine stills, where forced labor thrived and camps were often guarded at gunpoint to prevent workers from escaping. Camp bosses ruled with an iron fist. They were hard men who frequently resorted to beating workers to satisfy production demands, and despite a steady flow of European immigrants arriving in America in the early twentieth century, blacks were still the preferred workers. “No white people from any country . . . will . . . submit quietly to such treatment as the common Negro,” read an editorial in the Christmas 1904 edition of Southern Lumberman. Willis McCall was a throwback to the bygone days of Lake County.

  When the incumbent sheriff died in office in early 1944, McCall threw his hat into the ring with the backing of the county’s big citrus men and began campaigning. He was a natural. Quick-witted and folksy, with a big, round face, McCall was capable of showing extraordinary self-confidence as well as a self-effacing, aw-shucks modesty around voters. Even his opponents swore he could “charm a snake.” He branded himself “the People’s Candidate.” Smiling, with one of his meaty hands placed affectionately on a man’s shoulder while shaking hands with the other, he inspired trust and a feeling of safety. “People have confidence in me,” he said. “They know where I stand.”

  After knocking off five challengers in a primary, McCall won a tight race against interim sheriff and former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Emil Yde to become the new sheriff of Lake County in May 1944. One of his first moves as sheriff was a lightning-quick response to a newspaper allegation that McCall’s campaign had been financed by gambling interests and that McCall himself would prove to be a “sell-out in politics.” To prove the paper wrong, McCall raided a warehouse where he destroyed, he claimed, eighty-six slot and pinball machines belonging to his alleged financial backer, the county’s “King of Slots.” The Leesburg Commercial subsequently stepped back from its allegations, stating somewhat apologetically in an editorial, “It looks very much like we have a fine sheriff in Lake County.”

  Cleaning up the slots racket and sweeping punchboard lottery games out of Lake County’s taverns, however, were mostly symbolic gestures on McCall’s part, rather than demonstrations of a morally driven, sustained attack on illegal gambling. For the new sheriff was presiding over a county where bolita was king. A lottery game also known as Cuba, bolita (“little ball” in Spanish) employed one hundred Ping-Pong-type balls with numbers on them, which were tossed in a sack and then pulled out blindly, one by one, in a nightly or weekly “throw.” Players might bet as little as a nickel on their selected numbers, and the last numbered ball to be pulled from the sack was the winner. Depending on who was running the game, the payoff was roughly from 70–1 to 90–1. Bolita thrived in Hispanic and black communities, a fact that wasn’t lost on McCall. “Just as long as you got a little handful of ’em together,” he said of the blacks of Lake County, “you gonna have a little bolita, a little moonshine, and a whole lot of sex. Anybody that don’t know that, don’t understand ’em.”

  The game also lined the pockets of politicians and law enforcement officials wherever it was played, and bloody turf battles frequently erupted over who controlled the game and who got the payoffs—from the “cracker mob of Central Florida” right up to the king of bolita, Santo Trafficante Sr., the renowned Mafia boss from Tampa.

  Some of McCall’s critics and political opponents accused him of turning his back on the bolita business and allowing it to thrive. Others argued that the amount of money generated—supposedly under the nose of a sheriff who liked to boast of his awareness in regard to every activity in all 1,100 square miles of Lake County—would not be possible unless McCall had reached some kind of financial understanding with moonshine and bolita racketeers. Indeed, one of McCall’s deputies later acknowledged that the sheriff and his deputies controlled gambling in Lake County “from the back door of the county jail.” It was no surprise to McCall’s foes and critics when the Tampa Tribune reported that nineteen slot machines seized by state beverage agents had turned up in various Lake County Elks Clubs where McCall had active memberships. And a past president of the county’s branch of the NAACP admitted that his own mother was a bolita collection agent for McCall.

  What is certain is that Sheriff Willis V. McCall, from his first day in office, understood that citrus was the engine that drove Lake County’s economy, and he focused nearly all his efforts on issues surrounding labor. With so many young men serving in the military and the demand for citrus products increasing with every month, growers were scrambling to find enough hands to work in the groves. Every able body was needed, and in January 1945, Florida governor Millard Caldwell sent letters to all sheriffs in the state, urging them to “use their good offices” to take vigilant action to enforce “work or fight” laws that were designed to “prevent loitering, loafing and absenteeism.” To further incentivize Florida law enforcement, Caldwell’s statute allowed sheriffs to pocket all of the fines they collected up to a yearly maximum of $7,500. McCall had his mandate. Still, despite the additional money collected from fines, journalists wondered how the sheriff was able, on a mere four-digit salary, to accumulate the vast stretch of land on which he later built his ranch in Umatilla.

  Despite the chronic labor shortage in the groves, wages were kept low, and with the new sheriff enforcing the work or fight laws, citrus barons had in the blacks of Lake County “a ready pool of [cheap] involuntary labor that could be tapped whenever whites faced any sort of labor emergency.” Within days of receiving Governor Caldwell’s letter, McCall arrested forty citrus pickers for vagrancy when they did not show up to work on a Saturday. The next month, another picker, Mack Fryar, similarly failed to appear on a Saturday after having put in a full week’s labor. McCall, without a warrant, entered Fryar’s home and placed him under arrest. Fryar protested, but McCall was in no mood to explain: “None of your damn jaw, come on with me,” the sheriff said and, unprovoked, whipped out his blackjack and knocked Fryar out cold in front of his wife and fourteen-year-old son. McCall then dragged the supposedly delinquent picker to his car and hauled him off to jail in Tavares, where he was held for days before receiving any medical treatment.

  Pickers like Fryar were assessed exorbitant fines, which trapped them in debt peonage, a condition not unlike slavery. The “Florida bail bond racket” was, according to a former Orlando newspaper editor, the “most lucrative business in the state.” The bondsmen worked hand in glove with employers to secure labor in exchange for fines and bond costs. Citrus grove foremen informed bondsmen how many men were needed, and workers were “secured from the stockades.” If workers attempted to flee across state lines, they could be recaptured “without the formality of extradition proceedings.” They had no choice but to work to pay off their fines at whatever grove or camp they were taken to, and they often worked under the supervision of armed guards, as they might on a chain gang.

  In April 1945 six pickers accused the sheriff of brutality—McCall had gotten wind that they were attempting to organize citrus pickers to protest a mandatory seven-day workweek at A. S. Herlong & Company in Leesburg—so it didn’t take long for Sheriff McCall to come to the attention of the NAACP. Complaints mounted at the NAACP that McCall’s main function in law enforcement “appears to have been to dragoon the colored peons used in the county’s citrus fields and packing plants.” The NAACP, observing “a pattern of beating and abusing” on the part of the sheriff, contacted the U.S. Justice Department. T
he FBI was ordered to open a civil rights investigation. The federal field agents were stymied, however, when the pickers and their families suddenly began disappearing: fleeing Lake County for faraway states like Texas and Missouri, or, in the case of the Fryars, as far north as Harlem. (The Fryars managed to sell their chickens, but left behind all their possessions.) Local whites had made it clear that blacks could expect consequences and possible mob action if they stirred up trouble for the sheriff and the county by talking to J. Edgar Hoover’s men. Thus was Sheriff Willis McCall able to successfully dodge charges, as the FBI abandoned its investigation due to lack of evidence.

  Emboldened by the support he received from both the citrus growers and the whites in Lake County, McCall became more audacious in his arrests—audacious enough to make headlines in the winter of 1948. The local groves had slashed fruit-picking wages by 20 percent, an action that brought an out-of-town union organizer named Eric Axilrod from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to Mount Dora. At a public meeting Axilrod encouraged pickers to protest the wage cuts by staging an “Easter Holiday” strike in order to prevent “the return to eight cent boxes of fruit.” When McCall arrived on the scene with some of his deputies and spotted Axilrod’s “Don’t Starve Tired” circulars, he immediately handcuffed and arrested the organizer, then paraded him in front of more than one hundred men as a lesson to any pickers who might be considering joining a union. “Look at his wrists!” McCall bellowed before carting Axilrod and six pro-union workers off to jail, where they sat for days. The activist’s father posted a thousand-dollar bond, and on Axilrod’s release, McCall warned him and his “communist infiltrated groups” never to return to Lake County. Axilrod forfeited the bond and drove straight to Alabama, with McCall’s deputies tailing behind to make sure the union rabble-rouser left the state of Florida.