For Sale —American Paradise (52 page)

In mid-October 1928, the Red Cross compiled statistics outlining the hurricane's effect on Florida. More than 2,000 people had been killed by the hurricane, “with no possibility of accurate count,” the Red Cross concluded. The death toll was still being calculated seventy-
five years later. In 2003, the National Weather Service raised the official number of deaths in the 1928 hurricane to “at least 2,500.” Still, NWS meteorologist Rusty Pfost said, “We all know we really don't know what the answer is.”

There were other grim numbers: 95 percent of the buildings in Palm Beach County had been damaged, and 25 percent destroyed; the homes of 690 farmers had been destroyed; 15,000 people had been left homeless by the hurricane, which had “seriously” affected seven counties; 17,500 people were receiving help from the Red Cross, and 5,000 people were living in Red Cross refugee camps.

The year had begun with optimistic predictions for Florida's future—the Tamiami Trail would open, real estate prices would stabilize, investors and money would return, and good times would resume.

But 1928 was drawing to a decidedly depressing close.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
FEW WEEKS BEFORE HIS
M
ARCH
4, 1929,
INAUGURATION, PRESIDENT-ELECT
Herbert Hoover took a quick look at the small towns around Lake Okeechobee that had been ravaged by the hurricane five months earlier. It wasn't the first time Hoover had seen the aftermath of a disaster. In the spring of 1927, he had coordinated the effort of local, state, and federal agencies to help victims after massive flooding along the Mississippi River had left 600,000 people homeless.

Preventing another flooding tragedy around Lake Okeechobee was a winning campaign issue in Florida in the 1928 election. Hoover, a Republican and a former engineer who had campaigned on improved flood control, easily carried Florida, with about 56 percent of the vote. In the governor's race, Democrat Doyle Carlton made flood control part of his campaign, and he won more than 60 percent of the vote.

By contrast, former governor John Martin, who had tried and failed to enact a flood-
control program, was soundly defeated by incumbent Park Trammell in the Democratic primary for one of Florida's seats in the US Senate.

Although much of the area around the lake's southern shore that had been hardest hit by the storm had made a remarkable recovery by the time Hoover toured the area in February 1929, there were grim reminders. A house remained in a canal, and a large pile of storm-
driven debris remained by the road between Belle Glade and Pahokee. Many residents were still living in tents or hastily constructed shacks.

Many miles of road washed out by the flooding had been only partially repaired, and Hoover's motorcade had to slow to a crawl in places.

Remains of storm victims still were being found, and that would continue for years.

The storm debris provided a stark contrast to the thriving crops of cabbages, beans, tomatoes, and sugarcane that had been replanted as soon as the floodwaters had drained off and evaporated.

Hoover made only one stop during his five-hour drive around Lake Okeechobee. In South Bay, where dozens of bodies had once been piled in the
town's main street after the storm, the president-
elect was presented with a bouquet of flowers, and he posed for cameramen for a few moments.

Crowds awaited him in other towns, but his procession didn't stop, only slowing down so he could wave at the disappointed onlookers.

Hoover attended a banquet in Clewiston that night, and the crowd made it clear that they wanted the federal government to pay the tab for almost $11 million—more than $157 million in twenty-
first-century dollars—worth of
draining and flood-control improvements to prevent a recurrence of the 1928
disaster.

But the president-
elect stayed mum while other speakers addressed the crowd, and he slipped out of the gathering and went to bed early.

Still, work eventually started on a more substantial structure to protect the small lakeside towns. A sixty-six-mile levee, 175 feet thick at its base and 34 feet high, was completed on the lake's southern shore in 1935. By the 1950s, the massive levee had been extended another eighty miles so that it encircled the lake. The structure was named after Hoover.

While Hoover toured the storm area, Miami newspapers were boasting of a booming tourist trade for the 1928–29 season.

“Facts and figures give indisputable evidence that even the most skeptical must accept as evidence that Greater Miami has returned to prosperity,” the
Miami Daily News
crowed in its edition of February 17, 1929. The city's winter population was at least 15 percent higher than it had been during the 1927–28 season.

But the city also was looking over its shoulder, hoping to avoid a return of the “be-
knickered tribe of speculators” that had descended on the city in 1925, the
News
said.

And the city would have preferred that some winter visitors had stayed away, especially when
The New Yorker
magazine noted in its edition of March 2, 1929, that Al Capone was spending another winter in Florida.

Miami Beach leaders had continued their determined effort to force Capone to leave town. The company insuring the Palm Island mansion had canceled the policy when they learned Capone lived at the property, but Capone had dug in for a legal battle to hold on to the house.

Organized-crime operatives, many of them drawn by Capone's presence, were coming south to enjoy the state's gentle winters and swank amenities. The rowdy, backwoods bootleggers and bank robbers of the Ashley Gang era were being replaced by a different type of criminal—clever, well-groomed, sophisticated, and often armed with attorneys instead of guns.

On March 7, 1929, gangland violence from New York and Chicago spilled over into Miami with deadly results. On that date, about twenty people were playing cards in a two-room suite on the fourteenth floor of the posh Miami Biltmore Hotel. Among the group of stylishly dressed men and women was Thomas “Fatty” Walsh, who enjoyed telling people that he'd been a bodyguard for
the late kingpin of underworld gambling, Arnold Rothstein, who many thought had fixed the 1919 World Series.

Walsh had been questioned by police after Rothstein was mortally wounded three months earlier in New York's Park Central Hotel.

Suddenly a door opened and a man stepped into the doorway and began shooting. Moments later, Walsh lay dead on the floor. Mobster Arthur Clark, who said he'd come to Miami to recover from the flu, was wounded.

Clark, who was willing to talk to detectives investigating the crime, said he didn't think he was the target of the killer's bullets and had been hit accidentally. But he was guarded by police while he recovered in a Miami hospital.

Miami cops who investigated the Biltmore shooting unraveled a thread that went all the way back to the slaying of gangster Frank Uale eight months earlier—the murder that had been linked to Al Capone and his Miami pal, Parker Henderson Jr., who had bought guns for the bootlegging king.

Police also found evidence that Walsh had been in Chicago a few weeks earlier when a slaughter that horrified the nation took place—the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre, in which seven men were lined up against a wall and machine-gunned to death.

Walsh apparently had come to Miami to meet with Capone, police learned.

The afternoon after the shooting, Miami police rounded up fifteen men known to be connected with organized crime in New York and Chicago.

The gangland shooting in Miami's most opulent hotel and subsequent roundup of underworld thugs was a reminder of how Capone's presence was affecting the city's image. It was also starting to affect property values and real estate sales. Potential buyers were having second thoughts about Miami Beach property because of Capone's presence.

Still, Capone clung to the mansion, even after he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to prison in 1931. He eventually died there after having a stroke in 1947.

In his “Today” column of March 1, 1929, Arthur Brisbane—who was now the largest individual taxpayer in Martin County—was still bullish about Florida's future. He noted that the state had shipped 38,000 train carloads of winter fruits and vegetables north, and that this represented less than half of the season's crop.

He also noted that Carl Fisher had reported the tourist crowds in Miami were the largest in the state's history.

But up the coast, Martin County was facing serious problems.

The spectacular “ideal” developments that had been advertised with such grandeur in the
South Florida Developer
—Picture City, Port Mayaca, Okeechobee Shores—never materialized, nor did the deepwater harbor that would have been “the best south of Savannah.”

Instead of becoming an ideal city that exceeded even Coral Gables, Port Mayaca became better known for being the final resting place for about 1,600 victims of the 1928 hurricane buried in a mass grave.

Indiantown's dreams of becoming a thriving industrial giant—and perhaps being renamed to honor its benefactor—evaporated when Solomon Davies Warfield died. And Arthur Brisbane's 10,000-acre “demonstration” farm was never built.

Had the Ashley Gang still been around, they would've had to go someplace other than Stuart to find a bank to rob. By March 1929, both of the town's banks had closed their doors, and the money deposited there—representing income from businesses, government funds, and the life savings of hundreds of people—were gone forever.

The banks' closings were only one of many economic problems for Martin County.

On March 19, the
Stuart Daily News
—now owned by Menninger—reported that the town was facing a financial crisis. Only about 34 percent of the tax payments due had been paid. And in less than sixty days, the town would have to come up with $40,000—more than $546,000 in twenty-first-century dollars—in payments due on bonds and other debt obligations.

Nor could the town pay its electric bill, and the streetlights were turned off.

Things were no better for the county government. County finances were so strapped that employees were laid off or had their pay drastically cut. The county's agricultural extension agent took a pay cut, from $250 per month to $85 per month.

“People of larger financial resources were just recovering from the storms when the Seminole Bank closed in late February, and the Stuart Bank in early March,” Leora Field, executive secretary of the Martin County chapter of the Red Cross, wrote in one of her reports.

The Red Cross had even loaned the county money to pay one employee to make road repairs.

“Martin County is still suffering and mentally panic stricken by the financial depression,” Field wrote in April 1929.

“Our community is discouraged and is not normal because of it,” Field said. “However, the causes of discouragement are real. Our gasoline station man, with sternly set face, talks to us of the loss of his entire year's earnings in the bank.”

Taxes weren't being paid, schools closed early because the county couldn't afford to keep them open, and many residents were eating almost nothing but fish, Field wrote.

And there were other problems elsewhere.

Addison Mizner's ambitious and overhyped Boca Raton was in deep trouble in 1926, and he eventually was bankrupt. Infuriated investors hurled lawsuits at Addison, his brother Wilson, and the former members of the corporation's all-star board of directors. Wilson Mizner, always quick with a quip, said he could hardly open the door without a lawsuit blowing in.

That sense of humor didn't desert him when he was being grilled by attorneys. During his testimony in one suit brought by an unhappy investor, the
plaintiff's attorney asked him, “Did you, or did you not, tell my client he could grow nuts on this land?”

“I certainly did not,” Wilson snapped. “I told him he could
go
nuts on it.”

In April 1929, the Mizner brothers, T. Coleman du Pont, Jesse Livermore, and other former directors of the Mizner Development Corporation were sued for $1.45 million by ninety-
three plaintiffs who'd invested in Boca Raton. The defendants were accused of “conspiring to sell by fraudulent representations unimproved Florida real estate of little value.”

The lawsuit noted that Mizner Development Corporation had taken in more than $9 million from the sale of real estate, but when the company's assets were sold at bankruptcy, those assets brought only $56,000.

St. Petersburg, which had so hopefully hosted the Investment Bankers Association of America convention a few years earlier, was struggling under the debt of bonds issued to pay for municipal services during the peak of the boom.

Walter Fuller, who'd sold millions of dollars' worth of real estate in St. Petersburg, wryly noted that the lesson learned from the boom years “is that of the drunk who opens a bleary eye the next morning, defends his hilarity of the night before by claiming, ‘But look at all the nice new empty bottles I got.'”