Ron Chepesiuk

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This well researched book chronicles, through fascinating profiles, the rise of the gangster in Miami and the history of crime in one of America’s most exciting and edgy cities.

Rising from a swampy flatland a little more than a century ago, Miami has grown to become a trend setting metropolis known for tourism, fashion, nightlife and style. Miami is also the edgy city of Hollywood’s “Scarface” Tony Montana, television’s Miami Vice and popular culture’s “Cocaine Cowboy.” Gangsters of Miami digs beyond the headlines and fantasy to provide a close up look at the real role that mobsters, gamblers, hit men, con men and other gangsters have played in making American’s youngest city also one of its most fascinating.

Known as the Magic City, Miami has been the home for a colorful variety of gangsters from its early days to the modern period. They include the notorious smugglers of the Prohibition era, famous mobsters like Al Capone and Meyer Lansky who helped make Miami a gambling Mecca, the Cuban Mafia, La Compania (The Company), which arrived after Cuba fell to Castro, the Colombian cartels during the cocaine explosion, the Russian mafia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the street gangs that plagued Miami after the advent of crack cocaine.

Gangsters of Miami investigates the police and governmental corruption that has plagued the Magic City since its early days
“Gangster of Miami” is a lively and well documented account of Miami’s gangs and gangsters. As he did with Gangsters of Harlem and Black Gangsters of Chicago, investigative journalist Ron Chepesiuk shows that fact can be more riveting than fiction.

The King of Thunderboat Row

TODAY THE TREE-LINED, quarter-mile-long northeast 188th Street between Biscayne Bay and the Intracoastal Waterway is a part of the South Florida planned community of Aventura. Th e community is quiet and soberly middle class with its condos, award-winning public schools, exclusive Founder’s Park, a recreation center, and Aventura Mall, an impressive 2.4-million-square-foot structure. Gone from 188th Street is the energy of Thunderboat Row, a strip of powerboat manufacturing companies that made the location a dynamic center of U.S. powerboat racing in the 1980s.

The creator of this entrepreneurial racing hub was the charismatic and ruggedly handsome Don Aronow, who bhad a legendary reputation as a racer and designer of speedy powerboats. In 1987 Aronow was fi fty-nine years old, but at 6 feet, 3 inches and a solid 215 pounds he still resembled the young man who was once invited to take a Hollywood screen test for the role of Tarzan.

John Crouse, who acted as Aronow’s public relations manager for twenty years, remembered his boss as “dynamic, full of life and fi re, an exciting man all the time. Very bright, very competitive. He lived to laugh. He lived a full time. He didn’t miss a beat.” Aronow was a keen competitor in every aspect of life, including, according to the local gossip, the bedroom. “I’ve had every woman at this table,” he once whispered to a friend at a dinner party.

Aronow had won more than 300 off shore races and set 25 world speed records, and the world’s rich and famous, many of whom were eager to keep his company, spent millions buying his boats. In one early 1987 deal Aronow’s company provided one of his famous cigarette boats for the Sultan of Brunei. Aronow had named the vessel “Cigarette” after a boat owned by a notorious rum-running highjacker during Prohibition. Some of the boats, which cost $1 million a piece, contained a 3,000-horse power engine.

Among the international celebrities and public figures Aronow counted as friends and acquaintances were King Juan Carlos of Spain; Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco; Charles Keating, who later became involved in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal; Sir Max Aitken, the son of the British press baron; and Malcolm Forbes, the publisher of Forbes magazine. One friend, King Hussein of Jordan, introduced Aronow to his former girlfriend, Lillian Crawford, a one-time Wilhelmina agency model, who later became Aronow’s wife. Aronow’s celebrity pals included no less a distinguished public figure than George Bush, then the vice president of the United States.

On January 3, 1984, Bush came to Miami to accept thanks from a civic group known as the Miami Citizens Against Crime that two years earlier had sought and received the vice president’s backing for an unprecedented campaign to stop the flow of illegal drugs into South Florida from Latin America. Bush had spent the week prior bone fishing in the Florida Keys. In Miami he gave a speech at the posh Omni
International Hotel after arriving with Aronow from Islamorada in the Florida Keys via an oceangoing 39-foot catamaran with its 870-horse power engine. The powerboat cost about $150,000, had a range of 300 miles, and traveled at speeds up to sixty miles an hour. Mark McManus, a vice president of Aronow’s powerboat company, U.S. Racing, acknowledged: “To tell the truth, it was made to run people down.”

It is always good to have friends in high places, especially a vice president of the United States. Bush helped Aronow secure a lucrative contract with the U.S. Customs Service to help it battle the country’s ongoing war on drugs. Customs bought twelve of Aronow’s cigarette boats for $150,000 each and named their acquisitions “Blue Th under.” It was the first time the federal agency used specially designed interceptor boats rather than relying on boats it had seized from drug traffickers. Aronow had unveiled the cigarette powerboat model on March 22, 1969, in the Long Beach to Ensenada Regatta, an event in which he destroyed a strong field of competitors in record time.

The King of Thunderboat Row, as he was called used the 32-foot cigarette to win eight international races and set the off shore powerboat speed record at a little over 72 miles per hour in Italy’s 214-mile Viareggio-Bastia-Viareggio Race. Refined over the years, the cigarette continued to dominate the racing circuit into the 1970s and 1980s. The Cigarette mystique was enhanced in the mid-1980s when the popular “Miami Vice” television show featured the boat as the vehicle used for the drug-dealing and gangster characters operating in the Miami area.

“MIAMI VICE” REFLECTED the reality of life in Miami and South Florida in the late 1980s. Th e city was the nexus of the Latin American illegal drug trade, and the profits from drug trafficking were believed to be greater than the profits from all of Miami’s legitimate businesses combined. “In those days in Miami, it was difficult to pick up a dollar bill that didn’t have traces of cocaine on it,” recalled Lew Rice, a retired U.S. Drug Enforcement (DEA) agent and author of DEA Special Agent: My Life on the Front Line, who served in Miami from 1984 to1986. “The Colombian cartels had imported ruthless killers to Miami to do their dirty business. The daily newspapers were filled with headline stories about shootouts at shopping malls and business districts throughout the city. The violence was out of control.” A passing car of drug traffickers had even machine-gunned to death owner-driver Tommy Adams on Interstate 95.

The amount of money that Miami’s illegal drug industry generated was perhaps unlike anything seen in the history of criminality. A kilo of 100 percent pure cocaine that sold for $10,000, in Colombia, the center of Latin America’s cocaine production, could fetch as much as $65,000 a kilo in the United States. After the pure cocaine was diluted, the sale price jumped to as much as $130,000 per kilo. T. D. Allman, in his book Miami: City of the Future, graphically described what the Miami scene was like in the late 1980s: “In Miami, you could refuse to take drugs. You could refuse to associate with people who use them. You could even isolate yourself from drugs, if you were rich enough. But whatever you did, drugs would be a part of your life.”

Miami’s illicit drug industry had corrupted almost every activity in the city, and off shore power racing was no exception. In the 1980s more than a dozen prominent members of the local powerboat-racing group were convicted of drug trafficking and related crimes. In the mid-1980s, for instance, George Morales, the 1985 powerboat-racing champion, was winning races while moonlighting as a big-time cocaine smuggler. He was sentenced to two concurrent sixteen-year sentences after pleading guilty to three charges of drug smuggling. In January 1987 the owner of Midnight Express in Opa Locka,

Florida, another manufacturer of high-powered speedboats, admitted working as a money launderer for drug traffickers. As a penalty the company agreed to build $500,000 worth of fast boats for the U.S. Customs Service. “At one time, two-thirds of the people involved in off shore power racing were directly involved in drugs,” John Crouse, a former powerboat racer and the author of a book about the history of off shore racing, claimed in an October 1996 interview with the Fort Lauderdale (Florida) Sun-Sentinel. “You had guys running around there in racing boats without any source of income … or at least not any source that was reportable.”

Greg Smith, a retired Miami Dade homicide detective, said that, as happened in so many sectors of Miami society in the late 1970s and 1980s, greed corrupted the powerboat industry. “The racers were making good money from racing, but they knew they could still make a lot more money from drug smuggling,” Smith explained. “They would offload a couple thousand pounds of marijuana to a go-boat, bring it ashore, and make $10,000 for a night’s work. It was so easy.”

It is certain that Aronow’s boats ended up in the hands of drug traffickers, but the type of relationship he had with them is unclear. Close friends and family members shot down the suspicion that he had a connection to the bad guys. One associate even claimed that Aronow had once returned money to a prospective client after learning he was doing business with a drug dealer.

But according to retired DEA agent Paul Teresi, who was Special Agent in Charge of the DEA’s Fort Lauderdale office in the late 1980s, Aronow “hung out with people who had respectable reputations and he hung out with the bad guys. He liked to live on the edge.”

One comment that Aronow made about the utility of his powerboats did not reassure the authorities. In 1979 Aronow told Sports Illustrated: “I would estimate that for $65,000 or maybe less you could put together a top racing boat, a 35-40 footer fully equipped with twin 454-cubic inch MerCruiser engines, outsized 350-440 gallon fuel tankers, sophisticated navigation and radio gear, the works.” In short, Aronow’s boat could have everything a drug trafficker needed in a vessel to outrun the authorities.

YET TO THE good citizens of Miami, Aronow’s life story and accomplishments as an entrepreneur and boat racer made him a bigger than life legend. Born poor in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, to a family hit hard economically in the Great Depression, Aronow was an outstanding athlete in high school and very popular among his peers. He married a pretty girl named Shirley Parker and eventually quit his lowly job teaching high school physical education to join his wife’s father in the construction industry. Everything the young contractor built—houses, shopping centers, and an industrial park—seemed to turn a profit, and he made a fortune in construction while he was still in his twenties.

But Aronow found that success had come too easy and he grew bored with the construction industry. He became a boating enthusiast, and in August 1961, after sailing his 40-foot custom-built boat up the Hudson River to pick up his sister Claudia and brothers Michael and David from summer camp, Aronow announced he was quitting construction and leaving his home in New Jersey. He settled in Miami, where he spent much of his time at the marina where he kept his boat. Hearing the buzz about the upcoming Miami-Nassau powerboat race spurred him to enter the race, even though he had no experience racing. He could have won the race, but one of the engines of his boat, Claudia, blew a clutch.

But Aronow had found his passion in life. He won his first race in 1964, and three years later at age forty he garnered his first world championship. As his racing reputation grew, he was not shy about trying to intimidate the competition. In a January 2007 Men’s Vogue article, Doug Silver, who raced against Aronow, described his opponent’s aggressive style: “We’d be racing in rough seas, taking a terrible pounding. Don would come along and grin from ear to ear, then take off . God, he was so demoralizing.”

It was easy to be in awe of Big Don: he would win races while flirting with disaster and he survived numerous boat crashes and crippling injuries. For instance, in the 1967 Gateway Marathon to the Bahamas Race, his boat exploded. The following year his boat caught fi re in the Miami-Nassau Race, and in another race, his Donzie 15 boat jumped so high off the water that its deck clipped the skids of a press helicopter.

After that close call, Aronow asked Norris “Knocky” House, his longtime navigator, what he planned to do when they docked the boat. “Get in the shower,” Knocky said. Aronow quipped: “I get in the shower first. I own the boat.”

In 1975 Aronow explained: “People always ask if I have a death wish, but that’s stupid. I do like a challenge. I’m not a gambler in business, just a gambler in sports.” Aronow became as good at building boat manufacturing companies and designing boats as he was at off shore powerboat racing. He founded a series of boat companies, including Formula Marine, Donzi Marine, Magnum Marine, the Cigarette Racing Team, and U.S. Racing, all located on Thunderboat Row, and then made a nice profit when he sold them. He remained a consultant to the off shore powerboat industry while operating Aronow Stables, a successful racehorse-breeding farm in Ocala, Florida. One of his horses, Prince Charming, won $235,000 and was scheduled to race in the 1986 Kentucky Derby but missed it because of a leg fracture.

LIFE COULD NOT be better for the King of Thunderboat Row. To the good citizens of Miami Don Aronow seemed indestructible. That is why the events of February 3, 1987, which came with a staccato of gunshots in broad daylight, shocked the city.
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