The 1987 murder of Miami powerboat legend Don Aronow captivated the international boating scene. The case’s twists, turns and seemingly never-ending cast of characters leaves the killing a mystery to this day. People have tried to make sense of it, only productions misinformation along the way.
VÉHICULE’s in-depth exposé clears the air around the case, bringing you just the facts and illuminates some of the Miami scene’s most prominent characters and places, including Ben Kramer, Rocky Aoki, Betty Cook and the famed Fort Apache.
Excerpt from Paradise Lost: The Rise and Fall of Ben Kramer. Read the full story in the VÉHICULE print edition.
Maybe he was at peace knowing that he had started simplifying his life. He knew this day would come eventually, in one way or another, so his affairs were in relative order. The few companies that he still owned were to be liquidated within a year of his death, per his wishes. Maybe he was thinking about the 60th birthday that he would never have. It was only a month away. Maybe he felt anger—at himself for not thinking more of the hang-up calls that had been coming in at his house over the past few weeks, or at his foes for going so far with their revenge. Or maybe, in his final breaths, Don was pondering his legacy—the legacy that he had so carefully been building over the years. Maybe he would be thought of as a hero. He had a good run."
“Anglos tend to work the marijuana trade, while the cocaine market is controlled by Colombians and Cubans. No matter what their specialty, the illegal entrepreneurs can be easily spotted. Young Anglos wearing scruffy Levi’s and T-Shirts, gold Rolex watches and ropes of gold chain sit around the marinas waiting for the next call from a mother ship. Current pay for one night’s work piloting a ‘Cigarette’ averages $50,000, while the wages for unloading the bales are $5,000 to $10,000 a night.”
—Time Magazine, November 23, 1981, “Paradise Lost”
Ben Kramer was not only one of those “Young Anglos” but used his money made in the drug business to build up his own powerboat company “Apache Powerboats” which he also regularly participated in offshore races with.
In the summer of 1977, two years after bailing out of prison and fleeing law enforcement for marijuana smuggling, Kramer was nabbed again. In something that could only be characterized as a lucky coincidence, a Hollywood police officer went to pull over a Cigarette that happened to be driven by Kramer. Kramer gave the officer the finger, pinned the throttle through a no-wake zone, and left the cop in a cloud of spray. Backup was called, eventually leading to the service of a plane being enlisted. Kramer felt the heat and made the split-second decision to beach his boat and flee on foot. He was captured shortly thereafter. He pled guilty to importation of cannabis and violating state probation, and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Kramer’s sentence ended up being one marked by anything but rehabilitation, and he went right back to his old ways upon release. Federal authorities said he ran a criminal enterprise that distributed more than 500,000 pounds of marijuana nationwide between 1983 and 1986.
Powerboat mogul Don Aronow, shot dead in his car February 3, 1987, was Ben Kramer’s idol. To Ben, he was a father, an uncle, an older brother and a friend all rolled into one. Ben had made a habit of popping in to see Don at his office as a teenager, and he was always welcomed. The young Kramer was always curious and always complimentary—and Don wasn’t one to say no to a compliment. Don was the reason that Ben was so infatuated by boats and going fast.
Kramer, at the time reigning U.S. open class offshore powerboat champion, was arrested four months after the Don Aronow killing and sentenced to life in prison as a “drug super kingpin”. He was later charged with the murder of Don Aronow…
We deal with the real-world events that accompanied some of powerboating's most pivotal moments. History, up until now, has been written by the so-called victors. We document all sides of the story, bringing them to light and presenting the facts for consideration.
Read more about the rise and fall of Kramer and Aronow in VÉHICULE. #FREEBENKRAMER
]]>Watch the never before published, uncut footage of Yves Belanger's epic RAZZ Miami powerboat runs.
Belanger, a Canadian powerboat racer, is considered one of the greatest powerboat racers of all time. In this video, we see him in action as he speeds through the Miami waters in his RAZZ Apache 41' powerboat.
]]>Fort Apache Marina was Thunderboat Row's legendary high-rise boat storage facility and waterfront bar and restaurant. Founded by Ben Kramer and his father Jack in the early '80s, it was the crown jewel of an otherwise industrial 188th Street.
VÉHICULE was entrusted with this dispatch from a manager who operated Fort Apache in the post-Ben Kramer years.
“In 1995, I found myself in the position of general manager of the most notorious high-performance marina in the country. It was an amazing place—just walking around the marina, I could feel the history that was made there. Everything that went on there was present.
If I were to tell anyone about Fort Apache, I would have to start with the fact that the place was true to its name. It was, no doubt, built to be a fortress.
Like any good fortress, there were secrets. For example, there was a secret helicopter hangar underneath the boat storage racks that we had behind the restaurant. It took less than ten minutes to pull the helicopter out between the buildings, unfold the rotors and get into the air. Also enabling a quick escape was the secret elevator and system of hallways. These were above the restaurant and behind the brokerage offices.
And it was a lavish fortress. There was an area above the restaurant that was nearly all glass, which was Kramer’s office. This gave him a perfect view of the entire place. Leading up to that office was an enclosed hallway connected to a lobby area. That lobby had a beautiful reception desk and a giant wooden Indian statue with carved feathers running from head to toe. It had to be ten feet tall and weigh about a ton. I would be very interested to know what ended up happening with that thing.
On the right side of that hallway were smaller offices, I think there were three of them. We used them as sales offices when I was there.
Something that was pointed out to me when I was first hired was that I should be careful up in those offices.The doors to those offices were over two inches thick and had five hinges. If anyone caught their fingers in those doors, they would for sure lose them. I gathered that whatever may happen in those offices could not and should not be heard on the other side.Those offices all shared a rear hallway. This shared hallway had a private elevator that would take you to the parking lot on the east side of the building. Next to those parking lots was the Apache factory, so the back entrance would make coming and going a quiet affair.
Next to the dock area where the big forklifts put boats in the water, there was a larger pit where a travel lift would be used to take very big boats out of the water. If you were in a boat and pulled it into the pit when the tide was low (like it would be in the middle of the night…), the walls of the pit were high enough to hide the boat from view if you were standing on the surface above.
One afternoon I was returning from water-testing a boat that had been in for service work. When I pulled back in, I saw that all the dock space was taken. So I pulled the boat into the pit to tie it up until a dock was open, and from there I could pull the boat out with the forklift. When I pulled into the pit and began to look around, I noticed how there were these long, vertical strips of wood running from the top of the pit down into the water.
I had never seen anything like this before. Most marinas would just have bare walls. Sometimes they were painted, and sometimes they were just bare concrete. To me, the wood seemed like it was just there for decoration and not for any structural purpose. Knowing the Fort though, I was curious.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that some of the wooden pieces had horizontal cuts in them. I started to push on them and noticed that these cut pieces had some give to them. My curiosity grew and I pulled. It turns out that the panel was actually a metal door camouflaged by wood. The metal door opened up to reveal a huge metal compartment. There were somewhere between six and eight of these camouflaged doors and compartments.
As far as I could tell, these compartments were there so that you could pull your boat up at low tide under the cover of darkness and unload your cargo into these hidden rooms. These rooms would have had no place at a marina, so I can only imagine that the Fort was much more than just a marina.”
Read more about Ben Kramer and his friends in VÉHICULE.
]]>Growing up in Tokyo, Rocky's wrestling talent earned him a spot in Japan's 1960 Olympic team and a college scholarship in Massachusetts. He won three consecutive AAU titles and was inducted into America's National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Aoki opened the first Benihana in 1964 with $10,000 he made selling ice cream from a Mr. Softee truck in Harlem. By 1975, he'd opened 25 restaurants.
Before he launched Genesis, the porn magazine, he opened the exclusive Club Genesis, a six-story complex – housing a game room, a fine French restaurant and a disco – for the rich and famous. He lost two million dollars on the club, which he opened in 1972 and closed a year later. "I found that high-society people are the cheapest people in the world," Rocky told his biographer about the venture.
Aoki participated almost annually in the famous Cannonball Run road race. In 1985, when the 31-state cross-country contest was legally sanctioned and renamed "One Lap Around America", Aoki drove a 1959 Rolls-Royce that he'd souped up with two telephones, two stereos, a TV, bathroom facilities, a microwave oven and two tuxedoed chauffeurs.
Simultaniously to learning Backgammon, winning a world title only four years after starting to play, he started the Benihana Offshore Grand Prix which he himself won in 1979.
In late 1979, during a training run to prepare for the next Benihana Grand Prix, Rocky caught air going 80mph in the San Francisco Bay, destroying his speedboat and damn near himself. He touched down under the Golden Gate Bridge with a broken arm, a shattered leg, a torn aorta, and his liver split in two.
Rocky awoke from a hospital bed in San Francisco to find his then-wife, Chizuru Aoki, and his mistress, Pamela Hilburger, standing over him (their first time meeting). In a New York Magazine interview, he recalled,"I'm completely naked, tube in my Penis. I see my wife standing over me, on the one side. On the other side, I see my girlfriend… I say 'ohhh… shiiiiit!'." Chizuru divorced him soon after.
He returned to offshore powerboat racing three years after his nearly fatal accident, winning the 1982 Benihana Grand Prix once again!
Oh yeah and he also held a 34-year record for the longest balloon flight. In 1981, Aoki and three other man made a 5,208 mile balloon ride across the Pacific. They set sail from Nagashima, Japan and crash-landed 84.5 hours later in the mountains of Northern California during a driving rainstorm. Aoki was knocked unconscious in the landing and was later quoted: "If you are afraid to die, you are probably afraid to live."
Among Aoki's 7 kids from three women are Steve Aoki, the globe-trotting DJ and Grammy-nominated music producer and Devon Aoki, a supermodel and actress who starred in Sin City and 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Read more about Rocky and fellow offshore powerboat racers in VÉHICULE.
]]>Alfonso Muñoz for VÉHICULE
If you were competing in American sportscar racing in the 1980s, there was a good chance one of your competitors on the track was involved in drug smuggling, was a murdered or any kind of outlaw. So many former competitors were eventually convicted of drug running that IMSA earned the nickname of “The International Marijuana Smugglers Association”. The most twisted year in the world of motorsport in the United States was undoubtedly 1984. By the second race of the 1984 Camel GT Championship season on the track you could have found a serial killer, several drug smugglers, and the son of a fugitive accused of murder and drug dealing who to this day is still missing (or hidden).
20 years old Rosario Gonzales was last seen on February 26, 1984, at the Miami Grand Prix racetrack, where she was working at a temporary job distributing samples of aspirin for a pharmaceutical company. Witnesses stated that she left the Grand Prix track between noon and 1:00 p.m. on February 26, 1984, with a Caucasian man in his thirties. Her blue 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass was found parked near Dupont Plaza.
The suspect was Australian-born Christopher Wilder, a wealthy race-car driver who lived in an estate in Boynton Beach, Florida. Wilder participated in the Miami Grand Prix where he raced in the IMSA GTU class in a Porsche 911.
Chistopher Wilder was put on probation in 1980 after pleading guilty to attempted sexual battery towards a teenage girl. While on a visit home to Australia that same year, he was charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulting two teenage girls. His parents bailed him out of jail, and he flew back to the United States, promising to return for his trial which was set for April 1984. Wilder has been linked to at least a dozen disappearances, rapes, murders and/or attacks of women in the early to mid-1980s. He sometimes attempted to lure young female victims by offering non-existent "modeling sessions" or other tactics.
Chistopher Wilder Wanted Poster
Rosario Gonzales was an aspiring model at the time of her disappearance and had participated in the Miss Florida beauty contest. Her remains were never found, and her case remains unsolved.
Wilder went on a killing spree later in 1984 where he traveled across the United States, abducting, raping, torturing, and killing women along the way. He was killed in a struggle with police officers in New Hampshire in the late spring of 1984. Since his death he has also been considered a suspect in many unsolved murders.
Another driver in this competition was Randy Thomas Lanier. In fact, Lanier won the 1984 IMSA championship representing an independent team, beating factory efforts, seemingly without sponsors. This was because Lanier was funding the team through a sophisticated marijuana smuggling scheme that involved speed boats and a specially modified barge.
At age 15 Randy Lanier was selling marijuana to his classmates and students at his school. He said that it was more about the perks than the profit. “Honestly, I didn’t even think about it as drug dealing,” Lanier says. “It was just a way for me to smoke without having to pay for it.”
Randy In the pits, circa 1984.
He dropped out of school and started working in construction, where he started selling weed to his coworkers. In some time, joints turned into bags, and bags into bricks. Bricks then became bales. The future race car driver made so much money that at age 19, he bought a 27-foot-long Magnum Sport speedboat for $18,000.
At first, he used the boat for fun and pleasure, but it took only a few months for an associate to suggest that the boat could be put to commercial use. And that’s when he went from being a drug dealer to a drug trafficker. The first illicit work on his boat was carried out from the Bahamas, Lanier packed 750 pounds of weed into the boat, motored back to Fort Lauderdale, and pocketed about $5,000 for his effort.
Apparently, Lanier started to like things fast, fast cars, fast boats, and fast money. The only thing he didn't have was time to launder the money. By the year 1982 Randy no longer moved with just a boat, but with an entire fleet. Shipments, Lanier says, would routinely exceed 100,000 pounds.
Press Kit of the Blue Thunder Racing Team
This same year Lanier made a deal with a high school friend named Ben Kramer, who had recently been released from prison for marijuana trafficking. Kramer had introduced Lanier to traffickers in Colombia. The connection meant that Lanier no longer needed an intermediary to make the sale, but rather that he could buy directly from the producer in South America.
In one of the first large-scale transactions, Lanier, and Kramer, in true Miami Vice style, bought a load of 15,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia, and with a loaded ship in the middle of the Atlantic they coordinated the mission to unload it to many small inflatable Zodiac boats. When the operation was successful and the cargo arrived back on the US coast, a human chain of unloaders moved the cargo to the vans waiting to receive the cargo to Lanier's stash house. The next day, he sold the entire 15,000-pound load for nearly $4.5 million.
The Blue Thunder Marches of Bill Whittington and Randy Lanier, sponsored by Apache Powerboats, dominated the 1984 Camel GT season with six wins, giving the title to Lanier.
Between his millionaire business as a trafficker Lanier began his racing career in 1980. After participating in a couple of amateur races Randy gained enough experience to enter the IMSA circuit. During these same years, Lanier had joined up with a trio of brothers, Don, Bill, and Dale Whittington. Together, along with Marty Hinze, they made up the Blue Thunder Racing Team.
The Whittington Brothers, Don and Bill, were famous for winning the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans with a Porsche 935 K3. The Whittington’s raced aircraft prior to cars, Bill having won aircraft races at Reno between 1978 and 1983. Turned out that two of the brothers, Bill and Don, like Randy Lanier, were also involved in large-scale marijuana trafficking.
In 1979, the brothers purchased and operated the Road Atlanta circuit, where they allegedly landed planes filled with contraband on the back straight in the middle of the night.
Don Whittington poses with John and Peg Bishop in front of one of the Whittington brother's Porsche 935s and a Mustang P-51 at Brainerd.
Randy Lanier won the 1984 IMSA Camel GT title for the independent Blue Thunder Racing team, a team who financed themselves thanks to marijuana smuggling, the reason that led Lanier to prison in 1988. Lanier and his partner Ben Kramer received life without parole sentences on October 4, 1988, under the newly enacted Continuing Criminal Enterprise statute (also known as the "Super Drug Kingpin" law), owing to their refusal to cooperate with the prosecution. The Whittington brothers who were also involved received a lighter sentence.
The ’84 champ was eventually released in 2014 for reasons undisclosed under sealed motions. Lanier stated that he had a job awaiting him at a classic car museum in Florida, said to be for Preston Henn, owner of Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop. He spent his time in prison exercising, playing chess, answering letters sent by race fans and taking long walks in the prison yard with fellow inmate John Paul Sr., reminiscing about their racing days.
Now you may wonder who John Paul Sr. is. This guy was infamous within the racing community for his unlawful drug trafficking services and later became the most wanted man in racing history after being implicated in the disappearances of several people.
Hans Johan Paul who emigrated from the Netherlands to the U.S. with his parents in 1956. He changed his name to John Paul, married and had a son in 1960 that he also named John.
After graduating from Harvard, he became a successful mutual fund manager and began to amass considerable wealth.
John Paul Sr. began his racing career with local SCCA events in the 1960s, winning an SCCA Northeast Regional Championship in 1968. Domestic strife derailed his racing career and estranged him from his son for a few years, but he resumed racing in the early 1970s, entering a Corvette in IMSA races.
When he came back to racing, his son had also taken an interest in the sport, and the father- son team began winning races left and right. But this partnership between father and son racing together wasn't about love for cars and family bonding, it had much darker reasons.
John Paul Sr., left, and John Paul Jr, right, celebrating a podium.
Despite Paul Sr.'s success as a hedge fund manager, he certainly didn't have the funds to pay for his place in the race car driving. The obvious solution to this was to involve himself and the entire Paul family in the drug trafficking business, who turned out to be the most common business for a lot of team owners of those years.
The legal issues began for John Paul Sr. in January 1979 when he was caught with $10,000 cash and more than 1,500 pounds of marijuana in the bayous of Louisiana. Remarkably, he got away with just a fine and three years of probation after pleading guilty to marijuana possession. Not many in the IMSA paddock knew about his brush with the law, but whispers began circulating about the source of the money that supported his increasingly large racing budget. The light blue cars ran without sponsorship, because sponsorship money was not necessary, at least until 1982 when Miller beer jumped on in the form of an Atlanta area beer distributor providing support.
John Paul Sr. Porsche 935 with Miller sponsorship.
The 1980 season turned out to be his best. By this time, John Paul Jr. had begun racing in lower formulas and demonstrated a keen natural talent. Together, father and son won the 1980 Lime Rock Camel GT race. Remarkably, it was the younger Paul’s first-ever IMSA race and the first time he raced the 935. They added a win at Road America and Paul Sr. went on to score another ten Top 5 finishes and ended up second in the Camel GT championship. He also won the 1980 FIA World Challenge for Endurance Drivers, which compiled points from selected long-distance races, five on the IMSA schedule and five FIA events at Monza, Silverstone, Nurburgring, Le Mans and Spa.
Out of sight, federal authorities had spent a year carefully building a case against Paul Sr., ultimately indicting him for marijuana smuggling. After being caught and essentially let off with little more than a $32,000 fine, John Paul became concerned about his associate Stephan Carson. John Paul would later track down Carson, when at a Marina in Florida he shot him once in the back from about 10 feet away, then in the hip from about 20 feet away, and finally three more times at nearly point-blank.
John Paul Sr. and Jr., pictured here at an IMSA race in the Eighties.
Carson survived the encounter, and John Paul Sr. pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder. This led to a 25-year sentence which he nearly eluded in a prison escape attempt involving a mixture of hot sauce and sawdust. In 1980 he met a married woman named Chalice Benette, soon marrying. Unfortunately, things were not all sunshine and rainbows for the couple as the relationship turned toxic, eventually ending in divorce. After the divorce, John and Chalice "took a trip" to Key West, Florida. Once again, John Paul remarried a Woman named Colleen Wood, who would soon disappear on a trip with John Paul on his boat "The Island Girl.". She has never been found. The last person to go missing with John Paul was eventually himself as he vanished in 2001 with only rumors to give information on his whereabouts. Some reports have said that he is in the Bahamas or another island nation.
John Paul Jr. on the other side was an extraordinary talent behind the wheel of a race car and was recognized by team owners such as NASCAR’s Junior Johnson as one of America’s top young drivers. His IMSA success gave him choices. He moved to CART racing in 1983 and in only his fourth start passed Rick Mears on the last lap to win the Michigan 500, justifying predictions of future success. Continuing in IMSA on board the potent Phil Conte-owned RC Cola Buick March, Paul Jr. eventually got caught out by his father’s illegal activities and was indicted while the manhunt for his father was ongoing.
John Paul Sr's car, only with one sponsor, himself (JLP, John Lee Paul Racing)
After pleading guilty to federal racketeering charges in 1985, he spent more than two years in prison. Upon his release in 1988, the racing community opened its arms to him. He had done his time, and many felt his father had bullied him into the drug trafficking trade against his will. Paul Jr. resumed his racing career, scoring seven IMSA wins and an Indy Racing League victory at Texas in 1998 – 15 years after that inaugural Indy car win in Michigan. He competed in seven Indy 500s with a best finish of seventh in 1998.
John Paul Jr died on December 29, 2020, in Woodland Hills, California. Paul had been in a long battle with Huntington's disease for more than two decades.
Please remember, if you must learn something about these stories, think twice before starting in the drug business with your father, or your brothers... and if you do and it goes well, remember to camouflage your activities with sponsors.
By Juan Almeida
It was a bright sunny day when Jeff Soffer and his personal assistant Wayne appeared at the Fort. It wasn’t unusual for Jeff to visit Fort Apache Marina given Champion Marine’s proximity to the waterfront landmark.
Jeff was an avid boater, as was his father, Don Soffer and Champion Marine seemed to be a perfect fit for their pastime endeavors. Just prior to this period, Don's family name had been all over national news with his megayacht ‘Monkey Business’ featuring Donna Rice and Gary Hart’s affair. It was the early '90s and business was rocking post-Gulf War.
Jeff used the marina's launching facilities routinely to support his sales business, so it wasn’t unusual for Jeff to appear at the Fort. Except on this occasion Jeff was at the Fort to fill me in on an interesting opportunity involving a character he met at Turnberry Isles, a landmark property that they co-owned with the Rafael Hotel Group.
Jeff wanted me to know that he had met a distinguished gentleman who claimed he owned an 18-passenger Swiss submarine he was looking to off. For whatever reason, Jeff felt that I might be interested. So, soon after providing me with his contact info, I dashed off to Winterthur, Switzerland to tour the facility where the SPT-16 was being completed. Back in those days, I made routine trips to Moscow as part of my business interests with the former Soviet Republic, and making a layover in Zurich was really no trouble at all for me.
Codenamed SPT 16 (Sulzer, Picard, Tourismus –16), it was conceptually developed by the principals of Deep Line AG, a Swiss company formed in or about June 1987, specifically to promote operations of deep-line panoramic views of the great lakes of Switzerland, carrying passengers to lake Lucerne, Geneva and all the others. However, cost overruns as well as time constraints forced the small start-up into bankruptcy. Problem was their ambitious Tour De Lacs project had pre-sold tickets for the dives and were consequently forced to refund ticket purchases following the delays, being that they were unable to deliver on their promises. I quickly sensed an opportunity and began negotiations to purchase the submersible. Given my proximity to the Atlantic Ocean i.e., the Bahamas and the Florida Keys as well as my ownership of Fort Apache Marina, I figured it was a perfect fit. Months later after numerous failed negotiations, I purchased the 33-ton Rolex for a song and a dance and brought it to the US.
The submarine had some design flaws that required attention. One of which was its failed ABS inspection and classification in Europe. To overcome this design flaw, the submarine required a retrofit of its ballast tanks to cure the deficiency. Trouble would appear when, in the case of emergency/evacuation where all passengers might be forced to rush out the rear hatch, a buoyancy deficiency would trigger water to rush down the rear entry compartment and hence into the passenger area.
Shortly after its arrival to the United States, I received a phone call from Bruce Jones of US Submarines on the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state. Bruce Jones was the listing broker for the Swiss conglomerate and had a vested interest in bringing the deep-dive submarine to market. However, unbeknownst to Bruce Jones, Sulzer sold the submarine to Juan Almeida.
Subsequently, feeling obliged, Sulzer communicated the name of its new owner to US Submarines. Bruce then contacted me and explained the deficiencies in detail. He then offered his services to make the necessary corrections. That’s how I came to meet Patrick Lahey and Bruce Jones of US Submarines. Many years later, as in the present, they co-own the prestigious Triton Submarine company just north of Vero Beach, Florida. Patrick Lahey and Bruce Jones are two formidable and world-class gentlemen.
A couple of months after our initial contact and just over a quarter of a million dollars later, the SPT-16 was fully ABS certified and ready to dive off US coastal waters or anywhere else for that matter. And that we did, having lots of fun in the process.
All together, this particular experience introduced me to the realm of underwater adventure. It also became the conduit to my indictment. A novel business idea involving setting up a deep-dive operation in and around US coastal waters contributed to my indictment, no doubt. The submarine in it of itself brought me undue attention. Yet it was not the SPT-16 that was mentioned in the indictment, but rather a Russian military submarine that was at the heart of the multi-count racketeering indictment. Truth be told, it was an old Russian Juliett-class submarine that went from a vodka bar in Helsinki, to a federal task force and then on to film a series of movie productions.
First came the sub-caper indictment followed by Operation Odessa’s documentary film. Then it was the ‘K19: Widow Maker’, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. The Juliett 484 as she is known, was launched in 1968 by the Russian military. A submarine that inspired fear and envy with the US and its allies. The long, black, cigar-shaped vessel was once powered by gargantuan diesel engines and armed with an arsenal of nuclear missiles pointed towards American shores. But after long periods of deployment, when she surfaced, she found her country torn apart and its once mighty, powerful navy peddling warships as if they there were giant logs of worthless steel/scrap. Needless to say 484 was de-militarized as well as powerless and could only move about by extra-large tow barges. Get the drift? Go figure it out for yourself.
The SPT-16 on the other hand is a contemporary tourist submarine intended to carry 16 passengers on undersea tours to depths as great as 100 meters. The vehicle was built to meet the classification requirements of the American Bureau of Shipping. It was designed by the late oceanographer Dr. Jacques Picard in association with engineers from Sulzer Thermtec and was constructed by Sulzer in Winterthur, Switzerland.
The submersible was completed in late 1990, went to sea trails in February 1991 and subsequently shipped to Fort Lauderdale, Florida where I transferred it to Fort Apache Marina immediately upon its arrival for its refit requirement.
Eventually she would be moored at Safe Harbor’s Marina in Stock Island, Florida where she remained for a great many years pending Coast Guard approval for dives in and around Key West. Citing the Jones Act, the US Coast Guard requested an act of Congress to allow the SPT-16 to operate. An exercise in futility. A beautiful 33-ton Rolex sat in Key West for a number of years before I transferred her back to Boca Raton, Florida where she lives today. Efforts to restore her to her original luster are underway.
Read more about Juan Almeida in VÉHICULE.
]]>A group of several different la enforcement agencies along with a race boat driver come together with a common goal of stopping the drug traffic to the US.
Turbulent Waters: The War on Miami's Drug-Infested Seas
Introduction: Miami, the vibrant city known for its stunning beaches and nightlife, harbors a darker side beneath its waves. This blog post unveils an intricate cat-and-mouse game that unfolds on Miami's waters, where cutting-edge technology meets audacious criminal innovation.
The Drug Lord's Arsenal: Enter Tom Rampy, Miami’s infamous drug kingpin, whose criminal ingenuity knows no bounds. Operating like a villain out of a spy thriller, Rampy utilizes boats with ingeniously designed false bottoms to conceal his illicit cargo. His operations also incorporate transponders fixed on drug packages for tracking, radar jammers to confuse law enforcement, and, the pièce de résistance, an experimental boat that slashes through the waters at speeds exceeding 100 knots. The US Coast Guard and Customs Service are constantly outpaced and outmaneuvered by Rampy's relentless innovations.
A Conscience Awakens: Ben Bishop, an affluent boat designer, suddenly realizes that his creations have inadvertently become instruments of crime. His experimental designs are being exploited by Rampy to smuggle drugs through Miami’s waters. Fueled by a newfound sense of responsibility and guilt, Bishop uses his political sway to form the "River Intelligence Unit," an interagency force dedicated to curbing drug trafficking in the area.
The Unlikely Team: The real action kicks off when two US Customs agents, two Miami narcotics officers, a Florida Marine Patrol officer, and a US Coast Guard officer manage to apprehend one of Rampy's henchmen. However, their success is tainted by inter-agency rivalry, as they squabble over who deserves the credit. Bishop seizes this opportunity to have them all assigned to the River Intelligence Unit. An officer from the Bahamas Defence Force, attached to the US Coast Guard, also joins the eclectic ensemble.
The Mole and the Mission: The unit faces a significant challenge: there is an apparent mole amongst them, feeding information back to Rampy. The team's initial distrust and tension make coordination difficult. However, the stakes are high and they must overcome their differences.
A Change of Tide: Ben Bishop offers the unit a game-changing asset – his own prototype boat that matches the capabilities of Rampy's aquatic beast. The team also manages to persuade a former employee of Rampy, a skilled boat racer with a personal vendetta, to join their cause. The stage is set for high-octane chases, mind games, and tactical maneuvers on the tumultuous waters of Miami.
Conclusion: What started as a war waged by one man’s innovation in crime meets its match when responsibility and determination join forces. Miami's waters become the battlefield where technology, intellect, and human spirit clash. The River Intelligence Unit's endeavor to restore peace and security to the city’s coastlines is a gripping tale that highlights the importance of cooperation, innovation, and unwavering resolve. Stay tuned as we continue to follow their daring exploits on the high seas.
]]>Legendary powerboat pilot Yves Belanger talks to VÉHICULE about what is arguably one of the most iconic powerboat runs of all time (next to WARPATH). Running RAZZ Apache 41’ Powerboat Offshore Miami Beach.
"My name is Yves Belanger and this amazing video actually we started in the morning, me and Rick Conti. The morning was much rougher than the actual video."
"We took the boat out and we actually lost an engine at one point, that's how rough it was. We were coming out of the air so bad, it was unreal. At one point we got one engine that is not running, we're trying to start it, we got a humongous wave coming at us, the boat is going sideways, we really thought we were going to flip and I was thinking okay once we're upside down I'm going to evacuate this way, Rick the other way, and then all of a sudden the boat went back straight."
"We finally got the engine running, get back in, we had a quarter to see, that's how rough it was. After lunch Ricky says: "Yves, it looks like it calmed down a little bit. Why don't we take the boat and do a video? Oh my god, let's get the chopper!" So we get the chopper, start filming us and we were just having a blast. I mean, I had absolutely zero fear, neither did Rick, I mean I thought the boat was invincible, that we could do anything in the world with it (which we kind of did). We had a real, real good blast and the very last wave of course it was like, I don't know, 15 feet up in the air! You could run a Mack truck underneath and I heard a crack…"
by Alfonso Muñoz Sahr
Stock car racing had its roots in Appalachia, where producing, selling, and delivering "homemade whiskey" as quickly as possible with vehicles that looked ordinary on the outside offered liquid salvation for family farms seeking to escape crippling poverty, especially during the Great Depression. "Those were hard times back in the hills, and you did things you shouldn’t to get by," said NASCAR Hall of Famer Curtis Turner, who began bootlegging at age nine.
Joe Littlejohn's racecar (No. 7) is seen outside "Little Joe’s" tavern in the late 1930s.
Moonshine has been fermented "homemade" around the world for years, but in the United States, especially in the South, illegal distilling accelerated during the Prohibition era (1920–1933).
When this law was revoked, people mistakenly thought "Well, suddenly the nation could drink again", but for decades—and even to this day—there were places where selling alcohol was still illegal. In some states, there were dry counties and wet counties, and within a dry county, wet cities.
Moonshining kept on after prohibition, and it was also part of the cultural heritage. In places where it was finally legal to sell alcohol, producers had to regulate their production, and buyers had to pay taxes. Southern farmers did not want to abide by these requirements, so they continued to do so illegally. After all, the business was profitable, and it was a very good solution for many families to put food on the table.
Hooch makers would make the brew and then give it to the runners to hand out to customers. The runners had to be fast and have a thorough knowledge of the back roads to evade anyone who tried to bust, snitch, or rob them.
Driving on mountain roads and at night is treacherous, especially when the IRS is chasing you. Sometimes at night, drivers would even turn off their headlights and deactivate their brake lights to avoid the heat.
Back in the bootlegging days, these drivers were not racing to get the checkered flag; they were racing to escape the law. Moonshine cars were built for only one reason, and this was just to outrun and escape the cops.
What was essential for these drivers were the tires. The factor that could define whether you would go home with money that night or end up in prison was the quality of the tires. Drivers obviously invested in the best tire, and many of them spent time in jail just because some bad tire couldn't handle the aggressiveness of these steel machines.
In 1947 for $10, you could've been an original member of NASCAR
You had all these people from the South who were coming up as "Whiskey Trippers", That's what they called the drivers. They were some of the most skilled drivers around, and so it was just natural that they would become later involved in NASCAR.
Junior Johnson was one of the first inductees into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Johnson, as a young man, starting at about age 14, helped his father with his moonshine whiskey business. He was one of these guys who would go out at 14 years old, pre-driver's license, but he knew how to drive. And he would deliver the liquor to people. He knew how to drive fast and skillfully because the law was after him all the time.
"Moonshiners put more time, energy, thought, and love into their cars than any racer ever will," Johnson once said. "Lose on the track, and you go home. Lose a load of whiskey, and you go to jail."
Dubbed "The Last American Hero" by author Tom Wolfe in an article for Esquire magazine, Junior Johnson was a true original, on and off the track
Ford cars were popular among runners at the time (which is kind of ironic because Henry Ford was an outspoken prohibitionist). The Model T was affordable and could blend in well with the public, as 3 out of 4 cars on the road at the time were Model Ts.
While automaker Henry Ford banned drinking by his workers, his Ford V8 was literally the engine that drove moonshining after its 1932 debut. The stock black paint of this car was perfect for driving undetected at night, and the flathead V8 engine was an impressive machine that proved to have a lot of potential. With the proper modifications, this coupe could have easily outperformed anything the local police had in their fleet.
It turns out that Ford accidentally created the perfect hooch delivery vehicle. It was fast enough to stay one step ahead of the law, rugged enough for the mountain roads, and had a big enough trunk and back seat to squeeze in moonshine.
It wasn't uncommon to swap out another more powerful engine like a V8 from a Cadillac, the biggest V8 available at the time. The torsion bar was highly praised by bootleggers, as it provided extra stability when hauling all that cargo.
When stripped out, this little Ford coupe could hold up to 132 gallons of homemade whiskey. Very soon, the drivers and mechanics became even more ingenious and started adding features like brakes, which could enable cars to corner even more swiftly by stopping just one side of the car, or switches that could turn off rear lights in the dark.
Although the end of prohibition did not mean the end of smuggling, moonshiners were still producing their alcohol, but on a smaller scale. Now that the runners didn't have to do many more runs, they had more time to run, and let's face it, when you take a sip of the adrenaline rush of speed, you get addicted for life.
"Rapid Roy" Hall (center) was a pioneering American stock car racing driver who was also involved in the moonshine trade
Whiskey racers no longer had the need to deliver moonshine in the dead of night, and bootleggers began racing their whiskey wagons at local fairgrounds, cornfields, and racetracks, where they discovered that people, sometimes tens of thousands, were willing to pay to watch them show off their driving skills. Stock-car racing was born.
After World War II, many racetracks did not allow runners to race for fear that outlaw bootleggers would tarnish the racing organizations image. Atlanta's Lakewood Speedway became the first racetrack to allow known bootleggers. The promoters caved to possible protests to allow the bootleggers to compete, which would have caused a lot more trouble than simply allowing a couple of hooligans to compete. Various stock car racing associations existed, but they lacked uniformity and consistency.
The Daytona Beach Modified race held on January 16th, 1949, was won by Marshall Teague
On March 8, 1936, a bunch of drivers gathered at Daytona Beach, Florida. The drivers brought coupes, hardtops, convertibles, and sports cars to compete in an event to determine the fastest cars and best drivers. Throughout the race, the heavier cars got bogged down in the sand while the lightweight Fords navigated the ruts of the course, eventually claiming the top six finishes for the race.
Bill France, a young driver from Daytona Beach, placed 5th at the end of the day. He saw an opportunity to bring the stock car racing associations together, as he recognized the skills of the whiskey drivers and did not see them as a threat to racing.
Big Bill was a race car driver, skilled mechanic, and race promoter, but the next few years, instead of driving, he concentrated on organizing rival owners, mechanics, and drivers under a common set of rules. He worked for guaranteed purses, introduced safety and rescue innovations, and urged rival groups to adopt uniform officiating.
The Streamline Hotel is the recognized birthplace of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing and the oldest standing hotel in Daytona Beach
His efforts culminated on December 14, 1947. On that day, three dozen like-minded racers met in the Streamline Hotel in Downtown Daytona, Florida, to hear France’s vision to unify stock car racing under one banner, and there the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was formed. Two months later, in February 1948, the first NASCAR race was held at Daytona Beach. The winner was Red Byron in his Ford Coupe, a former moonshine runner.
Rum-running would land some of these drivers in prison repeatedly before competing in NASCAR, and their failures here were blamed on flat tires at inopportune moments. For this reason, several companies had developed high-quality tires specifically for the rum-running business.
Roy Hall, for example, spent quite a few times in jail for bootlegging, and later bank robberies would see him jailed for three years from 1946 to 1949.
Red Byron, first NASCAR winner with his Ford tuned by his mechanic Red Vogt
But the ties between NASCAR and moonshine have always been there, even in modern times. In 2009, Dean Combs A former NASCAR driver was arrested for taking the sport back to its roots. Combs was charged in connection with running a moonshine still.
Around the same time, legendary driver Junior Johnson started a legal moonshine business using his father's recipe for a product called "Midnight Moon Moonshine."
To this date, NASCAR seems to encapsulate an attitude that describes what America loves the most: rebellious, fast, and illicit fun!
Read all about drug smuggling operations in the VÉHICULE print edition.
by Alfonso Muñoz Sahr
The history of lavish showbusiness was written for almost 30 years in the Latin Quarter, one of Miami's swankier nightspots known for its extravagant shows, where the most exclusive residents of South Florida and the darkest characters of the underworld once gambled, ate, drank, and laughed like there was no tomorrow. It was a gambler’s paradise!
Today, if we enter Palm Island and walk through the beautiful houses of the man-made island in Biscayne Bay, looking for the address where the Latin Quarter was located, we will find a children's playground. But more than half a century ago, this location was an altogether different sort of playground, and it was definitely not for kids. From the roaring 20s to the early 60s, this place used to be the meeting point for the most beautiful and exotic dancers from around the world, along with politicians, celebrities, tourists, and gangsters who just wanted to have a little fun.
Aerial view from 7000 feet of Biscayne Bay – Miami, Florida, 1927
In 1922, Ed Ballard, co-owner of the French Lick Casino, opened the Palm Island Club at 159 Palm Ave. as the first ultra-chic gambling Prohibition-era casino, where alcohol flowed freely, to have a tourist-only policy. The logic was that the cops would look the other way if only out-of-towners got fleeced.
This same year, just a thousand feet away – seven lots to be precise – Al Capone's mansion was built at 93 Palm Ave., where the Mob King moved in in 1928 and lived until his death in 1947. Capone plotted Chicago's infamous February 14, 1929, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre while living in the mansion.
Big Bill Dwyer, a New York bootlegger and ower of the racetrack Miami's Tropical Park, took over the Palm Island Club next. One show offered bandleader Earl Carroll's Vanities Revue, featuring, according to a Miami Herald reporter, a naked showgirl in a huge glass of champagne.
But when the police began to listen to everything that was happening on the premises and started to take an interest in the place, the Palm Island Club had to be reformed.
In 1939, refurbished and renamed, the place opened as the Latin Quarter, under the management of New York club magnate Lou Walters, father of TV personality Barbara Walters.
“No trip to Miami is complete without a visit to the "Latin Quarter", Palm Island's Smart Night Club”, reads the back of this mid-century postcard
Initially created in Boston in 1937 and later in New York City, Miami Beach’s version of the Latin Quarter was also the responsibility of Walter’s business partner, Elias M. Loew, the brilliant theatrical tycoon and owner of the vast Loew’s Theatres empire.
Modeled somewhat after the Moulin Rouge in Paris, decorated with exotic murals by Wilho H. Anderson, and embellished with cut-pile carpets, velvet on the walls, satin draperies, and fountains with colored water, the Latin Quarter prided itself in having the best and most beautiful dancers in the world.
Tryouts were held all across America and Europe, at the Palladium in London and Club Lido in Paris, to find that certain handful of girls who "sparkled and shined." They were billed as "Latin Quarter Dancers of Today, Hollywood Stars of Tomorrow."
Some of the beautiful showgirls of the Latin Quarter
Costumes were created for specific dancers to "enhance their best features," as the club’s PR department proudly stated. The typical joke between Latin Quarter dancers as they took the stage in their semi-nude costumes went something like, "Gee, when I think of the money I wasted on singing lessons..." and "When he says "show girls" he's not kidding".
The club, in its heyday during the 1940s and 1950s, was the spot to be. Glitz, glam, and some of the biggest names in entertainment Sammy Davis Jr., Sophie Tucker, Betty Grable, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett all made appearances, among many others, on the handpicked and carefully blended shows offered sometimes three times a night.
Mr. Waters's formula for success in the nightclub industry was plenty of food and a luxurious ambience. "It's a popular fallacy in this business," he once said in an interview, "to say that your money is made or lost in the kitchen. The man who goes to a nightclub goes in a spirit of splurging, and you've got to splurge right along with him. My motto used to be that when the customer does not leave something on his plate, it's bad. I am always urging my stewards and chefs to give the customers more food than they expect."
There was a time when the Latin Quarter operated simultaneously in 3 different cities
Every night was different, and the artists varied between can-can dancers, singers, belly dancers, acrobats, comedians, drag performers, belly dancers, and high-kicking chorus girls. The club was even used a couple of times as a conference venue.
The Latin Quarter was a mid-century Mecca for big-name entertainers who performed for winter crowds of tourists, celebrities, and all the gangsters who gathered in Miami Beach from time to time.
1954–1955: New Year's Eve at the Latin Quarter
A dancer from this fancy nightclub, Mollie Fennell Numark, explained the situation with the Mafia at that time in an interview with the John Hemmer Archive: "We were told never to go down the palm tree-lined road from the club and heard Al Capone had lived there in a large mansion. It was probably now used by the Miami Mafia because they were everywhere. One of the American girls would disappear some nights, and we found out that was where she spent some evenings."
"One day I complained about having to mingle [with the patrons]. The next day, Lou Walters came into the dressing room, glaring in my direction. He threatened to send me back to England without a passage. We continued to eat our eggs and ignored the customers who were mafia types", expressed Numark.
Officers from the Dade County Sheriff’s Department led a raid in 1930 at Al Capone's house in Miami Beach
At the end of the 1950s, Miami's nightlife began to change, and the Latin Quarter ceased to be the most coveted meeting point. The club really flourished in the days when the hotels were forbidden by city ordinance to have nightclub shows and the independent clubs had the field all to themselves, so when hotels were finally allowed to hold shows of this kind, the Miami Beach nightlife migrated to Millionaire’s Row on upper Collins Avenue.
Huge new oceanfront hotels produced dazzling floor shows and competed against each other for the official title of Hotel of the Year. New Nightspots started booking the top bands, singers, and comedians for the season and packed in the tourists year after year. So too did Lou Walters. After the Latin Quarter, Walters moved his show to the Carillon, 1959’s Hotel of the Year, where his elaborate productions were considered the best on the beach for several years.
One by one, the independent nightclubs started closing their doors. Some say it was the competition for tourist dollars that finally killed off the independent clubs in Miami Beach during the 1960s. Others say it was the evolution of jet travel to distant and more exotic destinations that did them in. Was it perhaps the reputation of these clubs for attracting members of organized crime?
Matchboxes given to club visitors
On August 27, 1959, the Latin Quarter went up in flames, and the fire caused $500,000 in damage. The club never reopened. Its blackened, battered remains sat tattered until the city ordered their removal in 1968 and turned the place into a family park.
Was it an accident? Was it intentional? Did the Mafia have something to do?
The firemen said that probably a boat moored in the foreground may have started the Latin Quarter fire; they theorized that shorted wires from sinking craft caused the blaze.
The club on fire and the boat that supposedly caused the emergency
After the fire, E. M. Loew, manager of the nightclub, said he intended to rebuild the place immediately. "It won’t be just a cozy club, but a bigger and better club," he expressed. His comment came in the face of threatened lawsuits by the Palm-Hibiscus-Star Island Association to condemn the site and turn it into a park.
In 1960, the zoning law said that any building in a non-conforming area may be rebuilt if fire destruction is not more than 50%. "That puts Loew in a box," said William T. Kruglak, president of the Palm-Hibiscus-Star Island Property Owners Association. "If Loew files for 100% damage in his insurance claim—and he'd be crazy not to—we'll get a deposition and find out about it," said Kruglak.
The neighbors never got along with the club's co-owner, E. Loew, as he would not let the kids use the club's property to play ball when the club was not in operation.
Some neighbors also didn’t like that Al Capone lived there, so why would they want all the other mafiosi who came to visit walking around their houses?
As a neighbor, Capone took special liberties by not following the home association's rules and regulations. Examples were that his 25-foot boat dock exceeded the 8 feet allotted. His pool was one of the biggest ones on the island at the time. Talk of all-night parties, orgies, and even gunfire that were heard by neighbors Those who rented nearby were quick to pack up and leave.
The mob king tried to ingratiate himself by sending out invitations to a party at his home. Some came, and many refused. The ones that did attend quickly had a second opinion of the man. Those who didn't attend continued to cry foul. Their persistence led the authorities to harass Capone, arresting him many times for simple vagrancy. The Palm Island home was once raided, and alcohol was confiscated.
The club survived a dizzying array of owners, and even Al Capone once had a piece of the action.
Several firefighters were injured trying to control the flames that erupted from the Palm Island nightclub
Whatever ended with the life of the Latin Quarter can never erase the fact that, for a brief period fifty years ago, 159 Palm Island Drive was the hottest address in American nightlife.
The Palm-Hibiscus-Star islands have become, since the 1960s, a quiet community tucked away between two bustling cosmopolitan cities. A safe and quiet place to raise a family or retire.
The islands are rarely in the news for anything other than their beauty.
Read more about Miami's history in VÉHICULE.
by Alfonso Muñoz
It was the time of Prohibition, and rum-running was rampant throughout South Florida.
There was still a demand for alcoholic beverages, however, and plenty of illegal alcohol made its way to market. "Rum-runners" took advantage of Florida’s many miles of coastline to bring it in from Cuba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere. Many Floridians in the state’s rural interior made moonshine or other bootleg liquor and sold it to make extra cash. State, local, and federal authorities all attempted to enforce the prohibition laws, but they were never able to fully stamp out these illegal activities.
By the early 1930s, many Americans considered Prohibition a noble experiment that had failed. It did not end alcohol consumption in the United States, but instead drove much of the activity underground. Rum-running, moonshining, and organized crime all increased as a result.
Alcohol was big business for the mob, and when Prohibition ended in 1933, the next big thing was gambling, which would lead to the consolidation of powerful criminal syndicates in most large cities in the United States.
The rum-runner Linwood afire. With capture and arrest imminent, the fire was set by the crew of bootleggers trying to destroy the evidence and sink the ship.
Meyer Lansky, a Polish Jew born in the Russian Pale of Settlement, known as the "Mob’s Accountant", became important in the gambling scene in Miami, while his brother Jake lived and worked in Hollywood. But it wasn’t really Hollywood that became the center of Broward County’s illegal activity going into the 1930s. It was Hallandale Beach, a farming city, which soon had speakeasies, drinking establishments, and stylish gambling houses up and down its Boulevard.
Hallandale was indeed the "hotbed of sin" of the Sunshine State in the 1930s. The local farmers often made good profits selling their products to the casinos, and other residents were happy to take advantage of the employment opportunities provided by the illegal establishments. The city was growing exponentially, and everyone wanted to be a part of it.
Slot machines were ubiquitous in the early 1930s; in 1935, the Florida Supreme Court legalized them, and suddenly Hallandale had legal slot machines everywhere — in drugstores, gas stations, stores, and even fishing camps.
Hallandale was a gambler’s paradise and soon became known as the "Wall Street of South Florida", due to the many banks and other financial companies that had opened there to support the illegal gambling trade that operated around Hallandale under the beneficial eye of a crooked sheriff who once, when a reporter asked why he allowed gambling, replied: "Why? Because I’m a goddamn liberal, that’s why. I will not go around these parts and stick my nose in the private business of the people."
Soon, there were 12,500 licensed machines statewide; most were in South Florida. They brought an estimated $60 million a year into state coffers — at 5, 10, and 25 cents a spin. Within two years of legalizing slots came the real pros — gangsters from New York and Chicago — and their illegal machines.
A bookmaking operation started by two Chicago mobsters in a Hallandale tomato packing shed grew into the Plantation, one of the more famous carpet joints, where pampered patrons could drink and dine in style, watch a show, and, of course, gamble.
Though in 1937 the Legislature outlawed slots, their illegal cousins stayed on.
Some of the chips used in the illegal Hallandale casinos run by Meyer Lansky and his associates.
For $2, a patron could play six games to win $50, $100, or much more. Operators would dump all remaining proceeds into the final game, driving the winnings up to at least $1,000, a considerable sum during the Great Depression. The house took no cut, knowing they now had players for more lucrative games. The casino provided bodyguards to women who won and wanted escorts home to safeguard their winnings.
The gambling generated so much cash that the gangsters suppressed their violent natures. The Mafia had an understanding that there would be no killings in Broward County because it was such a lucrative business.
Opened in Hallandale (a few miles south of Fort Lauderdale) in December, 1945, The Colonial Inn was one of the plushest illegal gambling spots in the eastern United States.
Broward County boasted several casinos, the most famous being the Colonial Inn on Hallandale Beach Boulevard (owned by the Lansky brothers). La Boheme, Greenacres, and Plantation Resort also operated in South County. The accounting of most of these casinos was the responsibility of the Eisen brothers, allies of Lansky, who then, in 1950, had to explain all their movements to justice due to a resolution authorizing an Investigation of Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.
But while all that gambling was taking place in Hallandale, the wise guys in charge kept their families safe in beautiful seaside homes in the nearby city of Hollywood.
Some of these characters were, of course, the Lansky brothers: Julian "Potatoes" Kaufman, Joe Adonism, and Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo. These men were just some of the masterminds of organized crime during the 20s and 30s in South Florida. Upon their arrivals, all began to give generously to Hollywood’s churches, synagogues, fraternal organizations, hospitals, and more.
Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo , Meyer Lansky and Harry "Nig" Rosen
Meyer Lansky was undoubtedly one of the most famous mobsters of all time and the most important character of the "Kosher Nostra". While he was a resident of Miami, his brother Jake made his home at 1146 Harrison Street.
Jake kept a low profile compared to his brother but was known to be by his side and also a money counter both in Florida and later in the family’s Las Vegas operations.
His neighbor at 711 Tyler Street, Benjamin Eisen, was the head financial officer for Gulfstream Racetrack and the Hollywood Kennel Club and was also the bookkeeper for the Lansky family.
A normal race day at the Gulfstream Park
All good things come to an end, and for the gangsters, South Florida stopped being (for a moment) a land of opportunity when, on May 3, 1950, the Senate established a five-member Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce.
The committee quickly shut down illegal gambling in South Florida, but the gangsters still had their hands in local dog and horse tracks, jai lai frontons, and some other businesses.
Lansky, who lived for years in a canal home in Sunny Isles, took his people to Havana, Cuba, where they expanded their gambling ventures and built an empire under the eyes of Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista, who was more than happy to take bribes.
When the Castros took power in Cuba, the mobsters had to move their businesses to Las Vegas.
Carmine Galante, Meyer Lansky & The Mob In South Florida. News reports, footage.
“Everything we did back then is legal now,” Jimmy Blue Eyes was said to lament soon afterwards.
Years later, Meyer Lansky, it is said, was asked why, being the brilliant businessman that he was, he never went legit. His answer? “It’s just more fun this way!”
Meyer Lansky died in Miami Beach, Florida.
After nearly 60 years in the underworld, Meyer Lansky was never found guilty of anything more serious than illegal gambling. Lansky beat six murder charges and only spent 3 months and 16 days behind bars between May and July 1953. At one time, he was said to be worth an estimated $20 million (equivalent to almost $200 million today) or more.
He died of lung cancer in 1983 at age 80, leaving behind a widow and three children. On paper, he was worth almost nothing.
"I wouldn’t have lived my life any other way," Lansky told the authors of Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob in 1978. "It was in my blood, in my character. The environment certainly had something to do with it, but basically, my own personality determined my fate. I have nothing on my conscience. I would not change anything."
Lansky was buried at Mount Nebo Cemetery in Miami Beach.
Meyer Lansky lived here at Golden Isles 512 Hibiscus Dr.
For as long as there have been palm trees, good restaurants, and easy money to be made here, mobsters have treated South Florida as their sunny home away from home. Hundreds of them made Broward their second or retirement home.
South Florida has always been "open territory" for the mob, with no crime family claiming exclusive rights or control.
Read more Miami true crime stories in the VÉHICULE Print Edition.
The Salone del Mobile Milano is one of the most prestigious furniture and design exhibitions in the world, attracting thousands of visitors and exhibitors every year. Check out Sam Chermayeff's display "cars and the public joy" featuring his VÉHICULE Vitrine alongside collaborations with BLESS, Ertl&Zull and more.
VÉHICULE Offshore Nitro Cold Brew × Sam Chermayeff
The VÉHICULE Vitrine by Sam Chermayeff
BLESS × Sam Chermayeff – The Saunarider is a mobile sauna in a Mercedes-Benz outfitted with a wooden bead interior.
Drink VÉHICULE Offshore Nitro Cold Brew
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Everyone lies.
Cops, by virtue of being part of everyone, lie. Lying is integral to what they do, and without it, the job would be unrecognizably different. In large part, this goes unpunished. Why punish what is, or has become, a human reflex? To do so would be, simply put, counterproductive. Sometimes—only sometimes—people nearly lose track of their own lies. Other times, someone else's lies take precedence. And in rare cases, complex webs of mistruth are outpaced by what they intend to conceal. Bluffs expand faster than cover stories can keep up with, and consequently, no one knows who to believe. Nothing encapsulates this elaborate system more succinctly than the Miami River Cops saga does.Read all about drug smuggling history and modern day operations in VÉHICULE.
]]>VÉHICULE talked to powerboat legend and race car driver Lorne L. about his Apache 47 – built and pre-owned by Ben Kramer – that is being restored into its original form in Miami right now.
"I saw the boat completed near the end of 1986 at Fort Apache. It was a monster – 3 engines dwarfed the 47. Ben went to one race in 1987, got busted. I thought it was at the Jockey Club in Miami.
Word got out that boat and rig were abandoned on the highway en route to the shop. I went on a mission to find that boat. No internet, everything was word-of-mouth – all fabricated stories of sightings from New Orleans East to Florida. All BS from it being in secure storage to left out behind a building full of water. All I knew was the feds had it. I never gave up on trying to locate it.
Out of nowhere I get three phone calls days apart in the spring of 1995 telling me the boat is going to auction with other boats and cars in a month at the Cape Kennedy facilities as shown in the monthly Boat Trader publication for Florida. I get a copy and its part of a double page spread. The pictures look pretty good and it's complete with the trailer, the spare engine and spare drive. So it appears it's been unmolested. I later find out the reason it took so long to go to auction was that seized assets cannot be disposed of until all appeals are exhausted for the convict.
I register and attend the auction. The boat looks great, everything looks great, surprisingly. In the office they have a video of the engines being fired up at a dock. I'm excited – most of the brokers that were in attendance knew I was serious about the boat and were already congratulating me before the auction started. The boat was obsolete as a race boat by now…
I hate writing letters, call me when convenient. You can record the answers to all your remaining questions."
The 1987 murder of Miami powerboat legend Don Aronow captivated the international boating scene. The case’s twists, turns and seemingly never-ending cast of characters leaves the killing a mystery to this day. People have tried to make sense of it, only productions misinformation along the way.
VÉHICULE’s in-depth exposé clears the air around the case, bringing you just the facts and illuminates some of the Miami scene’s most prominent characters and places, including Ben Kramer, Rocky Aoki, Betty Cook and the famed Fort Apache.
Read more in the print edition of VÉHICULE.
Excerpt from Paradise Lost: The Rise and Fall of Ben Kramer. Read the full story in VÉHICULE.
American powerboat racing champion Benjamin Barry Kramer hates when people smoke cigarettes around him. At a concert in his hometown of Hollywood, Florida in the early 1970s, he went around the crowd pulling them from peoples’ mouths with only the words “You’re a fucking asshole” as explanation. It was an abrasive yet oddly charming act—a characterization that can be applied to his demeanor as a whole. He had no problem making himself known wherever he went, either by means of his off-kilter charm, his straight talk, or his bombastic individualism. Like any successful sportsman, he always gave his all and always needed to win, giving him an instant leg up in any endeavor that he sought to undertake—whether it was operating a marina, providing for his family, or taking on the midnight ocean at triple-digit speeds.
At press time, Kramer has been engaged in legal battles for longer than he was ever a free man. He has been behind bars since the late 1980s serving multiple sentences, the longest of which is life. The convictions against him are threefold and have varying degrees of truth to them—racketeering, tax violations and manslaughter. While even those closest to him will admit that he wasn’t entirely without fault, Kramer’s fate is one that traces a narrative of high-level abuses of power, corruption and personal vendettas waged over the course of years. There seems to be no end in sight.
Was Kramer meant to be the government’s example—a one-man, non-consenting, scared-straight program meant to show the masses what sidestepping the law could get you? If he were meant as such an example, why does he only appear as a footnote in publications, write-ups and news briefs about peers from his South Florida microcosm? Over the years, there have proven to be far less sympathetic characters whose stories of redemption have been plastered on newsstands. They’ve been positioned as bearers of thrilling stories about a time long past. They say that they’ve changed, and they have the high-budget photoshoot to prove it.
Benjamin Barry Kramer was born in 1954 in Hollywood, Florida, a city just north of Miami. Named in the 1920s for the still-nascent development in California, Hollywood gained a reputation as a refuge for northerners looking for a winter escape. It was this very thought process that first brought Ben’s parents down from Philadelphia. By the time Ben was five years old, his father Jack made the call to move the family back to his hometown and took up operation of an insurance agency along with his father and brothers. Shortly thereafter, a friend of Jack’s invited him to help run a small lighting business in the city. Jack’s business acumen quickly drove the shop’s profits to record highs. By 1966, Jack decided to bring his expertise back down south, once again relocating his family. Jack also brought his newfound wealth with him, purchasing a modestly distinguished home in Hollywood’s high-rent district. This new property came equipped with its very own dock.
Seized Cessna 1977 704 Titan. Fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks in the nose, wings and cargo area. Could stay airborne for 16 hours. Repurposed for US Customs use.
My parents were federal agents in the late ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and into the early ‘00s. My dad started life here as a CPO (Customs Patrol Officer), graduated to Special Agent and eventually became Special Agent in Charge (SAIC) at US Customs. He was most definitely a key figure in many of the infamous stories that give Miami its reputation. He cut his teeth growing up poor in New York, went to Vietnam and ended up here, implementing the trade craft he had learned in the war on the streets of Miami. It was most definitely the Wild West out here. My own neighborhood growing up hosted more than one car bombing, a couple raids here and there. I definitely had a very unique and unfiltered lens to view the events that unfolded here on a daily basis. Rest assured my dad wasn't a do-gooder on a crusade. He had a job to do, and it brought him pleasure to do it. Big money, big egos, big guns. He loved every minute of it. It was definitely cowboy vs. cowboy in those days. He just liked mixing it up and doing cool shit.”My Dad and Ferrari, 1998
Read more about big time smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
]]>Read about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
"My parents were federal law enforcements agents (father, US Customs - mother, IRS) and were intimately involved in some of the highest profile cases that played out down here, which are now a critical part of Miami lore.
I was born and raised here. I love this city and it’s history, of which I had a unique lens to experience as a kid growing up. Christopher and I got to talking and I said I would start going through the tons of material I have from back in those days and begin digitizing and uploading it. A lot of this stuff can’t be looked up anywhere, which sucks for anyone who would be interested in hearing the stories that made this city what it is.
I will begin to post all the photos/info I find relating to boats as I know that’s what this group is about (I myself know nothing about boats other than how to party on them.) I could post the other non-boat stuff if you guys care to see it or leave it out and keep it boats.
I hope some of these pictures jog some memories and I’d love to hear/share stories or anything.
Anyway, enjoy and there’s plenty more to come. It’s a lot of stuff to go through."
-Eric Girard
Read about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
Read about Betty Cook & friends in VÉHICULE.
Founded in 1976, the Kaama Racing Team consisted of Betty Cook as its owner and driver, John Connor as crew chief and throttleman, along with a number of navigators. The team ran four different hulls: a 36-foot Cigarette hull, a 38-foot Scarab, a 38-foot Cougar catamaran and a 38-foot Formula catamaran, all set up by John Connor. Over forty years later, Kaama is still regarded as one of the most successful offshore powerboat racing teams in history. Having started in well over 70 races, Betty Cook and her crew regularly beat out the competition, employing innovative engineering to gain the upper hand. This lead them to winning U.S. championships in 1978, 1979 and 1981, as well as world championships in 1977 and 1979.
Betty Cook always strove to be different. The fact that she was the lone woman competing in a sport dominated by machismo, in conjunction with her team’s name and boats’ designs served to reinforce Kaama’s unique standing. Cook was the sole designer behind the visuals that made the Kaama Racing Team so distinctive. The name was chosen as a reference to the south African antelope Alcelaphus buselaphus caama. The animal is known not only for its high speed, agility and jumping prowess, but also for its strength and resilient nature. Betty Cook’s boats touted similar characteristics, and the name soon came to dominate the media landscape. In contrast to the competitors’ logos, Kaama’s logo was a simple one intentionally designed in black-and-white. Sitting in a helicopter or standing on the shore, there was no mistaking Kaama’s boat. If that wasn’t enough, a rendering of the antelope’s face on the deck further set it apart in a crowd. Kaama’s graphics were clear and legible, making their boats especially popular subjects for press photographers shooting for largely black-and-white publications.As a result of her racing success, Cook founded a marine power and propulsion systems company under the name Kaama Marine Engineering Inc. In addition to developing products for their race team in-house, the company also developed Kaama performance engines and surface drive systems for public sale. Aside from his work engineering race boats at Kaama, John Connor co-developed the game-changing Arneson drive with Howard Arneson. Kaama Marine became the exclusive reseller. Once this agreement had expired, Connor, with the help of Peter Weismann, developed and released their expensive yet sought after Kaama surface drive. This later became a special performance upgrade for Wellcraft and Formula models. Betty Cook and John Connor tested the performance engines and products that they developed, running the drives on their famous Kaama Scarab 38 and Formula catamaran. Their race boats were perfect test benches for speed, efficiency and durability. As a testament to this, many Wellcraft and Formula models are still equipped with the Kaama surface drive after being run for over 20 years.
The Kaama offshore racing team also shares a long history with Mercruiser, having run their engines and drives in a number of races. The Kaama boats also became their testing grounds for many innovative technologies that, once proven on the racecourse, became production standard. The collaboration continued—the team regularly used Mercruiser’s “Lake X” facility for test runs and configuration assessments, and Betty Cook and Kaama boats were featured in Mercruiser advertisements.
Read about Betty Cook & friends in VÉHICULE.
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The 20-foot VÉHICULE Marine 300R Super Flat is propelled by a 300-horsepower V8, making it over three times as powerful as a standard flats-style boat, and is outfitted for on-water brutality. It combines pure presence with comfort, function and performance. It’s lightweight but not stripped out, with every precision-engineered surface, texture and material serving a purpose. Read more about the Super Flat's design on Wallpaper.
Read more about the 300R Super Flats in the VÉHICULE print edition.
“I purchased the boat in approximately 1999 from Randy Sweers. Greg Gluck was my contact. I’ll never forget the day myself, when a close friend and master engine builder Karl Patske and I called Greg to set up an ocean test. The ocean was where you could really test the horsepower.
Once we had contact with Greg, we set a time and place to meet for a sea trial. It was about 10:00 on a Friday at no other than Fort Apache Marina. Once we met up with both Greg and Randy, we were still entirely doubtful that I would and could purchase this boat. Of course, when we tried to go, the boat’s batteries were dead—a delay. Now how do we kill time while they change out the batteries? Apache Bar and Grill, of course.
After about an hour or two, the boat was sorted and it was go time. We headed out in search of only one thing, and that one thing was rough water or a huge wake. Guess what? We found both. As Randy was driving, I was to his right. Karl was to his left, and Greg was behind Karl. As we got moving, Greg tapped Karl and signaled him to trim the boat. Karl did not feel comfortable doing so, so he didn’t. Instead, Greg reached around him and started playing with keys like Liberace. After we jumped a few mountains, the boat made it clear that it could handle these huge waves like they didn’t exist. “We turned back into the Marina. Greg piped up and said ‘Any questions?’ I looked at Karl and both of us were in awe—no questions. We tied the boat up and got onto the dock. Then it was time to ask a question: ‘How much?’ He answered, and I knew at that moment that it was mine.
And so the journey started. I had the boat shipped to the northeast corner of Massachusetts on the New Hampshire line. After just a few days, the boat arrived and we couldn’t wait to run it. Now, bringing a boat like this to a city that has only ever seen it on TV or in a magazine was an endeavor in itself.
We took it to the town dock to splash it. Our first mistake was the fact that the dock master was a very old, cranky-ass guy that hated what he was doing. It was a weekend, very busy seeing as how it was all families out on their boats.
The dockmaster told us to put the boat in. We did, then he signaled us to start the thing. Holy shit, we’re fucked. First of all, we were one of three boats on the dock. The back of Warpath was just about two feet from this little 20-foot open boat carrying a family. We had just fueled up with CAM2, and the exhaust pipe would be dumping its fumes right into that 20-footer. Now the dockmaster is screaming at us to start the thing and go. Karl tried to tell everyone that it would be loud, and the dockmaster told us one more time to start it or take it out. Oh well, I guess we’ll start it.
Between the oxygen-deprived dockmaster, the pissed-off family and everyone within 100 feet covering their ears and running for cover, the boat didn’t make the best first impression. We never went back to that dock. To add insult to injury, the harbormaster and the Coast Guard were called before we even made it out to open water. We were too far out by the time they responded, but you can bet that they were waiting for us when we came back in. And of course they boarded us.
It ended up that they liked the boat just as much as we did. They said that when we were heading out to open water, their phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree with over 100 calls. The crazy thing was that we didn’t even break any laws—it just looked like we were breaking laws.
That was a great day for a ride. The water was 4- to 5-foot seas. When we first looked, we figured it was going to be a bad ride, almost not even worth trying. But we did. Once we his everything in the mouth of the Merrimack River at 80 mph, we started hitting bigger shit and running through it like it didn’t exist. At that minute, we knew Warpath was the real deal.
Needless to say, the 950 C&Gs that we purchased the boat with didn’t last even two rides. Surprise. Now we have a boat that we can’t even use. Karl has always built my motors, both in my cars and in my boats. So here we go. We pulled the motors. At that time we were both working seven days a week, so I decided to call the master, Keith Eickert. We ordered two motors, both with 1000 horsepower. That was an eye-opener. The quote wasn’t as bad as the final bill was, taking into account all of the dress-up goodies that he added. Once we received the engines a little over a month later, we installed them, took the boat for a ride, made it outside open water, ran for ten miles and then the nightmares started. One motor started dropping RPMs, so I shut it down. The intercooler let go and brand-new parts were now junk.
We called Keith and ended up sending both motors back. The rebuild would take at least another month, and in New England, we only have two months of summer. We got the motors back, we took the boat out, and what do you know, a motor died again. The new pre-lube pump started sending metal shavings through the motor and nicked up the rods, etc. Time for the motors to come out again. Six motors later (including the C&Gs originally delivered with the boat), we were in the clear.
In those first three months of owning Warpath, I spent what I had paid for the boat three times over. Not to mention operating costs. Dyno sheets showed 975 horsepower at 5600 RPM. They used 110-octane fuel, and the boat held 360 gallons per motor. Each motor used 150 gallons an hour at wide-open throttle. With two motors, and fuel at $8 per gallon, we were looking at $2,400 an hour. Fill the boat for an afternoon out... you do the math.
Taking it out was also a production. We spent anywhere between 10 and 30 hours before we could take it anywhere. We would check all equipment—motors, drives, oil, transmissions. We checked for leaks or wear. We also checked all electrical equipment, and we checked the hull for any signs of cracking or stress.
After a day out, the boat would be washed inside and out and wiped dry. The motor would be checked and fogged, the cover would be put on the boat and put away in the garage. This was the process since the day it was delivered.
Karl Patske was the mechanic who took care of the boat. He was extremely detailed and meticulous, and because of that, the boat never went out without Karl being on it. Ever.
Once we got used to running the boat, Warpath ruled the waters here for over ten years.
After having it for a few years, I decided to start fixing and replacing equipment. When I purchased it, one of the rear fuel tanks was so bad that I had to send the entire boat to Bobby Saccenti at Apache. Bobby replaced the four saddle tanks, had the #6 Speedmasters rebuilt, detailed the engine compartment and replaced all the rigging. The boat came back flawless. From there, it went to a friend to fix the graphics with new paint. It came out as nice as, if not better than it was done originally. Now the boat was new, inside and out.
I owned the boat for over ten years and it was the best ten years of my life. I have been on a ton of boats, and still to this day, nothing ran like Warpath. We called it ‘The Bully.’”
Read all about Fort Apache and Ben Kramer in VÉHICULE.
]]>Winning is Everything
We won, and we don’t see a problem with that. Back in 1949 at the inaugural Centomiglia del Lario—the storied powerboat race on Lake Como—winning was the only thing on everyone’s minds. What was the race created for if not to create a champion?
The race was held year after year, and the benefits of winning became abundantly clear. Winning came with glory, yes, but it also functioned as the most effective form of advertising. Whoever produced the boat that was first across the line was instantly renowned and became the go-to builder. As time passed, the world around Lake Como changed. But the Centomiglia did not—it was run every year without fail, and its importance never waned.
This year was no exception, with the race’s 72nd annual edition taking place as it has for decades and decades. Since its first iteration though, winning, depending on your perspective, has fallen out of fashion. Competition is ruthless by nature, and being friendly will get you nowhere. Prevailing thought says that this notion is improper and uncouth. We say that it’s human nature.
Véhicule Racing Team took the title at this year’s Centomiglia. We are proud of that. It was hard-fought, and we were rewarded as world champions accordingly. An award was given to teams who also participated in the historic Raid Pavia-Venezia. With the most points in class, we won that too.
Winning is a tradition. Perhaps it’s the oldest tradition we have. It is a visceral, innate drive—something that does not need to be taught, but rather lies deep within. Winning is an instinct, but it is not a privilege that simplz anyone is entitled to. It has to be worked for. Like any master of a craft, one who has conquered the art of competition is well within their rights to look back on what they have achieved in satisfaction, admiring the spoils of their labor. And so if you don’t mind, that’s just what we’ll do.
In our world, losing starts with second place. Life is war.
Read all about the history of offshore powerboat racing in VÉHICULE.
Photos by Christophe Duchesne
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Dakis Joannou's mega yacht 'Guilty' by Jeff Koons and Ivana Porfiri has been called "an act of calculated irreverence"—an apt characterization to say the least.
There are no ifs, ands or buts about it—'Guilty' is a floating artwork. This isn't a mistake either. Greek-Cypriot industrialist is no stranger to the art world or its alleged excesses. In fact, as a super-collector, he's more familiar with it than you and I may ever be. And the name of his boat owns up to that fact.Docked in Athens' Piraeus Port and measuring 115 eet long, this water-bound statement of pure luxury and its Jeff Koons-designed yellow, pink and blue color scheme instantly brings to mind the bold aesthetics of 1950s Pop art or op art. In reality, 'Guilty' goes back even further. Back to World War I, in fact, and the optically mind-bending strategy of dazzle camouflage. The idea back then was to hide in plain sight. Whether this homage is really trying to hide itself is up for debate.
VÉHICULE sits down with the mastermind behind it all—yacht designer Ivana Porfiri.
VÉHICULE: How did your involvement in Guilty come about?
VÉHICULE: Were you happy with the outcome?
If VÉHICULE is one thing, it’s fair. Everything deserves a proper chance. We genuinely believe that. Things need to be evaluated based on their own merits, and while subjectivity is not always feasible—or advantageous—we maintain the importance of assessing things for what they are, and not for what people tell us they are.
In that vein, we set out to take a look at Netflix’s docuseries “Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami.” Centered around the lives of Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon, two of south Florida’s remaining offshore-racing and drug-smuggling giants, this show seemed to be in our wheelhouse: an investigation of how the Miami scene pioneered by Ben Kramer, Don Aronow and their cohorts developed. We have our preconceived notions about Netflix productions, but our aim was to not bring those to this viewing experience—all in the name of fairness.
You may note that the show came out in August 2021. This piece is coming out in November. The original intention was to feed into the content cycle to which we have all become accustomed. That to which we have all become subservient. The formula is relatively simple, really. A release is announced, and everyone plans their content around it.
Maybe you’re granted an advance look at what you’re meant to be talking about, and you have the privilege of finishing your contribution to said content cycle ahead of time, scheduling it for release, sitting back and relaxing. You want to stay in the good graces of those who bestowed access to this advance look upon you, and your output will reflect that with glowing positivity and critiqueless enthusiasm. If you’re not in the PR list, maybe you write something of a skeleton article based on the trailer and what you can interpolate, and hope that your midnight viewing of the media at hand lines up with what you’ve spent hours on. In either case, the end result is that you are left desperately hoping that someone clicks on your piece, either out of curiosity, fandom, mistake or as the result of SEO trickery.
We did not hit our original goal of putting something out when the show dropped. Why? Because it took these three-something intervening months to work up the mental fortitude to think about “The Kings of Miami” again. No one wants to have their day ruined, and no one wants to ruin their own day. That’s what the mere thought of this show does to us. We’ll be honest, we were only able to make it through one complete episode. We had to watch it on 2x playback speed. We needed to get it over with. A friend filled us in on the rest in short-form.
Yes, fairness is paramount, and fairness probably dictates that you should watch the whole series before chiming in. We gave it a genuine shot, we really did. But if there’s anything that the media world knows, it’s that a strong start is everything. If your pilot episode isn’t good, no network is going to pick it up. If your lede sucks, no one is going to keep reading. And so on and so forth. The tone was set as soon as the theme song came in, and the vibes were simply off. They lost us right from the get-go, and people deserve to know that.
In concrete terms, we take issue with the structure of the series as a whole. It is no secret that Netflix has analyzed our habits to an extraordinary level and likely knows more about some aspects of us than we ourselves do. They have engineered their programming to maximize profits, regardless of what this means for their integrity, by maximizing building, praying on and even rewarding inattentive, passive viewing.
This is most apparent when considering the pure length of the series. It comes in at six episodes, each ranging between 40 and 50 minutes long. Perhaps this is showing our age, but remember feature-length documentaries? 90, maybe 120 minutes of tight, succinct storytelling that left you feeling confident, informed and respected. When done well, they were feats of filmmaking—testaments to a well-constructed crew and a mastery of the art of screenwriting.
Stretching Sal and Willie’s story out to almost 300 minutes is, in the simplest of terms, wholly unnecessary. This is, of course, depending on who you ask. If you ask someone who had their phone in-hand for the duration of the series, the tactics that Netflix employed to pump up watch time were perfect. By loading the story with filler, you were given permission to look away from one screen and at another. The time spent scrolling, and only halfway paying attention to either task, would detract from nothing—by the time you looked back up, the story hadn’t progressed to any significant extent. And the cycle repeats. Glancing back at the screen, you see the same unnecessary, three-degrees-removed talking head as before, followed by generic stock footage or some archival photo that they for some reason decided to try and make 3-D.
This, of course, is nothing unique to “The Kings of Miami.” What is unique however is the series’ disregard for the racing careers of its protagonists in favor of trend-following. True crime as a genre has of course blown up in recent years, with everyone trying to get a piece of the action. Others have done a much better job of explaining this explosion and the potential reasons for it, but what we would like to contribute is the notion that true crime, or any trending theme, is not a catch-all solution. It has its time and its place, and must always be deployed in moderation. It often takes center stage in stories where the most of-note topic in the story is the crime itself—it is what makes everything around it notable. Here, however, the subjects had storied careers of their own as powerboaters, which are just as entertaining, if not more entertaining than their misdeeds. The two are interconnected, without a doubt, but are separable in the hands of the right storyteller.
Read about the history of offshore powerboat racing in VÉHICULE.
There’s this story going around about Sal and Willie, and while it is in no way verified, it’s worth repeating. It was race-day eve for the pair’s Seahawk team—an unspecified race in an unspecified year. It was late, and the place that they had been eyeing for dinner had closed their kitchen for the night. This was the case wherever they looked nearby. The team went further into the small town where the race was set to take place to look for something, anything to eat. The only place with its lights on was a bakery. Their doors were closed, but after a few knocks, the staff came to the front and explained that they were preparing for a wedding the next day and weren’t open to the public. Sal and Willie made an offer to buy everything that they had prepared—they just wanted to get something in their stomachs. The baker refused, for understandable reasons. The two upped their offer, shoving so much cash at the baker that they couldn’t afford not to take it. For that amount, they could afford to simply redo their event prep. And the deal was done. The next day, the Seahawk team showed up to the grid with the cake they couldn’t finish, and shared it with their competitors before the race started. It was comical, but special nevertheless. Yes, it was an ostentatious gesture, but it was one rooted in sportsmanship. It was a humanizing offering that disregarded rivalry or racing’s fiercely competitive spirit, if only for a moment.
Sal and Willie had shown fairness in this maybe-true-maybe-not anecdote. We wish Netflix had extended that same courtesy in their own retelling.
VÉHICULE is the only journal for avant-garde transportation.
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Excerpt from Paradise Lost: The Rise and Fall of Ben Kramer. Read the full story in the VÉHICULE print edtion.
"Donald Joel Aronow was born on March 3, 1927 and grew up in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn back when the borough was largely farmland. He grew up rich, but that didn’t last. His parents lost the taxi company that made them wealthy, which kickstarted Don’s hustler instincts. He began his working life at a gas station before moving on to ushering at a movie theater. He proved tactful at moving his way up through the ranks wherever he was employed, supplementing his income by flipping cars on the side. He enlisted in the Merchant Marines during World War II where he was first introduced to boats.
After returning home in 1947, the GI Bill sent him to Brooklyn College. The knack he showed for sports while there fed his fiercely competitive nature. If for nothing but lack of direction, he became a high school gym teacher after graduating—a job whose only redeeming characteristic for Don was the uniform. He fell firmly into the “jock” category. Things were good. Things were easy.
As a change of pace, he relocated himself and his budding family to New Jersey and went to work for his first wife’s father’s construction company. Words came to near-blows in a matter of months, and by 1953, Aronow had opened his own contracting business in the area—The Aronow Corporation. In less than ten years, he would make his first million building commercial properties in the area, taking full advantage of America’s lingering post-war boom.
By age 32, in 1959, he figured that he had amassed enough wealth to live comfortably—he retired and moved to Miami. Why did he move, uprooting his family in the process? He would go on to say that he was simply bored in the northeast, living the same life he had for far too long. It was time to head down I-95 until he ran out of road.
Regardless of the circumstances, one indisputable fact was that Don arrived in Miami without direction. The city, like Aronow, was in one of its many transitional periods by the late ‘50s. Like Aronow, who took advantage of Americans’ desire to pour more and more of their newfound wealth into construction in the wake of World War II, Miami-Dade County seized the opportunity to market their beaches, weather and high-rolling lifestyle to those very same people. To flocks of midwesterners, Miami was as good as, if not better than, a trip to the tropics. It was glamorous and accessible, with vacation deals being offered left and right.
Like any too-good-to-be-true boom, Miami’s periodic success as a destination was volatile. The tourist seasons of 1957 and 1958 were a bit too cold for vacationers’ tastes, a seemingly small factor that led to the industry nearly collapsing in on itself. By that time though, Miami’s reputation had burrowed itself in the collective consciousness—enough so for the city and its primary (legal) industry to pull through, albeit precariously.
Don capitalized on the city’s specific brand of faded glory and quickly latched onto gambling, which provided him with a sense of direction and satiated his competitive streak. For the time being.
When he lived back up north, Don had bought a sport fishing boat. He wasn’t terribly invested in it, but he brought it down to Miami anyway. That’s what people were into in Florida, right? There’s lots of water, laws that were more suggestions than anything else and money. One thing led to another, and in 1962 Don caught wind of the annual Miami-Nassau-Miami powerboat race. It was a 184-mile route across practically untouched, unpatrolled water. It offered speed, danger and competition—all of which were Don’s proverbial middle names. It was a sport that most people didn’t know was a sport, presenting a pocket of undeniable growth potential. Even before officially entering, he knew that he was hooked.
By the early ‘60s, powerboat racing was still in its infancy. Fellow New Jersey trans-plant Richard Howard Bertram, better known as Dick, was at the helm of the sport and was among the first to introduce the world to a boat with a deep-vee hull—one whose v-shaped bottom could cut through the water better than anything else on the market could. While the general concept was around for years, only the fronts of boats had been v-shaped up until that point. Bertram’s designs were set apart by the fact that the shape ran the entire length of the boat. His creations were first made from wood as was traditional for boatbuilding. He later employed lightweight, durable fiberglass, a development that forever changed the sport for the better.
By 1962, friend of a friend of a friend Howard Abbey designed and produced a powerboat for Don to enter in the Miami-Nassau-Miami race. In a triumph of his winning spirit (or a testament to beginner’s luck, depending on who you are), Aronow ended up finishing fourth and officially cementing his place in the world of go-fast boats."
Read all about the real story of Don Aronow, founder of Magnum Marine, Cigarette, Donzi and Formula (amongst others) in the 30 page VÉHICULE print edition feature story. Order here.
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Smugglers on the mountain crests between Switzerland and Italy.
Based on an interview with Tullio Abbate and VÉHICULE publisher Christopher Kippenberger. Read the beginning of the story in "The Untold Story of Italian Cigarette Smuggling Part 1".
Read about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
This was clearly big business—the smugglers knew how much they stood to make if they were successful, and how much they stood to lose if they made any missteps along the way. Human error aside, the most significant weak link in their workflows was their equipment. While they had progressed from wooden rowboats to fiberglass-hulled powerboats, there were always advancements on the horizon that could make their business even more profitable. Big engines, high-flow carburetors, surface drives and cleaver propellers were the latest and greatest on the market. These innovations were all home-grown—born and bred on Italian waters, where every night felt like race night. This equipment would eventually make its way to the United States and onwards to be claimed by Miami’s latest hotshot boatbuilder, but the European roots of these crucial advancements were undeniable.
Each professional powerboat race was a scouting mission, with smugglers and customs agents alike keeping an eye out for which boat would be best suited for them. The races were veritable showrooms for the biggest builders in the region to prove their prowess, not only to sports fans but to potential buyers.
Cigarettes hidden in a concrete block.
By the early 1990s, smuggling had made its way to Italy’s Balkan-facing east coast. At that point, cigarette smuggling had become bigger than anyone could have ever expected. So big in fact that the nationwide effort came to be controlled by a central headquarters across the Italian-Swiss border in Lugano. There, by phone, a group of logistics experts managed an army of nearly 400 boats from a network of luxury apartments and five-star hotels.
Nightly, boats would cross the Adriatic Sea and dock in Montenegro. At a freeport, these ships would take on giant shipments of cigarettes intended for a freeport in Malta—as long as the goods were going from freeport to freeport, they were considered tax-free. At their Lugano-based commander’s direction, the ships would cross back over the Adriatic and reconfigure their routes to make a stop in Bari, Italy, where they would offload the bulk of the freeport shipment, with the little that was left over continuing on to Malta. This process would repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
The fate of cigarettes is well-documented. They went from being omnipresent, both on the lips of consumers and in the marketing landscape, to being nearly shunned in much of the world. Cigarettes were everywhere, with their branding forming some of the most iconic visuals in the sporting world. Ayrton Senna is forever linked with John Player Special, Camel and Marlboro liveries. Michael Schumacher is no different, with his name alone evoking the red-and-white color scheme. Mika Häkkinen and his McLaren Mercedes seem incomplete without West branding. The list goes on.
Cover image of the Corriere newspaper showing a gunfight between smugglers and Guardia di finanza.
This is not to lament the downfall of cigarettes, but rather to draw attention to their role in a series of interconnected narratives that span country, class, era and sector of society. History repeats itself endlessly—if it’s not cigarettes, it’s something else that follows the same trajectory for the same set of reasons. Despite that, we continue to be surprised, and our understanding is time and again reshaped by what we thought we could predict and regulate.
Read all about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
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Based on an interview with Tullio Abbate and VÉHICULE publisher Christopher Kippenberger. Story to be continued in "The Untold Story of Italian Cigarette Smuggling Part 2".
Read about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
The blue hulls were particular types of boats, which Neapolitan crime used to smuggle cigarettes, the "blondes" as they were called in Naples. The smuggling of cigarettes originated in the post-war period, to revive local economies.
The builders painted the hulls blue in this color so that they would not reflect the moonlight at night, making them invisible at night.
On board the blue hulls there were generally a maximum of 3 people, one of whom was an experienced motorboat pilot and 2 who loaded about 1000 kg of cigarettes per trip. During the day the blue hulls were proudly displayed on the docks all over the Gulf and admired by hundreds of onlookers.
As soon as the hulls returned loaded into port, dozens of boys filled different cars like "Alfetta" without seats with cigarettes and darted into the hiding places of the various Neapolitan neighborhoods. The boys sold smuggled cigarettes on small wooden stalls on street corners and this allowed the sustenance of numerous families who had no post-war income.
In most cases, the powerful blue hulls managed to trade without being caught. When caught in the act, daring chases were born between the patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza and the blue hulls. The pursuit lasted for hours and ended if the military vehicle managed to approach the blue hull, even for just a few seconds. In this case, the military threw a line into the propeller or short-circuited the engines with a powerful water cannon.
source: https://marinecue.it/scafi-blu-storia-contrabbando-sigarette-bionde/19666/
Whether you like it or not, currency is everything. It influences every dark corner of most people’s existences with very few notable exceptions. It controls all facets of public and private life, for better or for worse. It breeds innovation, or it becomes a person’s downfall. People have studied it, making careers out of trying to understand it, hoping to predict its behaviors and learn how to exploit it. If you can control it, you are the one in power.
Not all currency follows tradition as pieces of paper with numbers on them, abstract coins on some website, or some minuscule fraction of a megacorporation. Sometimes currency is more literal than that and is linked to an object’s intrinsic value rather than an assigned one. For example, post-World War II Italy had the lira, but it also had cigarettes.In Mussolini’s wake, work was hard to come by in Italy. The United States Army was stationed around the country under the guise that they would help rebuild what was lost, but everyone knew that that was a long-term project. People needed to make a living, and they needed to make it quickly. On Lake Como, up near the country’s northern border, people took advantage of their proximity to Switzerland and the nation’s neutrality throughout the recent war. Switzerland had what Italians wanted—among other things, they had cigarettes. Realizing tobacco’s potential as currency, a handful of enterprising characters took on the role of smuggler. They would work an honest job by day, and by night they would cross the mountainous border by foot to load smuggled cigarettes onto rowboats, bag by bag. A motorboat would have been quicker, but a rowboat ended up being quieter, which in turn raised less suspicion. From there the boat, full of bags with 500 boxes of cigarettes each, would continue the job. Their destination would be big, nearby cities.
There is only so much that can be done by lake, and the need for new territory was pressing. The next logical step was to expand to the sea as a trade route, with Naples as a gateway to the Mediterranean. In Naples, former fishermen abounded, and their knowledge of the sea, its conditions and its geography was unparalleled. They too were eager to get in on this new trade. The fact that international waters began just six miles from the shore made the endeavor seem even more enticing—with a powerboat, six miles would fly by.
Right past the boundary between Italian and international waters sat a “mother boat” waiting to receive its payload. It was a big boat, potentially a conspicuous one. It would be swarmed with smaller high-performance powerboats, each of which came with bags upon bags of cigarettes. Not only were cigarettes exchanged, but payment was too. This would come in the form of 1,000-lire banknotes which were cut in half on the shore before departure. One half of these banknotes would go to the “mother boat,” the other half would go to the drivers of each of the smaller boats. If the two stacks of cut lire fit together when the boats pulled up to each other, the delivery was considered legitimate and the loading procedure proceeded.
From there, the “mother boat” would make its distributions, mostly to small dealers in big cities. There, this unofficial currency would be bartered for the official, government-sanctioned money. The dealers, often children, were known for approaching cars waiting at traffic lights to make a quick transaction. Everyone smoked at the time, so the take rate was high. The driver would get their cigarettes and the vendor would get around 5,000 lire in return, or half of what a legal box of cigarettes would cost at a store. It was a win-win.
Based on an interview with Tullio Abbate and Véhicule publisher Christopher Kippenberger. Story to be continued in "The Untold Story of Italian Cigarette Smuggling Part 2".
Read all about modern day smuggling operations in VÉHICULE.
Naples, 4 April 1972. Neapolitan smugglers celebrate a funeral ceremony at sea in memory of three young colleagues shot dead by an American soldier during a negotiation that ended badly. The victims are Alberto Bravaccino, aged 35 (father of six children); Achille Diodato, aged 30 (father of five children) and Nunzio Pipolo, aged 19.
The facts date back to the previous night and involve the twenty-three-year-old Edward Michael Cox, a young corporal of the marines who on board the aircraft carrier Roosvelt was supposed to deliver six hundred cartons of cigarettes to the smugglers by motorboat. Something went wrong when paying. The soldier demanded a higher amount than agreed, starting a dispute that ended with the death of the three men. After appropriating the money, Cox provided magistrates with a bogus version of the facts, claiming to have witnessed a feud between smugglers with his own eyes.
]]>"Don Aronow wasn’t deterred by the fact that being a winner in the powerboat-racing sphere didn’t come cheap by any measure. To the naked, untrained eye, it would seem like a simple sport—there’s a boat and a two-person team of drivers. Behind the scenes though, the effort expended in preparation for each race was massive. There were endless rounds of research and development, there were replacement parts that could be as significant as entire engines and hulls, there were mechanics to replace those parts, and there were gallons upon gallons of high-grade fuel. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a team to spend into the six figures for just one race. There was a bounty waiting for the winner at the finish line, but that of course required a win.
Don Aronow catching air on a Formular 233
As any clever hobbyist would do, Don Aronow decided to turn his newfound passion into a business. If nothing else, he would try to at least break even on each race. In 1963, Aronow became the first of his future colleagues to purchase a plot of land on N.E. 188th Street in Miami from the Clyde Beatty Circus. The land that would come to be called Thunderboat Row, Gasoline Alley or Fleet Street in the community may have been undesirable to others, but it was perfect for what Aronow wanted to achieve. The street was built on swampland and dead-ended to the east, which meant it was infrequently trafficked, inconspicuous and compound-like. It was flanked by canals that both fed into Biscayne Bay—a perfect marine testing ground.
N.E. 188th Street in Miami aka. Thunderboat Row
It was on that land that Aronow founded and headquartered Formula, named after the racing cars. With the help of two veteran boatbuilders, Don quickly transformed his young company into a true force to be reckoned with, largely by following his creed that the only way to market boats properly was to have them win races. And so he did, claiming his first first place title in 1964. This would be the beginning of a streak of a number of powerboating companies helmed by Don over the coming years."
Read all about the real story of Don Aronow, founder of Magnum Marine, Cigarette, Donzi and Formula (amongst others) in the 30 page VÉHICULE feature story. Order here.
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