For Sale —American Paradise (15 page)

Bryan was horrified when he learned that the Bahamian government had no intention of helping the United States enforce Prohibition, and actually was almost gleeful that income from American bootleggers had erased their government's debt.

Rum-running between Florida and the Bahamas was becoming such an annoyance to Bryan that he made a dramatic proposal to end it: The United States should buy the Bahamas from Great Britain, or insist that Great Britain hand them over to pay off its debt to the United States from World War I.

The traffic of seagoing bootleggers had prompted the Ashley Gang to expand its illegal operations. They'd gone into piracy. Armed to the teeth, John Ashley, brothers Ed and Frank, and Kid Lowe would stop small boats loaded with booze from the Bahamas. The gang would force the unlucky bootleggers to hand over their liquor and any cash they might be carrying.

Sometimes, the gang would surprise unlucky bootleggers as they were coming ashore after completing their run. The rum piracy proved to be a lucrative sideline business for the Ashleys.

On June 1, 1921, DeSoto County Sheriff John Poucher got a tip that bootleggers were unloading a shipment of booze at a garage just outside the small town of Wauchula, Florida. When Poucher and a deputy arrived, they searched a car parked outside the garage and found two pistols. Then two men came out of the garage. Unarmed and seeing that they were confronting cops, the men surrendered peacefully and were taken to the county jail.

One of the bootleggers said his name was Davis. He was put into a holding cell.

But the man's face was familiar to one of the other prisoners in the DeSoto
County Jail, who asked for a private word with Sheriff Poucher.

That man's name is not Davis, the prisoner said. That's John Ashley.
The
John Ashley.

Three days later, Ashley was behind bars again in the Florida State Prison in Raiford. Eventually, he was moved to a prison in Holmes County in the Florida Panhandle between Tallahassee and Pensacola. It had been a sizable stretch of freedom—nearly three years—for Ashley. But he did not intend to stay in jail to serve out the remainder of his long term.

The loss of their most slippery member didn't curtail the rest of the gang members from their profitable activities on the seas between Florida and West End. But greed or perhaps the fury of other bootleggers tired of losing their profits to the Ashleys proved fatal to two gang members.

Just after dark on Wednesday, October 19, 1921, Ed and Frank Ashley climbed into a small skiff. The presence of a Coast Guard cutter just off the St. Lucie Inlet near Stuart didn't deter them in the slightest. They ran without lights, and they muffled their small engine so that it was practically noiseless.

Their tactics worked. They slipped past the cutter undetected and began their journey to West End.

The following day, the brothers insisted that their boat be loaded with as much booze as it could possibly carry. Although the Bahamian liquor dealers had no compunctions about selling booze to American bootleggers, they warned Ed and Frank that their boat was too heavily loaded. With typical Ashley bravado, the brothers laughed off the warning and insisted that more booze be loaded.

Still, the sky was threatening and it looked like rough weather was coming. Despite their indifference to the dangers of carrying such a heavy load, the brothers decided to wait a day before leaving.

On Friday, October 21, 1921, the skies were overcast and the seas were choppy—so choppy that the scant freeboard caused by the Ashleys' load of liquor would make for a very dangerous return to Florida in their small boat.

They were advised to wait another day, but Ed and Frank were itching to get their hands on the cash that their haul would bring. With choppy seas licking at their gunwales, the brothers set out for home.

They were never seen again.

John Ashley would later say that the same night his brothers had set out on the choppy seas, he'd had a dream about their fate.

Author Hix Stuart, who claimed to have had the only interview John Ashley ever granted to a writer, later wrote about Ashley's dream.

“He seemed to hover right over the liquor-
laden skiff as it plowed through the moonlit sea,” Stuart wrote. “Suddenly out of the night appeared another craft, larger and faster, skimming directly toward his brothers' boat. . . . To Ed and
Frank the contour of the boat placed it as just another rum boat going to the island for a load. But John, in his eerie vantage, recognized its crew of three as Jim White, Bo Stokes, and Alton Davis—hijackers on land and liquor pirates at sea. A fusillade of shots and John awoke, weak and frightened, convinced that something had happened to his brothers.”

Stuart said that Joe Ashley visited his son in prison, and John Ashley told his father about his dream. Not long after, Jim White, Bo Stokes, and Alton Davis disappeared at sea.

Bootleggers mysteriously vanishing on the high seas didn't have the slightest deterrence on the availability of booze in Florida, however. In one of his stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
, Kenneth Roberts reported that prices for bootleg liquor in Miami were low compared to the prices in larger northern cities, where tipplers “have been paying $120 a case for stuff that is only fit for cleaning the nicotine out of pipe stems.”

A case of twelve bottles of scotch whisky that cost $24 in the Bahamas could be bought in Miami for $50—about $690 in twenty-
first-century dollars. Taxi drivers then were selling the booze for $10 a bottle to hotel guests, pocketing $70 in profits in the process, Roberts wrote.

Some cigar stores and newsstands operated punchboards, offering as their top prizes bottles of expensive scotch and rye.

Roberts warned tourists who wanted “to bring back a wee nip of Scotch with them from Florida” to be cautious about how they concealed the booze. All trunks were searched, he said. They were more likely to get away with it if they kept the liquor in hand-
carried luggage.

But Miami's bootleggers had become so sophisticated that they'd devised ways to move large shipments of liquor out of the city right under the noses of federal agents. They'd load a train car with booze, then buy grapefruit or tomatoes or other perishable fruit to cover the whiskey for shipment by rail to wherever it was wanted.

Some of the smugglers owned schooners and made night runs to the Bahamas, where, because of the larger quantity they bought, they paid $18 a case for liquor.

The easy availability of liquor in Miami was infuriating federal agents, who were determined to stop it. By early 1922 they'd been watching bootleg traffic long enough to devise a plan. On March 20, shortly after William Jennings Bryan had proposed that the United States acquire the Bahamas, federal lawmen under Colonel L. G. Nutt, the acting federal Prohibition director, executed raids. Among those hauled in by the federal dragnet was a vice president of a Miami bank, who was charged with conspiracy for allegedly agreeing to be the bagman for a bootlegging transaction. He'd apparently agreed to hold four $1,000 bills and a $50 bill until a shipment of booze was delivered.

The raid was a brief embarrassment for a few Miami officials, but soon the liquor was flowing freely again.

Handford Mobley didn't look like a tough guy. In 1922, Mobley was seventeen years old, small and slender, with delicate, almost effeminate facial features.

But Handford Mobley was John Ashley's nephew, and he greatly admired and looked up to his uncle. And while Uncle John was in jail, Mobley made his bones, so to speak, with the family.

Business was usually quiet in the mid-afternoons at the Bank of Stuart, so when two people walked into the lobby at that time on May 22, 1922, the only others in the bank were the cashiers.

E. P. Hyer was in a teller's cage filing checks when the pair walked in. He was absorbed in his task and didn't notice them until he heard someone order him to “throw up my hands.”

“I was too busy to pay much attention to the first order, but when someone repeated it and shoved a .45 caliber revolver in my face through the bars of the cage, I realized it was a holdup and complied,” Hyer told the
Palm Beach Post
.

The young man who shoved the gun in Hyer's face was J. Clarence Middleton. He was nattily attired in what was referred to as a Palm Beach suit—a lightweight white suit with a double-breasted jacket. With him was “a young fellow disguised as a woman wearing a heavy black veil,” Hyer said.

The young man in drag was Handford Mobley. He also carried a revolver.

Mobley started shoving cash into a pillowcase, then ordered cashier Percy Fuge to open the bank vault. Fuge fiddled with the vault's locking mechanism, but instead of opening it, he activated the time lock so that the vault could not be opened.

An unfortunate customer came into the bank to make a deposit. Apparently, the gang had finally realized that it was best to bring their own driver when they pulled a stickup, and the customer was followed into the bank by Roy Matthews, who was driving the getaway car. Matthews had blackened his face with soot or burnt cork as a disguise.

In his haste to cram as much cash as possible into the pillowcase, Middleton spilled trays of silver coins onto the floor. He ordered the customer to pick up the silver.

Meanwhile, Mobley was getting impatient with Fuge for not opening the vault. Brandishing his pistol, Mobley sneered, “Open that vault or I'll blow your brains out.”

“It's too late now, boys,” Fuge replied. “I've already set the time lock on it.”

Mobley was infuriated, but did not carry out his threat to kill Fuge. The robbers left with about $8,100. The vault had contained another $20,000.

The robbers drove around Stuart a few times to confuse anyone trying to follow them, then crossed the St. Lucie River and headed north toward Fort Pierce.

But Palm Beach County Sheriff Robert Baker—the former jailer who had succeeded his father as sheriff—wasn't thrown off by the trick, and set off after them.

Baker chased the fugitives for more than two hundred miles. The gang eluded Baker near the town of Sebring, but Baker telephoned a description of the gang to police in nearby towns.

Mobley and Middleton checked into a hotel in Plant City, but the clerk became suspicious, and when the two went to their room, he called the cops.

When the police arrived, the two men had left. But an alert motorcycle cop arrested the pair at a nearby train station. They each had a ticket to Savannah, Georgia.

A man thought to have been the third robber managed to slip aboard the northbound Seaboard Air Line train. The train's conductor told police a passenger said he'd lost his ticket and paid for his fare in cash.

Mobley and Middleton—who told the police his name was J. Clarence Jones—had about $2,300 on them when they were captured. Mobley seemed to enjoy bantering with lawmen after he'd been arrested. He said he didn't have the rest of the money. He told the cops an imaginative tale about being forced at gunpoint to rob the bank by two threatening accomplices they'd just met in a nearby park. Those two men had the rest of the money from the robbery, Mobley said.

“Mobley gave every outward evidence of being very chipper and rather pleased with himself,” the
Palm Beach Post
reported. “He had not needed the money, he said, always had plenty of money, one or two thousand dollars, but he liked the excitement.”

A few days later, police in Griffin, Georgia—about forty miles south of Atlanta—arrested Roy Matthews and charged him with being one of the bank robbers.

In October, the three were in the Palm Beach County Jail in West Palm Beach awaiting trial. But on October 25, 1922, a judge ordered their trial postponed because several witnesses for the defense weren't available to testify. Defense attorneys said they hadn't had enough time to summon these key witnesses, who would swear under oath that these young men hadn't been anywhere near Stuart on the day of the robbery.

The three accused robbers did not seem at all concerned about the trial. “They seemed altogether at ease and during the intervals in the court procedure chatted and laughed with relatives and friends,” the
Palm Beach Post
reported.