For Sale —American Paradise (45 page)

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—described 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.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE EYE OF THE HURRICANE THAT DELAYED
P
ARKER
H
ENDERSON
J
R.'S RETURN
to Miami tore into Stuart and Fort Pierce with surprising fierceness on the morning of August 8, 1928. Electric wires and telegraph lines went down almost immediately, so newspapers from West Palm Beach to Vero Beach could not run their presses.

But Edwin Menninger, now publisher of both the
South Florida Developer
and the
Stuart Daily News
, was determined to get the story of the hurricane's fury to the outside world—even if it meant risking his life.

As the storm still raged, Menninger got into his car and started a perilous journey north. Buffeted and rocked by high winds and slammed by driving rain, he pushed through the storm seeking a town where he could get his story to the Associated Press.

Along the way, he took note of the storm's damage.

Menninger found electricity and phone service in Melbourne, about seventy miles up the coast from Stuart. He filed his story to the AP there.

The winds in the hurricane's eye wall were around 90 miles an hour when it made landfall, Menninger said. Around midnight, the storm's calm eye arrived, and all was quiet for an hour or so. But then the back side of the eye wall arrived, and the winds resumed with greater fury than before. Menninger later reported that the winds reached about 110 miles an hour after the eye passed. On the modern Saffir-Simpson scale—which rates hurricanes by wind speed and destructive potential—a hurricane with peak winds of 111 miles an hour is considered major.

Hundreds of homes and businesses from Stuart to Vero Beach were heavily damaged, and many had their roofs blown off, Menninger said. “Signboards, awnings, timbers, and parts of buildings lay all over the streets,” he wrote. “Broken tile, plate glass, and strips of felt and metal roofing covered the sidewalks.”

The winds had denuded tens of thousands of citrus trees and covered the ground with ripening grapefruit and oranges. “Citrus groves along the East coast [of Florida] looked like a winter scene in the North,” Menninger said.

Even in the middle of a story about destruction, however, Menninger found an opportunity for promotion. When he mentioned the storm's damage to Stuart, he noted that the town was “famed for its fishing and great natural harbor.”

No deaths were reported from the storm. Still, one sad death during the storm was discovered later. The body of the thirty-five-year-old, unmarried postmaster at Olympia was found on August 9. He was sitting in a chair in his home. Police learned that he'd been deeply disappointed when a recent love affair had been broken off. So as the hurricane raged around him, the postmaster sat down in an easy chair, pondered his unhappiness, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger.

In his story for the Associated Press, Menninger reported that the storm had inflicted several million dollars' worth of damage from Stuart to Vero Beach. But the hurricane's worst effects wouldn't become evident for a while. The storm dumped more than a foot of rain in some places in South Florida, and most of that water soon made its way to Lake Okeechobee.

Florida boosters are fond of pointing out that the lake is the nation's second largest, if you exclude the four Great Lakes with shorelines that touch both the United States and Canada. The lake covers about 750 square miles and is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.

The deepest part of Lake Okeechobee is at sea level. The shallow saucer-
like lake's average depth is about nine feet, so the saucer is pretty much filled when the surface of the water is fourteen or fifteen feet above sea level. Because the lake is so shallow, winds blowing across it can pile up water against shorelines and dikes.

In the days following the hurricane, water poured into Lake Okeechobee. Most of it was dumped into the lake by the Kissimmee River, which drains about 3,000 square miles as it flows southeasterly for about 130 miles down the center of the Florida peninsula to the lake's northern shore. Two smaller creeks—Taylor Creek and Fisheating Creek—also emptied more water into the lake.

There was more water than the Kissimmee could handle, and it spilled over the river's banks and spread out miles on both sides of the river. On August 14, the
Palm Beach Post
reported that the Kissimmee had reached the highest level since record-keeping had started.

And Lake Okeechobee was steadily rising. By mid-
August it exceeded seventeen feet above sea level, approaching the eighteen-
foot level that was considered dangerous. People living near the lake nervously watched the dikes and recalled what had happened only two years earlier when the hurricane that devastated Miami also sent water spilling over a dike, flooded Moore Haven, and killed hundreds of people.

One of those dikes near the town of Okeechobee on the lake's northern shore gave way on August 14, flooding about 1,200 acres. It was a reminder to Glades residents that state politicians seemed incapable of solving a problem that had long bedeviled them.

Controlling the lake's water level and eliminating flooding had been discussed in Tallahassee for decades, but the discussions had always broken down over how such a program would be administered. South Florida residents wanted to control how decisions would be made about a drainage program in their region. But opponents didn't want to give up control of a program funded by residents of the entire state that would benefit only residents of one region.

When John W. Martin ran for governor in 1924, he had promised voters that if they elected him, he would do all he could to improve drainage around Lake Okeechobee and stop the frequent flooding.

But in early July 1928, near the end of his four-
year term as governor and now running for the US Senate, Martin had thrown up his hands in frustration after Florida commissioner of agriculture Nathan Mayo refused to sign a bond issue that had been overwhelmingly approved by the state legislature. The bond would have provided $20 million—about $270 million in twenty-first-century dollars—for drainage improvements around Lake Okeechobee.

Mayo, whose signature was required along with those of the state treasurer, the state comptroller, and the state attorney general, said he wouldn't sign the documents because a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the bond issue hadn't been decided by the US Supreme Court. It didn't matter to Mayo that the Florida Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the plan that the legislature had approved.