Never Let Them See You Cry (13 page)

The end for the Ashley gang came the night of November 1, 1924. Police got a tip that the outlaws would be crossing the bridge at Sebastian Inlet. A Model T Ford with John Ashley and three other men, one of them his nephew, stopped at a chain and a red lantern deputies had strung across the south end of the bridge. Too late, they realized they were ambushed.

Deputies said the four outlaws went for their weapons and were riddled by bullets in a wild gun battle. No officers were hurt. Witnesses claimed the gun battle was strictly one-sided, that the shooting started after the four men were handcuffed. None of the gang survived to tell their story, and the cops were cleared after a hasty inquest.

Suspicious police shootings are nothing new in Florida.

Three gang members were buried on an Ashley family homesite. Rumors persisted that $150,000 in cash was buried with them. Looters looking for the money destroyed the tombstones.

Laura, John's sweetheart, committed suicide in the Everglades. Her sad end may be the only real difference between then and now. Today she would write a tell-all book and talk about it on
Gemido
.

Bank robberies, shootings and jailbreaks, suspected police brutality, a city rife with rumors, and calls for the National Guard to prevent more violence: Miami yesterday, Miami today.

Unsolved mysteries and unclaimed corpses are not exclusive to this generation. In 1923, the early builders of Miami Beach unearthed something terrible where the small oceanfront municipality of Surfside now thrives. In a mass grave, buried in the sand, were the bones of more than fifty and possibly two hundred unidentified people.

The Miami
Daily News and Metropolis
speculated that the remains were those of pirates tracked down and executed. Journalists quoted doctors and anatomy experts who identified the bones as those of Southern Europeans. Many were women and children, even babies, they said. All bore signs of violence: axe marks and holes in the skulls.

One Miami man said he had the explanation: a ship's log. The ship was British and had set sail from Jamaica in the West Indies in 1785, on a mission to eliminate a pesky pirate colony. An accompanying ship's chart supposedly showed the vessel anchored offshore, a mile from the gravesite. But the man who claimed to possess both log and chart was a secretive sort who never shared them. Did they exist? Or were they simply the invention of some early Miamian's fertile imagination?

A charred tree stump and broken cooking utensil unearthed deep in the burial site supported the existence of a pirate camp. The writers also pointed out that had Indians killed the victims they would not have buried them; that was not their custom. One early archaeologist insisted that the bones belonged to Indians, not Europeans. But the pirate theorists pointed out the absence of arrowheads or Indian implements—although a huge conch-shell mound was found south of the grave.

The builders removed the sand surrounding thirty of the skeletons and built a road so the curious could visit the macabre scene. The 1923 residents were apparently no different from the Miamians of today who rush to accident and crime scenes to eyeball the carnage.

One exposed skeleton was that of a man more than six feet tall. Few Indians grew to that stature. A botanist concluded in 1929 that the bones were probably those of aboriginal Indians along with a few white men they had captured.

In the 1930s archaeologists excavated what was left and announced that the bones belonged to long-extinct Tequesta Indians, some perhaps three thousand years old. They crated about fifty skeletons and shipped them by train to the Smithsonian Institution for study. The crate was either lost or stolen somewhere along the way; the Smithsonian claimed it never arrived. The archaeologists maintained that the shipment arrived but was mislaid in the Smithsonian basement.

The mass-grave mystery will probably remain unsolved forever.

People and politics do not change. Miami's first police chief was charged with murder, acquitted and reinstated.

Then, of course, there was Scarface.

Feeling the need to escape the high stress of mob business and blustery Chicago winters for fun in the sun, Al Capone found himself a Miami Beach retreat. The house on Palm Island had been built by Clarence M. Busch, of the Anheuser-Busch brewing dynasty. Capone bought it for $40,000 in 1928 through a “dummy,” so residents would not know that their new neighbor was America's most notorious mobster. He installed more than $200,000 in improvements. A wharf was built for his yacht and a tropical garden planted, with a dozen royal palms. He paid $85,000 for the swimming pool alone, the first in Miami Beach with a filtration system adaptable to fresh or salt water. His cabanas were two-story, Venetian style.

The owner's name leaked out fast. Florida authorities and his wealthy neighbors were outraged.

The Capone story was written in bullets and booze.

Bullets cleared his way to the top. Mobsters dropped like flies, cut down from speeding cars. Saloons were sprayed by gunfire. A crusading prosecutor who dared to question Capone about a murder was machine-gunned from a passing car in Cicero, Illinois. Witnesses who saw Capone wield the weapon soon lost their memories. He was never charged.

His reputation grew, and he loved the power as much as he loved money. Arrested for violating the National Prohibition Act, Scarface was released the next day—with apologies. Arrested for a gangster's murder, he had the charges dropped within the hour. When the mayor of Cicero questioned Capone's authority, Scarface kicked His Honor down the front steps of City Hall.

Capone seemed to lead a charmed life. A dozen attempts to kill him failed; he seemed invincible. He wrote his own laws with a “Chicago typewriter”—a portable machine gun.

Florida Governor Doyle Carlton issued an edict to the sheriffs of all sixty-seven Florida counties:
Send Capone a message. He is unwelcome. Arrest him on sight
.

Summoned to the county solicitor's office, Capone and his attorney were told he was to get out of Miami and stay out. Capone refused. He was in Miami to stay, he announced. If pushed, he would take his case to the Supreme Court of the United States.

A lavish spender and big tipper, Capone became a local celebrity. Despite anti-Capone crusades in newspaper editorials, Miamians not only accepted Scarface but applauded when he strutted into a courtroom. The same spectators hissed the mayor and other local officials who sought to banish him, a level of respect Miamians display for their leaders today.

Capone won a federal injunction halting action against him by Florida officials. He sent
them
a message: Even mobsters have constitutional rights.

“I have no interest in politics, neither in Chicago nor Miami,” he told a reporter, while puffing on a fat cigar. “I am here for a rest, which I think I deserve. I have done nothing in violation of the law in Miami and will not. All I wish is to be left alone and enjoy the home I have purchased here.”

Then he took his young son Alphonse for a speedboat tour of sparkling Biscayne Bay.

Scarface became a flashy habitué of Miami nightclubs, racetracks and prize fights. His houseguests included Chicago aldermen, mobsters and crime reporters.

Big Al often hired a local seaplane pilot to fly him and his entourage to Bimini for private beach parties. Former war ace Eddie Nirmaier charged $150 for the flight, and Capone always tipped another hundred. The picnickers would eat salami sandwiches, drink beer and then return, skimming low over the brilliant blue water.

One chilly night Capone and his cohorts visited a Miami theater, eager to see the new James Cagney gangster movie. High-kicking chorus cuties performed in a stage show first. In the finale, they tugged on a long rope. The end of the rope finally appeared, tied around the neck of a small monkey. The performing monkey wore a sign:
AL CAPONE
.

Scarface and five companions rose quietly from their balcony seats and strolled into the lobby. Capone introduced himself to the manager, then flattened the man with an old-fashioned haymaker that smashed his nose.

Capone and his friends returned to their seats to watch the movie mobster. The bloodied manager summoned police. The officers pondered the situation, then warned him to stop making trouble or they would shut down his theater.

Scarface was conspicuously in residence at Miami Beach on February 14, 1929. He hosted a huge party that night for politicians, members of the press and local businessmen. The butler wore a shoulder holster; so did the very burly waiters. Two men armed with rifles greeted the guests, who were scrutinized closely by gunmen who even trailed them to the bathroom and waited outside the door. Machine guns were stored neatly under tarpaulins by the pool.

Seated near a table laden with food, Capone waved to arriving guests, then instructed his gunsels, “Geddem champagne.”

None of the guests knew why he was celebrating—until later.

Men in police uniforms had raided a garage in wintry Chicago on that St. Valentine's Day in 1929. Police often conducted such raids, mostly for appearances' sake. Seven men who worked for Bugs Moran, Capone's archrival, were lined up against the wall, expecting at worst a night in jail. Too late they realized the uniforms were a ruse. The phony cops opened fire with machine guns. The real cops arrived later to count the bodies. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre became America's most publicized mass murder.

When a newsman who had attended Capone's party returned to ask questions about the massacre, Al looked perplexed and shook his head, saying, “The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.”

Nobody believed him, but Capone did not let the bloody events in Chicago spoil his fun in the sun. He and his friends planned to attend the Sharkey-Stribling fight at Miami Beach on February 27. He had promised fight tickets to Eddie Nirmaier, but Big Al had other matters on his mind. The day before the fight the pilot had not received his tickets.

“I had a quantity of fireworks bombs,” Nirmaier told a
Miami Herald
writer years later. “So I flew over Capone's house, triggered the fuse and tossed a bomb out of the plane. There was one hell of an explosion—in the air of course—and you've never seen so many mugs in your life. They all ran out of the house with their pistols in their hands. I thought for a moment they would start shooting at me.”

He buzzed the house again, to drop a paper parachute with a note asking where his fight tickets were. “By the time I got back to the dock and got out of my plane, Capone's chauffeur was driving up with my tickets.”

The prank only served to further unnerve Capone's swanky neighbors, already irate about gangsters conducting machinegun practice off the dock in the cool of the evening.

Refreshed from his Miami stay, Big Al returned to Chicago. During a lavish dinner party, he flew into a rage, ranted that three of his guests were disloyal, picked up a baseball bat and bashed in their skulls.

Still it seemed he could never be beaten. When Capone, loudmouthed and imperious, was finally toppled, it was not by bombs or bullets: Pencil pushers brought him down, government crime busters with adding machines, not machine guns. At first he failed to take the tax charges seriously, not even bothering to show up for court. He went to the racetrack instead.

Shortly before his 1931 trial, Capone summoned a tailor. He ordered two new lightweight suits for Miami's subtropical climate. “You don't need to be ordering fancy duds,” a cohort snorted. “Why don't you have a suit made with stripes? You're going to prison.”

“The hell I am,” Capone replied. “I'm going to Florida for a nice long rest, and I need some new clothes before I go.”

Capone was wrong. His nice long rest was for eight years—behind bars. By the time he saw Miami again, the suits no longer fit.

Expecting a slap on the wrist, Capone swaggered into court fat and smug. The judge socked him with an eleven-year sentence. His twelve-year-old son, his mother, wife, brother and sister, all saw him off to federal prison in Atlanta. He posed cheerfully for photographers and boarded the train. That was May 1932. He was thirty-three years old.

The former crime czar was soon transferred to a new island home, Alcatraz, and served seven and a half years before being released on parole.

The news swept Miami Beach: Al Capone, the city's most notorious snowbird, was coming home. His lavish island mansion was groomed and ready, newly painted and ablaze with lights that November of 1939. Reporters clustered at the barred gates and crowded sightseeing boats circled like sharks, hoping for a glimpse of the resident who made the city the least proud.

Rumors of Capone's arrival in Miami Beach proved premature. Hours after his release, he was admitted to a Baltimore hospital.

Capone's wife, Mae, pleaded with hospital personnel to “avoid publicity.” His brother blamed Big Al's illness on “his confinement in prison.” Stories spread that the mobster had gone stir crazy. Gangland friends who visited called him “as crazy as a bedbug.” Truth was that the mobster was undergoing treatment for paresis, a brain-destroying disease caused by syphilis. The first symptoms, confusion and slurred speech, had surfaced in prison. His Maryland doctor was the nation's foremost “syphilologist.”

Years earlier, a teenage mistress had been diagnosed as syphilitic, and Capone was advised to take a blood test, but the mobster hated needles.

Capone celebrated Christmas 1939 in his hospital room, with his family and a gaily decorated tree. The patient who spent his time playing dominoes scarcely resembled the Chicago liquor king who had enjoyed a million-dollar-a-year income and ruled a mob of seven hundred.

Capone remained in Baltimore for medical treatment and did not return to Miami Beach until March 20, 1940.

Several appearances that summer fueled rumors that he was recovering. He and a party of friends strolled into a Miami Beach nightclub one evening, took a remote table, listened to the orchestra and left quietly, well before midnight. A few nights later Capone and his wife dined at a bayfront restaurant as a bodyguard watched from the bar.