LITMIR.BIZ

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1949 Life contained a feature article on Miami Beach, referring to the island as the “crown jewel” of South Florida. To be sure, the 1950s once again belonged to the Beach. The island became immensely popular as one of the nation’s hottest vacation spots, especially for the rich. The 1950s saw a return of the glitz and glamour reminiscent of the roaring 1920s. Yet again a new style of architecture emerged, mainly in the central and northern parts of Miami Beach. Art deco was already passé and considered gaudy. In MiMo, short for Miami modern, the square structures with rounded corners and symmetrical ornamentation of art deco made way for a whimsical tropical style that was curvaceous, asymmetric, and daring. The best example of MiMo is the Fontainebleau Hotel, at Collins and 44th Street.

      The Fontainebleau was designed and built in 1953 by Morris Lapidus, whose adage “Too much is never enough”³¹ fit perfectly with the hedonistic disposition of the Beach’s wealthy pleasure seekers. Many critics considered the building a monstrosity and despised its flamboyant style. It became a symbol. With five hundred rooms, the Fontainebleau was double the size of any existing hotel on the Beach. Indeed, it caused problems for a number of smaller hotels in the deco district. Such is the backdrop to Hole in the Head, a movie from the 1950s in which Frank Sinatra plays a struggling small hotel owner on Ocean Boulevard who tries to connect with the tycoons who hang out in the Fontainebleau. Lapidus also designed one of the first outdoor pedestrian malls in the country: Lincoln Road was converted from a heavy-traffic artery into a shopping way for pedestrians in 1960 and promoted as the “Fifth Avenue of the South.”

      In the course of the 1940s and 1950s, Miami Beach’s clientele started to diversify. Besides its customary niche for the rich leisure classes from up north, it began to attract middle-income residents and tourists, northern retirees of more modest means, and Cuban visitors. For a growing number of upper-middle-class Cubans, a vacation in South Florida became a yearly event; for the wealthy, daily shopping trips to Miami were not uncommon. Many of the new residents settled in South Beach, the area roughly equivalent with the deco district. Despite the gradual introduction of air conditioning in the 1950s, the large majority of wintertime people on the Beach were snowbirds. In 1952, for example, the winter population of Miami Beach swelled to about 200,000 while the summer population stood at 45,541 residents.³² The growing Jewish population on the Beach maintained a seasonal character well into the 1950s: “The constant influx of a great number of visitors gave a special character to local Jewish institutions. The synagogues have the highest rate of ‘out-of-town’ attendance in the nation.”³³

      South Florida, and particularly Miami Beach, also continued to be a magnet to organized crime. By the late 1940s, the area was firmly embedded in Mafia networks centered in Chicago and New York, making it the “winter gangster capital of the world.”³⁴ In 1947, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover remarked, “If you put a dragnet around Twenty-third and Collins, and slapped every mobster you caught into jail for life, you’d end organized crime in America.”³⁵ Big mob names from this era include Hymie “Loudmouth” Levin and Jack “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. Miami’s appeal consisted of the weather, beaches, wealthy patrons, lots of entertainment, the absence of state taxes, and relaxed policing.

      Since the end of Prohibition, the main focus of organized crime was on gambling. Some of it was legal, as at the Hialeah racetrack, but most of it was not—there was also much irregular gambling at Hialeah Park and at the dog races. Lottery games, such as Cuban bolitas, targeted people with lower incomes. Miami, Hialeah, Fort Lauderdale, and Hollywood had well-known gambling parlors, but most of the action was on the Beach. Much of the racketeering money was spent lavishly on alcohol, food, women, cars, and entertainment. The Mafia also used its financial prowess to influence elections and public opinion, and to bribe officials. Considerable funds were plowed back into real estate, hotels, industries, and sports.³⁶ Miami Beach hotels owned or controlled by the Mafia around this time included the Wofford, the Boulevard, the Roney, the Grand, and the Sands.

      In 1950, the U.S. Senate appointed the Greater Miami Crime Commission, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, to investigate the escalation of organized crime in Greater Miami. The committee conducted hearings in Dade and Broward counties and reported in detail on key figures, places, practices, and networks. Kefauver branded Miami as a “plunder-ground … for America’s most vicious criminals.”³⁷ The committee’s work received lots of publicity but it did not stop the Mafia from extending its activities.

      One of the leading figures during the 1950s was Meyer Lansky. Born in Russia, he migrated to New York as a child and grew up with the mob. He first visited Miami in 1936 and brought the New York Jewish Mafia along with him. Lansky was known as the chairman of the board of the National Crime Syndicate, one of the biggest criminal organizations of the 1940s and 1950s. The syndicate had close ties to the Cosa Nostra and maintained operations in New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Havana.³⁸ Lansky set up gambling halls across South Florida but especially in Fort Lauderdale, where the competition was less. Many big hotels on the Beach, such as the Fontainebleau and the Singapore, were owned or controlled by the Minneapolis Group, one of Lansky’s corporate fronts. Lansky was one of the most successful mobsters ever. He brilliantly mixed illegal earnings with legal activities and lived a quiet private life. Lansky’s name is inscribed as a benefactor in one of the stained-glass windows of the Synagogue on Third Street. He died at the age of eight-one, in 1983, and never went to jail.

      To add to the mix, in the 1950s Miami was “the underground capital-in-exile for the plotters of revolution in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America” with gunrunning as a major industry.³⁹ In the slightly hyperbolic words of the mob expert and author Hank Messick, Miami was “very much like Casablanca in the forties—a city full of stateless men and women, soldiers of fortune, spies and secret agents, con men of all persuasions, and even a few patriots.”⁴⁰ The most important group of “plotters” was the Cuban exile community that opposed the Batista regime. The Caribbean island, only ninety miles across the southern waters, was about to resume its historical role in the shaping of Miami, and it would do so in dramatic fashion.

      CHAPTER 3

      Extreme Makeover

      A Time magazine article in 1958 reported that “gaudy, gritty Greater Miami” had become “the revolutionary headquarters of the Americas.”¹ The area was referred to as a “plotters’ playground” for Dominicans, Haitians, and especially Cubans who were aiming at the demise of the governments in their home countries. South Florida was the ideal location because it was close by, it had various big and small airports and seaports, and its coastline was like a maze with innumerable winding waterways. In addition, the city’s transient atmosphere and crime networks made it relatively easy to engage in subversive activities.

      It was not the first time that Cubans had used South Florida as a backstage for their political struggles. Ever since the beginnings of armed resistance against Spain in the 1860s, they would at times seek refuge in Key West. From the 1920s onward, Miami was the haven of choice. Since the establishment of the Republic of Cuba in 1902, politics had been erratic and unstable. The island witnessed several irregular transfers of power and occasionally politics turned violent.

      When President Gerardo Machado’s rule took a dictatorial turn in the late 1920s, it caused a flow of refugees to Miami. In 1933, the president was pushed aside in a military coup: his opponents returned home and celebrated while disillusioned machadistas took their place in Miami. Machado himself fled to the Bahamas before settling in Miami. It was a pattern to be repeated several times. Almost two decades later, in 1952, the democratically elected president, Carlos Prio, was unseated in a coup d’état led by General Batista, resulting in the largest number of refugees yet to arrive in South Florida, Prio himself among them. There were about twenty thousand Cubans in South Florida then. For some upper-class Cubans, Miami was familiar terrain as it had been a popular vacation and shopping destination since the 1940s.

      Batista’s government in the 1950s was characterized by corruption and nepotism. Poverty was widespread and the gap between rich and poor was enormous. Havana, with its casinos and famous nightlife, was an important place in American organized crime networks and the Mafia provided

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