“Harvey St. Jean had it made,” Edna Buchanan and Gene Miller began their front-page story in the Miami Herald on December 12. “He had money, a reputation as a crack criminal lawyer, and time to tee off for 18 holes at La Gorce Country Club any afternoon he wanted. Most afternoons he did.
“When he left his apartment at the Jockey Club Wednesday morning…he had his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with Eddie Arcaro, the jockey. He didn’t.
“In the crisp bright light of Miami Beach, someone murdered him. He was found shot to death in his car.”
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Harvey St. Jean started his Miami Beach career digging ditches for the city—a poor boy from Holyoke, Massachusetts, whose résumé could not have gone much beyond some clippings of high school athletic triumphs. It was 1939, with the Depression still on in most of the country. “People came here because things weren’t right where they came from,” Bernard Wieder, a Miami Beach lawyer who had been St. Jean’s friend and fellow ditchdigger in those days, said recently. “This was pioneer country.” Some of the pioneers were just drifters; some were ambitious. One of the people who dug ditches with St. Jean and Wieder became president of the bank in whose aqua high-rise, on the Lincoln Road Mall, both of them eventually practiced law. Another was elected mayor of Miami Beach. St. Jean and Wieder both took the examinations to become policemen—a seasonal occupation then—and firemen. Wieder still has an early picture of them as policemen at the Miami Beach version of a community event—a wedding of Bernarr Macfadden, the health faddist. St. Jean saved a picture of himself in police uniform standing behind a posed meeting of Jake LaMotta, Rocky Graziano, and Walter Winchell.
In 1951—when, after years of holding down a regular police job and attending law school at the same time, St. Jean was admitted to the bar—a lot of people considered the practice of criminal law to be a step down from practically anything. The leading criminal lawyer in Miami Beach owed his preeminence to being the favored attorney for members of the S & G Syndicate, which used to control the gambling in South Florida. Many of his colleagues at the criminal bar were considered hacks or shysters. There are now criminal lawyers who spend a lot of their time defending sophisticated businessmen charged with tax evasion, but criminal lawyers are still not quite respectable in the sense that, say, specialists in trusts or corporate mergers are. Their clients are usually not the kind of people with whom it would be appropriate to discuss the case over lunch at a decent club. There is often talk of fees paid in stolen goods or of chumminess with mobsters. “To a professional detective, any criminal attorney has to be a certain part fixer,” a professional detective with the Miami Beach force said recently. When Harvey St. Jean was already the leading criminal attorney in Miami and was expanding into some business ventures, those city councilmen who argued, unsuccessfully, against awarding him the contract to run the concessions at the city golf course based their argument on the kind of undesirables he defended and might associate with in business. Like any two groups of people thrown together, criminal lawyers and their clientele sometimes develop complicated links of style, or even of family. One of St. Jean’s associates was once married to a woman who had previously been married to one of St. Jean’s clients. One of St. Jean’s own wives—he had a number of them—was once married to a man identified as a close associate of the mobster Frank Costello. She almost became some criminal lawyer’s client herself—so St. Jean said during the divorce case—by pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger twice on what happened to be empty chambers.
Even people who assume all criminal lawyers to be part fixer refer to Harvey St. Jean as a gentleman. He was a soft-spoken man, closemouthed about important matters but affable about routine ones. People who had known him for years could not recall ever hearing him raise his voice. The judges liked him, and so did the police. As someone who had been a policeman for years himself, he had friends on the force who could steer clients in his direction, and he could translate the stilted jargon of police reports into some vision of what must have really happened. He steadily worked his way up from pickpockets to jewel thieves. St. Jean was never an eloquent or flamboyant man—tables went unpounded and tears went unshed during his summations—but he was shrewd about picking juries and thorough about rules of evidence that often made it possible to exclude from consideration the statement or the jewelry necessary for a prosecution. As the Warren Court decisions increasingly emphasized the rights of the individual, criminal law was increasingly practiced not with eloquent summations but with detailed challenges to the affidavit that led to a search warrant or with hard questions about how the defendant was treated at the station house. Harvey St. Jean became what his partner, Lawrence Hoffman, believes was the finest search-and-seizure lawyer in the country.
As his practice grew and some real-estate investments began to pay off, St. Jean began to lead the South Florida version of life at the top. There may be cities in which the respectability of a self-made criminal lawyer will always have its limits, but in Miami just about everyone seems to have a tenuous hold on respectability anyway. The historic attraction of the area for promoters and grifters and profligates being what it is, Miami remains a hard place to cash a check. The difference between an established family and a new family sometimes seems to be that the established family pulled off some successful land-flipping in the thirties instead of the fifties. The dominant standard of a club like the Jockey Club—often described around town as “the ‘in’ place” or “a swinging joint” or “the place to be”—is ready money, and motivation by money is assumed. (Some pieces of African sculpture for sale in a showcase are identified as “Rare Collector’s Items for Investors in African Art.”) The golf club that elected Harvey St. Jean to its board of governors—La Gorce Country Club, in Miami Beach—had, according to an estimate in the Miami Herald a few years ago, five hundred millionaires among eleven hundred members, including a Firestone and a Du Pont. It had the final badge of exclusivity in Miami Beach: it excluded Jews, like the one British planters’ club in a newly independent African country that can’t bring itself to alter its membership rules enough to allow in the new president. But La Gorce was not founded until after the Second World War. And one of its members was accused by the Internal Revenue Service a few years ago of having used it as a base for hustling some five hundred thousand unreported dollars from golf or poker patsies, and a Herald story about changes in its board of governors described one of them as “auto dealer, former state senator, and sometime associate of bookmakers.”
In the past several years, anyone looking for Harvey St. Jean was likely to find him at La Gorce or the Jockey Club or in his office—and his office became, increasingly, the least likely of the three. In 1970, St. Jean had an operation for some old knee injuries—the Miami Dolphins’ team surgeon was his doctor—and, still in his fifties, he began to tell people he was semiretired. He spent a lot of time on the golf course and on various business ventures. A couple of times a year, he went to the Golden Door spa in California. “He just said he was semiretired as a way to avoid the wise guys who wanted him to do small cases for nothing,” Jack Nageley, a Miami Beach criminal lawyer who once worked for St. Jean, has said. “If there was enough money involved, Harvey was there.” The money was in the occasional big criminal trial and, more and more, in the divorce work brought in by his fame or by his contacts with rich and important people.
A divorce lawyer who lived at the Jockey Club could feel as secure about his future as a dentist who lived in Hershey, Pennsylvania. The standing joke at the Jockey Club is that the average age of the residents is forty—“that’s a sixty-year-old guy and a twenty-year-old broad.” The club consists of a couple of high-rises full of condominiums for the live-in members, some tennis courts, a marina in which some of the boats seem large enough to serve as destroyer escorts, a restaurant, and a bar whose patrons are so uniformly the type of people who order drinks
by brand (“J&B and a twist, Joe, and an extra-dry Tanqueray martini”) that the bartender’s reaction to being asked for a Scotch and soda is likely to be a moment of puzzlement, as if he had just been asked for a jug of homemade busthead. The Jockey Club is a place in which the names dropped at the bar are vaguely familiar—familiar because the people were once in films or because their families have even more money than they can spend on boats and alimony payments—and the names displayed on the membership invitations seem designed to trigger the same kind of brand identification as modish brands of gin. Twenty-five years after he stood anonymously behind Walter Winchell, Harvey St. Jean lived, with his wife, in a condominium at a club whose board of governors includes Perry Como and Pierre Du Pont and Fess Parker. He owned two condominiums at the Jockey Club, in fact, having moved into a larger one after his marriage and held on to his bachelor apartment. He had been talking about trying to consolidate their mortgages. He apparently had a cash-flow problem. But he had sent a check to the condominium sales office at the Cricket Club, which is being built just north of the Jockey Club. The Cricket Club will have a full spa, and many people believe that it will be the new place to live.
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Walter Philbin looks and talks enough like a detective to play one in the movies—and has played one, several times. In Lenny, the New York detective sergeant who arrested Bruce at a nightclub and then testified, with some embarrassment, in court as to his language and gestures was played by Walter Philbin. In real life, he is a major, the chief of detectives of the Miami Beach Police Department, and in real life he had some dealings with Lenny Bruce. (“I harassed him pretty good.”) Philbin joined the Miami Beach force the year after Harvey St. Jean left—another poor boy from Massachusetts. “We more or less grew up together—me on the force, him in the practice of law,” Philbin said recently. “I beat him on ten or eleven first-degree-murder cases. I was his nemesis.” St. Jean won some, too. “I once collared a guy on a stakeout with two hundred thousand dollars in stolen jewels—and a gun,” Philbin says. “Harvey got him off on search-and-seizure.” Philbin believes that he and Harvey St. Jean exchanged the respect of competent adversaries, and he recalls thinking about that when he arrived at a public parking lot between the Lincoln Road Mall and the Miami Beach Convention Center late on a Wednesday morning last December and found St. Jean shot to death inside his Cadillac. “When we were taking him out of the car, it was a funny thing to think about, but I thought Harvey would be glad that if anyone had to investigate his murder it would be me—because I think he had respect for me as a homicide investigator,” Philbin said. “It was an almost communicative feeling: ‘Don’t worry about it, Harvey.’ And him saying, ‘Well, I’m glad you’re here, because if anybody can get the son of a bitch, you can.’ ”
There may be detectives who would regard that as the recollection of a member of the Screen Actors Guild, but any homicide investigator would sympathize with the next thought Philbin recalls having: “Jesus, God! He’s got a hundred guys capable of killing him.” A disgruntled client? An ex-wife? One of the undesirables that people said St. Jean had as associates in his business ventures? A hit man from the mob? Just a thief who heard that St. Jean often carried a lot of cash with him? Philbin’s detectives fairly quickly eliminated the possibility of random robbery and turned up only one undesirable and no strong suspects among St. Jean’s business associates. (“I almost wish I could talk to Harvey: ‘How could you get involved with this creep?’ ”) The street talk and the prison grapevine produced a theory about St. Jean’s murder almost immediately: that he had been killed on the orders of a Cuban cocaine dealer, a former client, who believed St. Jean had a lot of his money and was refusing to return it. The theory was consistent with some of the physical evidence, Philbin thought, such as the fact that St. Jean had been robbed. (“It’s a matter of honor with an Italian hit man not to touch anything; Cubans rob the guy as part of the deal—the price plus what he’s carrying.”) It was the theory in newspaper headlines within a day or two of the shooting, and it remains the dominant theory in the police department today, even though Walter Philbin, for one, is not optimistic about ever finding enough evidence to indict whoever it was who actually pulled the trigger.
Since the St. Jean killing, Philbin has arrived at some strong views on the version of organized crime that has developed among post-Castro Cuban immigrants. He believes that Cuban gangsters often behave the way Italian gangsters did in the twenties, when they had been in the country only fifteen or twenty years themselves—extorting money from their own community’s businessmen, for instance, and shooting at each other a lot in arguments over power. The Cubans differ, he believes, in concentrating on a type of business that some of the old-style immigrant gangsters avoided—drugs. The people in charge of Cuban organized crime learned organization from the American gangsters who were in Cuba at the end of the Batista regime, Philbin thinks, and the eighteen- and twenty-year-olds now used as runners and enforcers learned how to be hoods right in the United States of America. “When the Cubans first came here, we’d always say they were no trouble,” Philbin said recently. “Strong family ties. Strong culture. Now, eighteen, nineteen years later, we got nothing but trouble. They’ve lost their strong family ties, they’ve lost their strong culture. And the sad thing is that we’ve done it. We’ve Americanized them. They learned everything on our streets.” The organized Cuban operation that uses the street toughs, Philbin thinks, is much more powerful than has been believed. Among the people who may have underestimated the Cubans was Harvey St. Jean.
Why the client in question believed that St. Jean owed him money remains a matter of conjecture, of course. There is a theory, expressed in the newspapers by Dade County state attorney Richard Gerstein, that “some of those people just assume that if they pay large fees they are buying a dismissal or acquittal.” There is a theory that St. Jean, a controlled and unemotional man in the courtroom, might have exacerbated such a misunderstanding by carrying on a defense that could have seemed unenergetic to a Latin. It is possible, of course, that the money that changed hands really was for services other than the defense of one case. It is even possible that Harvey St. Jean, a secretive man with a cash-flow problem, really did keep some money he should have returned. “Harvey had almost scrupulously avoided drug cases,” Philbin says. “He was doing pretty well without them. But this was so much money he couldn’t turn it down.” The amount usually mentioned is something over a hundred thousand dollars. “Harvey knew all the angles,” Jack Nageley said not long ago. “But his love of money did him in.”
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Harvey St. Jean made banner headlines with his funeral. “The friends of Harvey St. Jean, the honest ones, assembled before an open casket Saturday for piped organ music—and the prayers of a priest who never met him,” Gene Miller wrote in the Miami Herald. “It was simple and quick. Only the last of his seven wives attended. Detectives saw none of his notorious clients. Harvey J. St. Jean, criminal lawyer, is now case number 385393.” In a short eulogy, a friend called St. Jean “a sportsman and a sport.” His widow, Dorothy St. Jean, got a lot of sympathy letters from important people and ordinary people, and even some people who wrote from prison—the type of client she could remember her husband’s considering “a thief, but a nice thief.” She also got the cash-flow situation. She is a bright, red-haired woman who, like her husband, came to Miami Beach poor, twenty years ago—a secretary from New Jersey. She worked her way up from cocktail waitress to a job at one of the big hotels organizing conventions and Super Bowl charters. Last fall, she quit her job and devoted her organizing energies to charity work. She was having lunch at La Gorce when she heard of her husband’s death. One of the ironies she mentions when she talks about the murder is that she and Harvey St. Jean, two people who had worked their way up, finally had it made. “People came up afterward and said, ‘At least, his problems are over now,’ ” she said recently. “Listen. He didn’t have any problems.”
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