For Sale —American Paradise (20 page)

Mobley, Ashley, and other gang members decided that instead of holding up bootleggers on the high seas, they would aim for a fatter target. They would raid the liquor dealers at West End.

Their plan worked almost to perfection. They raided several liquor warehouses and made off with around $8,000 in cash and a boatload of booze. The only flaw in their raid was that shortly before the Ashleys arrived, a government boat had left the harbor with $250,000 in cash.

After more than a decade of chasing John Ashley through the Everglades, it was becoming clear to police that he was practically invincible in his wilderness hideout. Soon, however, a powerful natural force would drive Ashley and his gang out of the Glades, and the cops would take full advantage of that vulnerability.

On October 14, a tropical storm formed in the western Caribbean Sea and quickly morphed into an extremely powerful hurricane. On October 19, the hurricane crossed the western tip of Cuba with winds that may have reached up to 165 miles per hour.

As the storm turned to the northeast and headed toward Florida, it weakened rapidly. By the time it came ashore on the Gulf Coast, it was only a minimal hurricane. Still, it dumped almost a foot of rain as it crossed the Everglades on October 21 and went back to sea.

The drenching downpour made life miserable in the Everglades for John Ashley, Handford Mobley, and other gang members still on the lam from the recent bank robbery in Pompano. Ashley, Mobley, and two other gang members decided they'd had enough of the soggy Glades for a while. They were going north to Jacksonville, planning to perhaps knock off a bank or two along the way. They would lay low in Jacksonville until they figured out their next move.

Their plans didn't include Laura Upthegrove, and she wasn't happy about being left behind. Soon after the hurricane had crossed Florida, Palm Beach County Sheriff Robert Baker learned that Ashley, Mobley, and gang members Ray Lynn and Clarence Middleton would be leaving for Jacksonville on Saturday, November 1. They would be traveling in a Ford.

Baker saw an opportunity to catch Ashley and his remaining gang members away from their protective Everglades, but he knew his movements were constantly being watched, and that if he headed north around the same time as Ashley, his quarry likely would be warned.

Baker was running for reelection on Tuesday, November 4. While he announced that he would be campaigning in Palm Beach County on November 1, he quietly sent four of his deputies north to Fort Pierce, where they reported to St. Lucie County Sheriff J. R. Merritt.

In 1924, there was only one road into Jacksonville from southern Florida, and that route would take Ashley across a wooden bridge over the Sebastian River, about fifteen miles north of Vero Beach. Merritt decided to set up a roadblock at the bridge and grab Ashley there.

Merritt and two of his deputies joined the four Palm Beach County lawmen. Around sundown, they drove north to the bridge.

Merritt left his deputies on the south bank of the Sebastian, drove his car across the bridge, concealed it, and then walked back across the bridge.

The lawmen hung a chain across the entrance to the bridge and attached a red lantern to the chain. They hid in bushes and underbrush beside the road and waited.

Shortly before eleven p.m. a car with two men stopped at the bridge entrance. Moments later the Ford with John Ashley and his gang rolled to a stop behind the first car.

“We waited until they stopped, then came up from behind and covered them with our guns,” Merritt later told the
Evening Independent
of St. Petersburg. “They were caught unawares, being interested in seeing why the car ahead had stopped.

“When we came up alongside, John Ashley saw me first and grabbed for his rifle. I pushed a shotgun in his face and Deputy Wiggins pushed a gun into his ribs at the same time, telling him to throw up his hands or we would blow his head off.”

The cops disarmed the four men and ordered them to get out of the car and stand in front of the headlights.

Merritt later told reporters that he'd ordered the other lawmen to carefully search the four fugitives while he crossed the bridge to get his car, where he'd left his handcuffs. That was a lie, although the truth about what actually happened that night would not be known for more than seventy years.

The lawmen handcuffed John Ashley, Handford Mobley, Ray Lynn, and Clarence Middleton. Their hands were cuffed in front, and they were ordered to raise their hands above their heads and to not move.

Merritt then asked the men who'd arrived at the bridge just ahead of the Ashley Gang to give him a ride across the bridge to get his car to take them back to Fort Pierce. When he got to his car, he sent the men on their way and started back across the bridge in his car.

The cops guarding the gang members were edgy. After the January shoot-out in which his father was killed, John Ashley had said that he would kill any lawman who confronted him.

The deputy guarding John Ashley warned him he'd be shot if he moved. Ashley stood motionless for a few moments, but then made that sudden movement he'd been warned against. He took a quick step forward and started to drop his manacled hands. Maybe he was making a move for a concealed weapon that the cops hadn't found, or maybe the car's headlights had attracted mosquitoes—always plentiful after a hurricane has dumped heavy rains—and he'd been bitten. Whatever the reason, the deputy guarding him fired, and fired again.

Hearing the shots, and perhaps thinking that Ashley was making a move for a gun—or perhaps just waiting for an excuse to shoot—the other lawmen gunned down the other three gang members.

When Sheriff Merritt returned, he and his deputies removed the cuffs, loaded the four corpses into the Ford, and hauled them to an undertaker in Fort Pierce.

But Merritt told the
Evening Independent
a different version of how the four fugitives had died. He said they had not yet been handcuffed.

“When I returned, I stopped my car with the lights shining on the party,” he said. “I got out and went to the side door of my car to get the handcuffs.”

Merritt said the four men had not been searched, and that Ashley “gave a signal and all of the outlaws grabbed for their six-shooters. Then the shooting began,” he said.

A few days later, Merritt told the same story to a hastily convened coroner's jury, and the jury ruled that the shooting of the four gang members had been justified. As unlikely as it would seem that an experienced lawman would not have immediately searched four notoriously dangerous criminals for weapons, or that he would have left handcuffs that he knew he would need on the other side of a long bridge, no one, other than perhaps John Ashley's grieving mother, wanted to punish the men who had finally rid South Florida of the Ashley Gang.

John Ashley, Handford Mobley, and Ray Lynn were buried near the Ashleys' modest home on November 4, 1924.
Miami Herald
reporter George L. Bradley turned the funeral into a maudlin portrait of a mother's grief.

After stifling her emotions while the coffins were carried to the open graves, Lugenia Ashley began sobbing, Bradley wrote.

“There they are—three of them,” she wailed. “They killed them for not a thing in the world.”

Turning her gaze to the grave of her husband who'd been killed in the January gun battle in the Everglades, she said, “He never wanted to harm a hair on anybody's head.”

“It's [Sheriff] Bob Baker's work,” she concluded. “We never did anything to him. I hope he's paralyzed tomorrow and they have to feed him out of a spoon for the rest of his life.”

Decades later, author Ada Coats Williams interviewed the deputy who'd killed John Ashley at the Sebastian River bridge on November 1, 1924. She never identified the deputy, but she later quoted him in her 1996 book,
Florida's Ashley Gang
.

“He did not credit Sheriff Merritt with any of the shooting,” Williams wrote. “He also did not apologize for his act. He made good a threat to John Ashley, and said that John had promised to kill all of them if he had a chance.”

A part of the wild Florida frontier died the night that John Ashley and his gang members were gunned down on the banks of the Sebastian River. Their violent deaths, coming at the moment that a growing tide of fortune seekers was beginning to flood Florida, also marked the end of the first phase of the Florida land boom.

The people pouring into Florida would be just as eager as the Ashley Gang had been to grab all of the money they could and run; they would just use different methods to snatch their riches.

On the day after Ashley, Mobley, Lynn, and Middleton were killed, an advertisement for Coral Gables was published in the
Atlanta Constitution
.

“The tropical beauty which appears in such overflowing abundance is only one of the many attractive phases,” the advertising copy read. “Certainly no state in the Union holds such unlimited opportunity for profitable investment as Florida does today.”

Coral Gables developer George Merrick was an honest man trying to build something beautiful, but many of those who followed his lead had no such scruples. The new robbers coming into Florida didn't need guns to get rich; all they had to do was play on the greed of other newcomers who wanted to make a quick fortune without having to think about it too much. They would be ripe for the picking.

CHAPTER FIVE

B
Y THE WINTER OF
1924–25, G
ILDA
G
RAY HAD COME A LONG, LONG WAY FROM
the old neighborhood in the Milwaukee suburb of Cudahy, where she had been known as Marianna Michalska.

Gray came to the United States as a child with her family from what is now Poland in 1909. In January 1925, she was twenty-
three years old and in her second marriage, having danced her way onto Broadway with the Ziegfeld Follies. Her sinuous dancing had even caught the attention of that darling of the Jazz Age, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentioned her in a scene in his classic 1925 novel,
The Great Gatsby
.

Her journey from Milwaukee's saloons to Broadway's salons had been made possible by a trademark dance known as “the shimmy”—a shivering, shuddering, twitching dance that, combined with her striking Slavic beauty, had made her a Roaring Twenties icon of sexual allure.

She was just what the developers of Hollywood-
by-
the-Sea were looking for to help them sell their new planned city near Fort Lauderdale, just up the coast from Miami. Gray and her touring dance troupe were booked for a two-month appearance at the Hollywood Golf and Country Club. She would dance to music provided by one of the big-name jazz orchestras of the era, the Arnold Johnson Orchestra, whose arranger would later write the musical score for the movie
The Wizard of Oz
.

Gray's opening-night performance would be December 31, 1924, when she would ring in Florida's star-studded New Year of 1925. Hollywood-by-the-Sea's publicists blanketed Miami newspapers with ads for the lavish production. The prose walked the line between being titillating and scholarly, explaining Gray's signature dance as one she devised after “an exhaustive study of the folklore and traditions of dancing in the islands of the South Sea.”

It was a tribal love dance, and Miss Gray had added her own “subtle innovations.”

“How She Shivers, How She Shimmers,” proclaimed a full-
page ad in the
Miami Daily News
for Gray's appearance at the Hollywood Golf and Country Club.

From December until March, Gray's name would appear regularly in local newspapers, and her shows during the 1924–25 season would accomplish exactly what the developers of Hollywood-
by-the-Sea had hoped—get the attention of the crowds flocking to Florida that winter, and get the name of their project into newspapers across the United States.

The terms of Gray's contract were not announced publicly. One report said she'd received a couple of choice waterfront lots in Hollywood-
by-the-Sea in exchange for her services; another said she was being paid $3,500 a week—more than $46,000 in twenty-first-century dollars.

Other Miami-area businesses hired Gray to add a touch of daring glamor to their images. Burdines Department Store hired her and some of her dancers to model their new spring fashions. Burdines then partnered with a horse-
racing
track, and Gray wore the store's fashions to a race.

Nationally syndicated sportswriter and author Ring Lardner was at the track that day, on his way to the betting window to place a wager on a horse named Gray Gables—a hot tip, at ten-
to-one odds—when photographers spotted him and persuaded him to pose with Gilda Gray. Lardner was so taken with Gray that the betting window closed before he could get his money down.

Gray Gables won. Lardner lost a chance to pocket some quick cash, but he wrote a column about his chance meeting with Gray that was read by millions in the United States and Canada.

The 1920s were becoming a golden age for sports. At the same time Gilda Gray was shimmying her way to a small fortune in Hollywood-
by-the-Sea, Major
League baseball players were coming to Florida to start spring training. Ten of the sixteen big league teams would get ready for the 1925 season in Miami, St. Petersburg, and other Florida cities.