Never Let Them See You Cry (12 page)

Overhead, Venus, brightest of all the planets, star of the summer night, shines so brilliantly that Miami police are frequently plagued by UFO reports. Observers think they are seeing a star explode, and a confused air-traffic controller once gave it permission to land.

Miami is full of strange and wonderful people—some out of control. As a rookie on my first reporting job in Miami Beach, I covered the predawn exploits of a cherubic young platinum blonde named Peaches. Her real name was Emily, but no one used it. Chubby and fresh scrubbed, from a highly respectable and wealthy family, Peaches persisted in speeding through the city naked at the wheel of her open sports car. Only God knows why, but Peaches loved it.

Other motorists, particularly bus drivers and truckers with more lofty vantage points, would drop their jaws when she pulled up beside them. So would police officers, who arrested her for indecent exposure. She appeared in court, demure in blue and white gingham, and good-naturedly paid her fine, smiling coyly, with lowered lashes, at the handsome young cop who had arrested her. Much to his embarrassment, she sent him roses at police headquarters. Officers arrested her again at five
A.M
. on the same charge. They accused her of wearing only a Turkish towel—“containing many holes”—as she drove through Miami Beach.

“I'm trying to lose weight, and I was going home from the health studio,” Peaches explained. “I always wear just a Turkish towel on the way home.”

Made sense to me.

“I think I'm in trouble this time,” she confided, though she did not seem unduly concerned.

Peaches lived in Surfside, a small, eight-block-long oceanfront municipality just north of Miami Beach.

“They never arrest me there,” she pouted. “They even let me go swimming at night in the nude. They guard the Ninety-sixth Street beach for me. They are why I moved to Surfside.”

Surfside police denied ever hearing of her. I believed Peaches. No way she could live in Surfside without coming to their attention.

“The only reason they keep arresting me here,” she said, “is because I get so many tickets. I'm a speed trap,” she sighed. She slid behind the wheel of her Corvette, blew a kiss to a group of watching police officers and roared away.

A county judge with no sense of humor sentenced her to 120 days in jail and a thousand-dollar fine for four speeding tickets. He recommended she undergo psychiatric evaluation. I could not picture free-spirited Peaches behind bars. I never saw her again. In the press of stories and deadlines, I lost track of her. Though I thought of Peaches every time I saw a speeding sports car, she seemed to vanish from the face of the earth.

A year later I was reading copy off the newswire after a devastating earthquake in Italy. The story listed names, ages, and home towns of Americans killed and injured in the disaster. One leaped out at me: from Miami, a young woman named Emily. It had to be Peaches. First, middle and last name were the same. So was her age, twenty-two. She was among the injured taken to a Rome clinic. Neither her condition nor the severity of her injuries was mentioned.

Our newspaper was so small and impoverished that we were not even allowed to make toll calls, much less overseas to Rome.

I have no idea why she was in Italy, how badly she was hurt, or if she is still alive. If so, she is middle-aged now, perhaps with chubby blond daughters of her own. She remains a symbol, to me, of Miami Beach in its youthful, more innocent days.

I hope Peaches survived the storm and found what she was forever racing in search of: her own Deryabar. And I realize how fortunate I am, to have found my island home, surrounded by turbulent Technicolor waters under brilliant azure skies.

There is no new thing under the sun
.

—E
CCLESIASTES
1:9

Miami is—and always has been—a city seething with intrigue and tension.

Hot-headed motorists pull guns in Miami traffic. You can buy an Uzi at the five-and-dime, and would-be warriors rehearse for war in the swamps.

The uninformed mourn a paradise lost. How sad, they say, that such a magic place has become so violent—but violence is nothing new to Miami.

A woman and her faithless lover reclined on a blanket beneath the tall, whispering Australian pines at Cape Florida not long ago, listening to bird songs and the sounds of the sea. She waited until he dozed, then shot him in the head.

I drove out to the murder scene, on the tip of Key Biscayne, a strip of beach with an old lighthouse, jungle and pine forest. A homicide detective suggested that this was the first murder at Cape Florida.

Nope. The first recorded homicide at Cape Florida took place at the lighthouse—in 1836. Rampaging Seminole Indians wounded the lighthouse keeper and cornered him in the tower. Overwhelmed, trapped, convinced he was a dead man—the attackers had massacred his assistant—the lighthouse keeper did the only thing that made sense at the time. He hurled a keg of gunpowder down the narrow stairwell, knowing it would explode. He was committing suicide, and he hoped to take a few Indians with him. To his surprise, he survived. The force of the blast generated outward. The Indians ran away screaming, some of them on fire.

Sounds like a Saturday night in Miami in 1991.

The spirit of the lighthouse keeper survives. Modern Miamians, innovative if nothing else, fight back the best they can against marauders who threaten to overwhelm them. In the same week a Liberty City businessman electrocuted a burglar with a booby trap rigged in his oft-looted shop, a Homestead businessman shotgunned and killed a robber after chasing him half a mile in his car, and a middle-aged Miami woman awakened at 1:15
A.M
. by the sound of breaking glass investigated and found a man halfway through her living-room window. He proceeded no further. She bashed his skull with an axe handle—twice. Police found him draped over the windowsill.

Headlines and editorials spotlight the current crop of embarrassingly inept or corrupt Dade County leaders, guilty of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance or all three.

They also are nothing new—they are the wretched legacy of U.S. Army Major Francis Langhorn Dade.

The father of our county was a pompous ass and a know-it-all who led his troops into disaster. His only claim to fame was being massacred.

Dade was a Virginian whose mother's kin hobnobbed with George and Martha Washington. He served in the War of 1812 and with Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson in Pensacola in 1821. When Spain ceded Florida to the United States, Seminole Indians were scattered across the peninsula. Jackson forced them onto a central Florida reservation.

By the time his old boss became president, Dade was an infantry commander in Key West. White settlers soon coveted the territory the Indians occupied. President Jackson, the old Indian fighter, ignored past promises and ordered Florida's Indians to move west of the Mississippi, to Arkansas. They refused to go peacefully, and a chief named Osceola took leadership in the dispute. Old Hickory was harsh, and trouble was imminent. A deadline was set. The Seminoles were to be rounded up at bayonet point on January 1, 1836. Believers in treaties and justice, the Indians hoped that Washington would relent, but when the government refused to change plans, the Indians made their own.

Fort King near Ocala was manned by a small garrison under the command of General Wiley Thompson. In December, as the deadline neared, reinforcements were sent to back up Thompson and his handful of men. That it was Major Dade who led the contingent of a hundred soldiers was mere chance. The wife of a captain was gravely ill, and Dade volunteered to take the man's place.

Dade had boasted that he could march one hundred men through the entire Indian nation; now he could prove it. They marched out of Fort Brooke, where Tampa is now, on December 23, 1835. The 106-mile trek took them through the heart of Indian country, across rivers and creeks, through swamps and piney woods. Indians stalked them from the start. They would have attacked sooner but Osceola, who engineered the assault, and Micanopy, another leader, were away on other business.

Osceola had hurried ahead to Fort King to kill General Thompson. The grudge was personal: Thompson had thrown him in irons the previous summer. Osceola also wanted to avenge his young wife, the daughter of a slave woman. Slaves' descendants were considered slaves themselves, and whites had seized Osceola's wife. The chief was eager to ambush Dade and his men, but settling the score with General Thompson took first priority.

A seasoned veteran of the military in Florida, Dade had helped build the road between Fort Brooke and Fort King in 1824. He knew the land, and he knew the Indians. He kept advance and rear guards and flankers on the alert for Seminoles, but after crossing the forks of the Witlacoochee River, into open pine and palmetto country, Dade relaxed his vigilance. He withdrew the scouts. Indians had never attacked in daylight in country covered only by scattered pines. The major scoffed at repeated warnings from a sharp-eyed slave who kept pointing out signs of Indians.

The column marched across open land at eight
A.M
. on December 28. The weather was cold, in the forties, and a chilly rain had fallen. At Major Dade's instruction, his soldiers buttoned their overcoats over their muskets and ammo boxes to keep them dry. No scouts were sent into the low-lying sawgrass, as was usually done on marches. The Seminoles, hidden in the brush among the palmettos and pines, watching the troops trudge by like ducks in a shooting gallery, must have sniggered up their sleeves.

The soldiers were two-thirds of the way to their destination when Micanopy arrived. He and two other leaders, Alligator and Jumper, assembled the warriors at Wahoo Swamp, five miles west of the trail Dade traveled, and decided to attack.

Rumors down the century hint that the soldiers had depleted their rum rations and were suffering from hangovers that day. Records indicate that Major Dade also had a fondness for rum and that he had escaped court-martial for drunkenness and sloppy record-keeping only because he was not considered worth the trouble.

Still ignoring the warnings of his slave interpreter, Dade now felt secure. They had left Indian country and were in white man's territory. What he did not realize was that Indian country was anywhere the Indians wanted it to be. Major Dade left the column—only officers were on horseback—to move up and ride point He shouted out cheerfully as he passed his men, promising them three days' rest and a Christmas celebration at Fort King.

Those were his last words. As he uttered them, Micanopy was taking aim. As Dade reached the advance guard, he was shot dead off his horse. The first barrage killed or wounded half his command. The soldiers fell before they could wrestle their guns from beneath their bulky buttoned coats.

The Indians withdrew to regroup. The captain who had lingered at the side of his gravely ill wife had caught up to the column and took command. During the half-hour lull, he ordered survivors to chop down pine trees and build a fortification—instead of running for the woods, which would have made more sense. The logs were only knee high when the Indians launched their second attack. The last soldier was cut down by two
P.M
. One hundred and three were dead; five were West Point men. The captain died with them. His sickly wife lived another sixty-one years. The mulatto guide and four soldiers escaped alive. The guide was welcomed into the Seminole Nation. An Indian killed one of the soldiers as he fled toward Tampa Bay, but three survivors made it to safety and reported an attacking horde of 400 to 1,000 Indians.

The Indians said they had 180 warriors: 3 were killed and 5 wounded. The debacle, one of the Indians' most decisive victories over American soldiers, took place four years before the birth of George Armstrong Custer.

That same afternoon, Osceola surprised General Thompson and a lieutenant as they strolled outside Fort King smoking cigars. He killed and scalped them both.

History books refer to the battle as the “Dade massacre.” When the army won, it was victory. When the Indians won, it was a massacre.

The shot that killed Francis Langhom Dade began the Second Seminole War. It was long, unpopular and never won, like Vietnam. The Seminoles battled on for seven bloody years. The United States eventually sent forty thousand soldiers against a Seminole force that never exceeded fifteen hundred. The price was $20 million and fifteen hundred dead soldiers, the costliest, in lives and money, of all our Indian wars.

Osceola led his nation in battle for only two years of the war, but his guerrilla strategy so baffled U.S. troops that his enemies hailed him as a military genius. When the government could neither capture nor defeat Chief Osceola, they invited him to engage in peace talks, under a flag of truce. They guaranteed he would not be arrested.

They lied.

When Osceola arrived to pursue peace for his people, he was seized and thrown into a dungeon. He died there, at age thirty-four. Official cause of death was variously described as malaria, pneumonia, tonsillitis, and a broken heart.

Osceola had refused treatment from the white doctor assigned to his care. His instincts were right. The doctor decapitated his corpse, put the famous chief's head on display and used it to frighten his children when they misbehaved.

Our longest war until Vietnam ended in 1842, without a treaty, but with nearly all the Seminoles relocated beyond the Mississippi. A few hundred hid deep in the Everglades and survived.

The Indians were cheated and lied to by white men whose treaties were masterpieces of double-dealing. The scheme was to force them out west so speculators could seize their Florida property. Those early land-grabbing leaders were no different from the politicos and developers who continue to pillage South Florida today.

Violence did not end with the Seminole wars. The Ashley gang lived some of Florida's bloodiest adventures. John Ashley hunted and trapped in the Florida wilderness until 1911, when he was accused of murdering a Seminole Indian named Desoto Tiger. He showed up in Miami shortly after the slaying to sell eighty animal hides stolen from the dead Indian. On the run for murder, Ashley became the state's most wanted frontier outlaw and bank robber.

Even Carl Fisher, the entrepreneur who would soon build Miami Beach from a swamp, posted a $500 reward for Ashley's capture. Nobody collected. Ashley remained at large. He and his gang, which included his sweetheart, Laura. Up the grove, his brothers Bob, Ed and Frank, and at least four other men, robbed a bank in Stuart. Shot in the eye during the robbery, Ashley was captured and taken to Miami to stand trial for murder.

On a hot summer day at one o'clock in the afternoon, young Bob Ashley arrived in Miami to save his big brother John from the hangman. The sheriff saw Bob Ashley pedal up to the jail on a bicycle. He thought the cyclist was just a local boy who wanted to talk to a prisoner. When the sheriff went to lunch, Bob Ashley rapped on the door of the deputy sheriff's residence, adjoining the Dade County Jail. When Deputy Wilber Hendrickson answered, Bob Ashley shot him in the heart. The deputy's wife grabbed a rifle, aimed it at Ashley and frantically yanked the trigger, but the weapon was not loaded. Ashley snatched the deputy's keys and ran toward the jail. But the gun-shot had been heard and men came running. Ashley panicked, dropped the keys and fled. He tried to commandeer a passing delivery truck, pointing his gun at the driver's head. Two Miami police officers overtook him. Officer John R. Riblett, revolver in his hand, tried to take Ashley alive. That mistake was his last. As they struggled, Ashley shot him in the jaw. The officer staggered, Ashley stepped back, took deadly aim and fired again. Struck near the heart, Riblett squeezed off three shots. One went wild, one hit Ashley in the body, the other slammed upward into his jaw and emerged from the top of his head.

His fellow officer rushed Riblett to the hospital. The sheriff quickly arrived and took Ashley there also. His deputy was dead. Riblett died soon after, Miami's first police officer killed in the line of duty. He left a wife and a child.

Despite Ashley's mortal wounds, an angry mob gathered outside the hospital. The sheriff took the dying prisoner to the jail for safekeeping and the lynch mob followed. News reports say that Bob Ashley, frothing red from the mouth, lay on a bunk, in a cell, eyes glazed, “a death rattle in his throat.” The grim sheriff visited John Ashley's cell. Was the young man who killed the jailer and the police officer his brother? Was Ashley aware in advance of the attempt to free him? The prisoner denied knowledge of the aborted jailbreak and was allowed to see his dying brother. Too late—Bob Ashley was already dead when his older brother arrived at his side.

Miamians were jumpy. Rumors flew, amid fears that the well-armed gang was planning to swoop down on the city to exact revenge and free their leader. There was talk that the governor would be called upon to send in the National Guard, but calm was eventually restored.

John Ashley won a new trial and the murder charges were dropped. Convicted of bank robbery in 1916 in West Palm Beach, he was sentenced to seventeen years. After escaping a chain gang, the one-eyed desperado and his gang embarked on a three-year spree of bootlegging, rum-running and hijacking, robbing and plundering along Florida's east coast.

Legends grew in dusty Florida boom towns, some that the gang probably never visited. Every unsolved case of robbery and mayhem in the state was attributed to the notorious gang, including a bank robbery in West End in the Bahamas.

John Ashley was captured again in 1921 and sent to prison. Being jailed may have saved his life. His brothers Ed and Frank were lost at sea in a rum-running caper months later. John escaped again in 1923 and continued his lawless ways.