For Sale —American Paradise (44 page)

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 Ponce 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.